These squares represent all the voters in North Carolina.

They were voting for these 13 seats in Congress.

About half voted for Republicans.

And about 48 percent voted for Democrats.

So you might think, of the 13 Congressional seats, maybe Democrats would've won 6 seats,

and Republicans would've won 7.

But no.

Democrats only won 3 of 13 seats — way less than half.

This imbalance was because North Carolina's Congressional districts had been "gerrymandered."

It means that these voters had been grouped into districts very strategically

with the goal of benefiting one party.

Gerrymandering has pretty much always happened in America.

That's because, every 10 years the political districts are redrawn.

And in most cases, those new lines get drawn

by whoever holds power in state governments at the time.

That's what happened in 2010.

Republicans won control of lots of state governments, and redrew the political lines to favor themselves.

And over the next few years, redistricting helped them hold onto almost all those states.

This shifted the balance of power.

And it turns out that behind a lot of this, was one guy.

This is Thomas Hofeller:

The mapmaker who helped Republicans gerrymander districts over the last decade.

When Hofeller died in 2018, his daughter found thousands of his emails and files, which she

shared with activists.

The files show that Tom Hoeffler's fingerprints are all over the way America's political

maps look today.

But North Carolina was his masterpiece.

And if you want to understand why gerrymandering is a such a big problem in the US,

that's a good place to start.

The basics of gerrymandering are actually pretty simple.

If you're a Republican trying to keep power, you want to do two things.

First, "pack" as many Democratic voters as possible into a single district.

If you have a district where almost everyone votes Democrat, that means almost half of

those votes are basically wasted.

You can also "crack" big Democratic areas into separate districts — where there are

slightly more Republicans.

So even though an area has a lot of Democratic votes, they would actually lose in this district

and in this district.

These are the two elements of classic gerrymandering: Packing and cracking.

And Hoffeler employed these techniques masterfully in North Carolina.

In 2011 he was hired to redraw the state's political lines.

And for congressional districts, he came up with this map.

Now, I just want to focus in on District 12, this weird skinny shape.

In order to make sense of this shape, we have to look at another map.

This map shows the percentage of black people in each neighborhood.

The bluer areas are where more black people live.

Hofeller basically gathered up black people in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Charlotte

— and packed them into one district.

So that's how District 12 happened.

Hoeffler also did this with North Carolina's state representatives and state senators.

For example here are the state senate districts.

Here, he packed Winston-Salem into one district.

And then packed Greensboro into its own district.

These new districts helped Republicans get a stranglehold on power in the North Carolina statehouse.

And over the next few years, they were able to pass crucial legislation.

A strict new voter ID law in North Carolina.

Which bathrooms transgender individuals can use in North Carolina.

In 2016 and 2017, federal courts ruled both of these maps were unconstitutional.

They said what North Carolina Republicans did wasn't just gerrymandering — it was

racial gerrymandering, done to deliberately dilute the political power of black people.

The courts said that the Republicans in the North Carolina statehouse now had to redraw

the lines without looking at racial demographics.

So they went back... to Tom Hofeller.

This time, Hofeller couldn't look at race.

Instead, he looked at which areas voted for Democrats and which areas voted for Republicans.

Instead of a racial gerrymander, it would be a partisan gerrymander.

Here's that map, using data from 2014.

The bluer an area, the more Democratic voters there are.

Now, if you zoom in here, to Greensboro, you can see one of the highest concentrations

of Democratic voters in the state.

Hoffeler drew a congressional district line to crack this community in half.

This meant Democrats here, were now the minority in their district.

And Democrats here were also the minority in their district.

Hoffeler employed these techniques all over the state to create North Carolina's new

political districts.

And the first big test for these new maps would be the 2018 election.

Democrats were expected to turn out in droves.

Democrats are vying for a potential blue wave.

The wave that Republicans fear is going to wipe them out.

So, how did the maps do?

For state representatives, Democrats got 51 percent of the vote.

They won only 46 percent of seats.

For state senate, they received half the vote — and won just 42 percent of seats.

And for Congress?

You already know how that one turned out.

Democrats won nearly half the votes — but won only three out of 13 seats.

A year later, in 2019, the Supreme Court weighed in.

They said it was beyond their reach… that it wasn't their job to fix it.

All of this raised an existential question:

If Republicans could continue drawing the lines to stay in power, how could they ever

be elected out of office?

But the Supreme Court ruling left open the possibility for state courts to rule on partisan

gerrymandering.

And in September 2019, that's exactly what North Carolina's Supreme Court did.

The court found that partisan gerrymandering violated the state constitution.

In the court's decision, it was Hofeller's files that helped prove that North Carolina

Republicans drew these lines with the clear intention of benefiting themselves.

Ultimately, the court said North Carolina Republicans had to redraw the state house

and state senate maps one more time.

This new map approved by North Carolina legislators is much less biased toward one party — even

though it took some extreme measures, and nearly a decade, to force politicians to draw

a fairer map.

In the last few years, the courts in several states, like Florida and Pennsylvania, have

made partisan gerrymandering much harder.

And now that's also the case in North Carolina.

Hofeller is gone now.

But in other states across the country, many maps he helped draw are still in use.

And while there's now a clearer strategy to challenge those maps in state courts...

… many voters are still, effectively, not choosing their representatives.

It's like Hoeffler said:, the representatives are choosing the voters.

"... of course, redistricting is democracy at work.

Redistricting is like an election in reverse.

It's a great event."