Understanding Gerrymandering: A Monkey Village Tale

Let me paint a picture for you. You are a monkey; you live in the forest with other animals, like the elephant, the giraffe, and the lion. All the animals want to vote on a main food for each part of the jungle. Your part, Monkey Village, is dominated by monkeys with a 73% majority in the area. The other percentages are 23% giraffe, which takes up most of the rest of the village, then a mix of various animals. You see this disparity and sit comfortably in your monkey hut, knowing that bananas, the monkeys’ favorite food, will surely be monkey village’s main food by tomorrow.

Rolls of 'I Voted' stickers in English and Spanish on a table, alongside a printed notice about voting. — “I voted” stickers in English and Spanish, Virginia, USA, November 2014. (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) photo.)

That’s when you wake up the next morning and check your monkey phone. Mysteriously, you see that somehow tree leaves are the main food for the village. What happened to our bananas? Wait, aren’t leaves giraffes’ favorite? That’s when you figure it out: the mayor of monkey village right now, John D. Giraffe, appointed a fellow giraffe to be his mapmaker. You put two and two together and realized what happened. You fell victim to the oldest political loophole in the book, gerrymandering. It’s the process of political parties drawing unfair voting districts. It is the power of those already elected in office, like the giraffes, to decide which parts of the forest they want to vote on. This creates scenarios like Monkey Village, where most people want bananas, but because of the people in office, the election isn’t based on the majority.

A visual representation showing election results across 50 precincts, with 60% green and 40% yellow. Below, it displays results for 5 districts with green and yellow blocks, indicating Green wins with all 5 districts represented as green, and Yellow wins with 2 green and 3 yellow blocks.

Now let’s apply this to real life, because it happens. Your local government is likely doing this in some form; let’s try to find it. The two main tactics for gerrymandering are packing and cracking. Packing would be like the giraffes, all getting drawn in together to be most of the animals voting in the election. Cracking is splitting opposing voters into multiple districts; say you, as a monkey, are voting for Monkey Village’s mayor, but your neighbor, a monkey, despite living in Monkey Village, is oddly voting for Lion City’s mayor. Now equipped with this base knowledge of gerrymandering and how it’s performed, I encourage you to look for real-world examples in your everyday life. One I’ll give you is North Carolina. According to the North Carolina State Board of Elections, as of 01/03/2026, North Carolina has a nearly even Republican and Democrat population of nearly 2.3 million each. Despite this, the North Carolina state map looks overwhelmingly red. Nothing like the even split in the numbers.

Map of North Carolina showing electoral districts in red and one district highlighted in blue.

This is a prime example of one of the US parties successfully negating almost half of their population’s votes. I encourage you, the reader, to look for local examples of gerrymandering in your life and try to point out wrongs in government.