Chapter 35 Exercises — Apply the Frameworks

These exercises convert the chapter's analytical apparatus into something you can do, with your own state's data, in a week. Several feed directly into the running Democracy Audit project. Several require a calculator and ten minutes' patience with geometry. None requires partisanship.

Exercise 35.1 — Find your district's map and basic stats (Democracy Audit)

Go to congress.gov/members (or your state's secretary of state's elections page) and find the congressional district you live in. From the Princeton Gerrymandering Project's Redistricting Report Card (gerrymander.princeton.edu), pull the following data for your district and your state's full congressional map:

  1. The district's compactness score (Polsby–Popper or Reock — note which).
  2. The district's Cook PVI rating, current cycle.
  3. The state's overall partisan-bias score (efficiency gap, mean–median, or partisan-symmetry score — note which).
  4. The state's compactness score (statewide average).
  5. The institutional method by which the map was drawn (legislature, bipartisan commission, independent commission, staff drafting, court drawn).

Write up: A 250–400 word "District Map Profile" entry for your Democracy Audit binder. Include all five numbers, the source for each, and one paragraph of analysis interpreting what the numbers tell you about whether your district is competitive, safe, gerrymandered (or, in some cases, all three at once).

Exercise 35.2 — Compute Polsby–Popper by hand

Pick any oddly shaped congressional district in the United States (Maryland's 3rd, North Carolina's 12th historically, Pennsylvania's 7th historically, Illinois's 4th — there are many candidates). Find a map of the district that includes a scale bar.

Compute the Polsby–Popper compactness score: $PP = \frac{4\pi A}{P^2}$, where $A$ is the district area and $P$ is the district perimeter.

You can estimate area by overlaying a grid of squares of known side length and counting filled squares; you can estimate perimeter by laying a piece of string along the boundary and measuring the string. Commercial tools (the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, Dave's Redistricting App at davesredistricting.org) will give you a precise number for comparison.

Write up: A 250-word reflection comparing your hand-computed score to the published score. What approximations did you make? Which approximation contributed most error? Does this exercise change how confident you are in any single quantitative measure of compactness?

Exercise 35.3 — Trace your state's redistricting process

Find the most recent congressional redistricting bill or commission map for your state. Document, with primary-source citations:

  1. Which body drew the map (legislature, commission, court).
  2. Which political actors led the drafting (committee chairs, commission chairs, outside consultants).
  3. Whether the map was challenged in state court, federal court, or both, and the outcome.
  4. Whether the current map (in 2026) is the original 2021–22 map or a redrawn version, and why.
  5. The vote share (statewide presidential or generic congressional ballot) and seat share (House delegation composition) for the 2024 election under this map.

Write up: A 400–600 word "Process Trace" entry for your Democracy Audit binder, with citations to bill numbers, court case names, and election-result sources.

Exercise 35.4 — Steel-man both sides of the commission debate

Write two essays, each 350–450 words.

Essay A ("Independent commissions are the right reform"): Make the strongest case for independent commissions, drawing on the Arizona, California, Michigan, and Colorado experience. Address the conservative critique of partisan capture; address the empirical evidence on whether commission maps reduce partisan bias; address the participatory argument that commissions give citizens a more direct role.

Essay B ("Legislatures should draw the lines"): Make the strongest case for legislature-drawn redistricting, drawing on democratic-accountability arguments, federalism arguments, and skepticism that "independent" commissions are actually independent. Address the empirical evidence that legislature-drawn maps in the 2010 cycle were unusually biased; address the question of whether commissions are democratically legitimate.

Submit both essays. The point is not to take a side but to demonstrate that you can present each side at its strongest. Your instructor will evaluate the essays on the strength of the arguments made, not on which side you "really" agree with.

Exercise 35.5 — Simulate a packing-and-cracking gerrymander

Imagine a hypothetical state with 1,200,000 voters, evenly distributed in a 10×12 grid of 100,000-voter cells. The state has 12 congressional districts, each containing 100,000 voters. Your task: design two maps for this state, given partisan distributions to be specified by your instructor (suggested: 55% Party A, 45% Party B, with Party B concentrated in the lower-left corner of the grid).

Map 1 ("Party A pro-gerrymander"): Draw 12 contiguous districts that maximize Party A's seat count. Use packing and cracking. Compute the seat distribution.

Map 2 ("Neutral compactness"): Draw 12 contiguous, compact districts (squares or near-squares) with no consideration of partisan distribution. Compute the seat distribution.

Compare. Which map produces more proportional outcomes? By how much? What does this exercise demonstrate about the relative contributions of geographic distribution and line-drawing strategy to seat outcomes?

Write up: A 300–400 word analysis with hand-drawn maps included.

Exercise 35.6 — Audit the Allen v. Milligan facts

Read the Supreme Court's 2023 opinion in Allen v. Milligan, available at supremecourt.gov. Identify:

  1. The three Gingles preconditions and how the Court applied them to Alabama's facts.
  2. Alabama's principal counter-argument (the "race-neutral simulation" claim).
  3. The basis on which Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh joined the three liberal justices.
  4. The dissent's strongest argument (Justice Thomas writing).

Write up: A 400–500 word legal analysis. Be specific: cite page numbers, name the cases the majority and dissent rely on, and articulate the doctrinal stakes.

Exercise 35.7 — Pair Republican and Democratic gerrymander cases

Identify one example from the 2010 or 2020 cycle of:

  • A Republican-drawn aggressive partisan gerrymander that was challenged in court.
  • A Democratic-drawn aggressive partisan gerrymander that was challenged in court.

For each, document: the map's partisan-bias score (efficiency gap or comparable), the legal challenge (state or federal court, claim brought), the outcome (struck down, upheld, settled), and the eventual map used in the relevant election.

Write up: A 400–600 word paired comparison. Conclude with one paragraph on what the comparison demonstrates about the symmetry (or asymmetry) of partisan gerrymandering across parties.

Exercise 35.8 — Reform-design proposal

Choose one reform option from Section 35.7 (independent commission, non-partisan staff drafting, algorithmic redistricting, multi-member districts, federal legislation, constitutional amendment). Draft a 600–900 word policy proposal that:

  1. Specifies the institutional design in implementation detail (membership, selection, decision rules, criteria).
  2. Identifies the strongest critique of the proposal and addresses it.
  3. Estimates the political feasibility (in your home state for state-level reforms, nationally for federal reforms).
  4. Specifies the empirical metrics by which the proposal's success or failure should be evaluated five years after enactment.

This exercise prepares you for Chapter 38's reform-portfolio analysis.

Exercise 35.9 — Democracy Audit synthesis

Combine your work from Exercises 35.1, 35.3, and (if you did it) 35.6 into a single 800–1,200 word Democracy Audit Chapter 35 entry: "Redistricting in My State and District."

Include: the institutional process, the most recent map's empirical scores, the 2024 election results under it, any pending legal challenges, and a one-paragraph conclusion in which you offer your honest assessment of whether your district was competitive, gerrymandered, or both — and what evidence supports your conclusion.

This entry will become part of your final Democracy Audit deliverable in Chapter 38.

Exercise 35.10 — Compare two states' processes

Pick two states with substantially different redistricting institutions: one legislature-drawn, one commission-drawn. Reasonable pairings: Texas (legislature) and California (independent commission); Florida (legislature) and Arizona (independent commission); North Carolina (legislature, no governor veto) and Michigan (independent commission, citizen-initiated 2018); Ohio (Redistricting Commission with documented compliance failures) and Iowa (non-partisan staff drafting).

For each state, document with primary-source citations:

  1. The institutional design (who draws, who ratifies, what the legal criteria are).
  2. The current congressional map's compactness scores (statewide average) and partisan-bias scores.
  3. The 2024 House delegation composition and the statewide presidential vote share.
  4. Any pending or recently resolved legal challenges to the current map.

Write up: A 600–900 word comparative analysis. Conclude with a paragraph evaluating whether the institutional difference appears to have produced a measurable difference in map quality. Be honest about the limits of two-state comparisons (selection effects, confounders, geographic differences).

Exercise 35.11 — Read Rucho v. Common Cause and write the dissent

Read Chief Justice John Roberts's majority opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), available at supremecourt.gov. Then read Justice Elena Kagan's dissent.

Part A: Summarize, in 250–300 words, the majority's reasoning. Why is the absence of a "judicially manageable standard" decisive for the majority? What avenues does the majority identify as still available for partisan-gerrymandering challenges?

Part B: Summarize, in 250–300 words, Kagan's dissent. What standards does she propose as judicially manageable? What does she identify as the consequences of the majority's holding?

Part C: In 200–300 words, evaluate honestly which side has the better of the argument. Steel-man both before reaching your conclusion. Cite specific passages.

Exercise 35.12 — Algorithmic redistricting evaluation

Visit Dave's Redistricting App (davesredistricting.org) and find a publicly available "neutral" or "compactness-optimized" map for your state, generated by community participants or by the platform's own algorithms.

Compare the algorithm-generated map to your state's enacted 2022 map across:

  1. Compactness scores (statewide average).
  2. Partisan-bias estimates (efficiency gap, mean-median, or simulation comparison).
  3. Number of competitive districts (Cook PVI R+5 to D+5).
  4. Number of majority-minority districts (where applicable).
  5. Compliance with the Voting Rights Act preconditions (where applicable).

Write up: A 400–600 word analysis. Conclude with a discussion of whether algorithm-generated maps appear to deliver on the reformers' claims, or whether the comparison reveals the rule-dependent limits Section 35.7 of the chapter identified. Be careful: a single comparison cannot resolve the broader question, but it can illustrate the trade-offs.