Gerrymandering is a Game of Sudoku
Op-Ed on Politics and Democracy
By: Jana Younis
Gerrymandering is a game of Sudoku played by cheaters.
There is a peculiar game at the heart of democracy. It does not unfold in town halls or in debates, but quietly across maps. It is called gerrymandering, and it is the dark twin of Sudoku.
The United States is divided into 435 congressional districts, each of which elects a member of Congress. For elections to be fair, the map needs to be “fair”. And in the U.S, weird maps win elections.
Every ten years, through the process of packing– drawing districts so that like-minded voters are clustered together in a way that reduces competition for the winning party in a district– and cracking– dividing like-minded voters across different districts in a way that weakens their party’s power so that the opposing party can have a better chance of winning more districts– the map is redrawn (Johns Hopkins University, Coursera). This strategy is called Gerrymandering.
The outlines of the Wisconsin Assembly map adopted in 2011 illustrate how Democratic votes in the 2016 presidential election, centered in the city of Milwaukee, are distributed among the legislative districts.
In 1812, the Governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry (pronounced with a "G" sound), had an election approaching. But it was looking bad for Gerry. So, his advisors came up with a bill that could secure the win of their party without gaining additional votes: all they had to do was reconfigure the map. “The method of gerrymandering is to pack your opponents’ supporters into a few districts where you will lose by a wide margin, and crack the remainder into several districts where they are a minority” (JHU, Coursera).
Image Source: Elkanah Tisdale (public domain)
Sudoku, essentially, is an act of fairness. In a grid, nine by nine, each number (1-9) must appear exactly once in each row, column, and box. It is a puzzle that does not care for politics, only for logic. If the rules are respected, the outcome is fair.
Gerrymandering, too, is a puzzle on a grid — but its rules are bent to privilege the hand that holds the pen. Instead of numbers, there are people; instead of boxes, there are districts. Through Gerrymandering, politicians design a Sudoku where specific numbers win by default, regardless of how the people actually voted.
Imagine a puzzle in which the architect decides, before the first square is filled, that the threes will dominate the board. The grid is completed according to the letter of the law — every row, every column, every box “works” — but the spirit of the game has been violated. The puzzle remains solvable, yes, but it no longer implies a fair game.
This is the genius, and the violence, of gerrymandering: it transforms democracy into a counterfeit puzzle. Unlike Sudoku, gerrymandering is not a neutral brain-teaser. It is a human design, a weaponized geometry. The map is not a puzzle waiting to be solved; it is a battlefield where democracy itself is gerrymandered into submission.
But because it is human, it can be undone. The same hand that distorts the lines can also erase them. We can insist that democracy be as honest as the Sunday puzzle: challenging, but fair.
Because at the end of the day, true democracy deserves better than Sudoku played by cheaters.
