The Steal Playbook · Move 02
Your party is outnumbered. But you draw the districts. You can choose your voters in an attempt to determine the outcome of the election. Crack your opponents apart, pack them where they can't hurt you, and win with a minority.
Choose your handicap
Win 3 of 5 seats, while holding fewer votes than they do.
They have the votes. You have the pen, crack them apart, pack them tight, and steal the map.
▸ Each district = 5 voters; the majority wins its seat. ▸ Every district must be one connected shape.
Pick a district below, then paint 5 voters into it.
You turned a minority into a majority, without changing one ballot.
Cleared on EasyYou turned 40% of the vote into 60% of the seats, not by changing a single ballot, but by choosing who lived in which district.
Splitting your opponent's voters across many districts so they never hold a majority in any of them.
Cramming your opponent's voters into one throwaway district they win big, so their votes are wasted and you take the rest.
The trick got its name in 1812, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a district so contorted it looked like a salamander, the “Gerry-mander.” Today, data and AI let mapmakers do it with surgical precision, so that elected officials choose their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives, and in 2019 the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts can't even hear partisan-gerrymandering claims.
From Stealing Elections, American Style by David F. Walbert (Bloomsbury, 2026), Chapter 7.
Here, like real districts, every one must be equal in size and one connected shape. That
connected-but-contorted requirement is exactly why gerrymandered districts end up looking
like salamanders. Unless it's reined in, the book warns, redistricting after the 2030 census
will be worse.