The map is banned for being unfair, but that’s actually NOT why everyone is flipping out.
Voters in the state woke up to find their county split in half—one chunk of land re-drawn so it’s now connected by a single gas station and a river. Experts are calling it a “textbook partisan gerrymander,” but here’s where it gets messy: one of the map’s architects accidentally included a selfie with a stack of “secret” demographic spreadsheets just visible on their laptop screen—and the internet matched the numbers to a leaked political donor list. Now the state supreme court, three anonymous Reddit accounts, and the Department of Justice are all racing to answer one question: Did redistricting just become the biggest data scandal of the year?