Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Expressing your anger at gerrymandering? There's a font for that.

Expressing your anger at gerrymandering? There's a font for that.

The Gerry font comes up with all 26 letters by mashing up and rotating just 31 House districts. See our slideshow at the bottom for details.

Ugly Gerry

Plenty of congressional districts get mocked for looking like parts of a Rorschach test. But only now have some creative folks conjured up the letters A through Z.

It was hard not to see "a rabbit on a skateboard" in last decade's map for Illinois, or "Goofy kicking Donald Duck" in the Philadelphia suburbs until a few years ago, or — most famously — a salamander slithering across Massachusetts in the 19 th century map approved by Gov. Elbridge Gerry, which gave rise to the derisive term gerrymandering for such convoluted contouring.


But today's map of the House of Representatives, it turns out, contains an unsightly but still readily readable alphabet.

Redistricting reformers with a sense of humor, or at least looking for a fresh way to make their point, are welcome to go to UglyGerry.com and download the letters for free.

The letter O

Ugly Gerry

Arizona's 6th is held by Republican David Schweikert.

The font was unveiled at the end of July by Chicago digital creatives Ben Doessel, James Lee and Kevin McGlone. Their inspiration, they said, was realizing their home congressional district, the Illinois 4th, looked quite a bit like a letter U – albeit one lying on its side. (To the political world it's long been the legendary "earmuffs" district, with Latino neighborhoods north and south of the Loop stitched together to comply with a federal court command that Chicago have a Hispanic-majority seat.)

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

After that realization, the team noticed how rotating North Carolina's rural 6th district 90 degrees turned it into a pretty good letter H. Before too long, they had come up with the other two dozen letters as well.

To finish the job, a pair of districts had to be mashed up to create five letters. But, intentionally or not, the 31 districts chosen underscore the central reality of gerrymandering: It is a bipartisan practice that's been used with remarkable effect to assure the vast majority of the 435 seats are not competitive between the parties.

The new font uses 15 districts where Republicans now appear to be prohibitive favorites to win again in November 2020 and 15 others where the Democrats are similarly safe bets. Only Ohio's 12th (the spine of the letter B) looks to be competitive, Republican Troy Balderson having won twice quite narrowly in a suburban Columbus district that President Trump also carried.

The Gerry font — which looks like a cousin of the eclectic, early '90s font Wingdings — employs districts from 16 states. And, in another potential coincidence that could prove confounding to gerrymandering critics, the three states represented most draw their maps different ways. The map for Ohio (5 seats in the front) was drawn by Republicans and the Illinois map (4) by Democrats, but the California map (also 4) was the work of an independent commission.

Still, the creators have a strikingly simple message for anyone who views their handiwork. Other than the detailed maps, their website says only: "Tweet your rep. Do something about it."

Clicking on that message allows the user to compose a message, in Gerry, which can then be tweeted to the author's House member.

And, now that the Supreme Court has ruled the federal courts have no jurisdiction to decide when partisan power plays in mapmaking have gone too far, the burden falls squarely on state courts and legislators – either in state capitals or in Washington. Several state legislatures are mulling legislation, and several lawsuits challenging maps as violating state constitutions.

Congress could set a national rule, but that seems impossible in the currently divided Capitol. The House-passed political overhaul, HR 1, would require non-partisan panels to draw the congressional lines for every state, for example, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says the bill will never be taken up in the Senate because the Republican majority has no interest.

Font crafters Doessel and Lee work for the advertising firm Leo Burnett. McGlone, an alumnus of the agency, designed the site. The project is independent of the firm.

"To ensure the eroding of democracy isn't an issue that is lost in the news cycle," they said via email, they "concocted a creative way to keep our warped voting districts top-of-mind."

Ready to test your gerrymandering knowledge? Take our quiz.

Read More

Members of Congress in the House of Representatives

Every four years, Congress gathers to count electoral votes.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

No country still uses an electoral college − except the U.S.

Holzer is an associate professor of political science at Westminster College.

The United States is the only democracy in the world where a presidential candidate can get the most popular votes and still lose the election. Thanks to the Electoral College, that has happened five times in the country’s history. The most recent examples are from 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the Electoral College after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and 2016, when Hillary Clinton got more votes nationwide than Donald Trump but lost in the Electoral College.

The Founding Fathers did not invent the idea of an electoral college. Rather, they borrowed the concept from Europe, where it had been used to pick emperors for hundreds of years.

Keep ReadingShow less
Nebraska Capitol

Nebraska's Capitol houses a unicameral legislature, unique in American politics.

Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

100 years ago, a Nebraska Republican fought for democracy reform

Gruber is senior vice president of Open Primaries.

With Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen’s announcement on Sept. 24 that he doesn't have enough votes to call a special session of the Legislature to change the way the state allocates electoral votes, an effort led by former President Donald Trump to pressure the Legislature officially failed.

Nebraska is one of only two states that award a single Electoral College vote to the winner in each congressional district, plus two votes to the statewide winner of the presidential popular vote. Much has been made — justifiably — of Republican state Sen. Mike McDonnell’s heroic decision to buck enormous political pressure from his party to fall in line, and choosing instead to single-handedly defeat the measure. The origins of the senator's independence, though, began in a 100-old experiment in democracy reform.

Keep ReadingShow less
Man sitting in a chair near voting stations

An election official staffs a voting location in Lansing, Mich., during the state's Aug. 6, primary.

Emily Elconin for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Closed primaries, gerrymandering eliminate competition for House seats

Meyers is executive editor of The Fulcrum.

There are 435 voting members of the House of Representatives. But few of those districts — 55, to be exact — will be decided on Election Day, according to new data from the nonprofit organization Unite America. That’s because the vast majority of races were effectively decided during the primaries.

The research data goes deep into what Unite America calls the “Primary Problem,” in which few Americans are determining winners of House elections.

Keep ReadingShow less
House chamber

Rep. Scott Perry objects to Pennsylvania's certification of its Electoral College vote during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 7, 2021.

Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

What voters need to know about the presidential election

Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund. Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.

It is quite clear that the presidential election is going to be incredibly close. In each of the seven swing states, the margin of error is less than 2 percent.

As citizens, this is not something to fear and it is critically important that we all trust the election results.

As part of our ongoing series for the Election Overtime Project, today we present a guide explaining in detail what you, as a voter, need to know about the role of state legislatures and Congress in a presidential election. The guide was prepared by the Election Reformers Network, a nonprofit organization championing impartial elections and concrete policy solutions that strengthen American democracy.

Keep ReadingShow less