Ending Gerrymandering

Josh Lafair and his siblings, Louis and Rebecca, are big board game fans. They’re also concerned about the fact that their hometown has been carved into six different congressional districts. So they decided to create a game to raise awareness. “Gerrymandering has all the correct aspects of a board game: scheming, strategizing, backstabbing,” Lafair says. They made Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game, which lets players redraw districts to ensure their political party wins the election. There’s also an online version, which Lafair hopes to get into as many classrooms as possible. “Gerrymandering is an extraordinarily complicated topic,” he says. “This provides an introductory way for people to learn about it in a way that doesn’t seem as scary.”

In 2016, the North Carolina legislature redrew the state’s congressional districts, splitting the campus of North Carolina A&T State University—the largest historically Black college in the nation—in half. Concerned that this would dilute their voting power, Caesar and some of her fellow students began speaking out. “I was being disenfranchised, and it felt as if my vote wasn’t counting as a full vote,” Caesar says. She was proud to watch the community come together to fight—and get results. In late 2019, a state court ruled that the two districts should be reunited. But Caesar’s work didn’t stop there. Through Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization, she’s now helping other students with redistricting-related activism. “We want to keep these people together so they can have a voice that is unified,” she says, “and not split up into different sections that don’t make any sense.”