A ‘redistricting nerd’ from NC won a national contest. His map is worth a look.

The process of redrawing state legislative and congressional districts every 10 years is usually an unsavory combination of math and mendacity as the state lawmakers in the majority party manipulate boundaries to tilt elections in their favor.

Ten years ago in North Carolina – where Republicans rule the General Assembly – legislative leaders turned to an expert on the dark art of gerrymandering – the late Thomas Hofeller. He helped draw new maps that overwhelmingly favored the election of Republicans to the state House, Senate and Congress. The maps worked as intended, but their imbalance also brought lawsuits and repeated court orders that the district lines be redrawn.

This time around, Republicans would do well to turn to an expert of another sort, one schooled in the noble art of mapping districts that serve the voters instead of the politicians. That would be Nathaniel Fischer, a 24-year-old Durham resident and self-described “redistricting nerd.” His proposed map for North Carolina’s new congressional districts recently won its category in a national contest sponsored by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, a Princeton University-based effort to promote fair redistricting. The winning map beat 130 other entries.

“I’m still sort of a little blown away,” said Fischer, a Boone native and 2019 UNC-Chapel Hill graduate. “I can’t believe my little ol’ map won. It was a very amazing moment.”

Fischer’s fascination with redistricting began in high school and continued as he majored in political science and interned with Common Cause North Carolina, a group which successfully challenged partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina.

“I redistrict just for fun. It’s like playing a video game, though obviously a lot more important,” said Fischer, who now works for the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality North Carolina. A few years ago, he even tried his hand at drawing gerrymandered maps, though he said the experiment left him “feeling a little dirty afterward.”

Fischer’s challenge in the Great American Map-Off contest was to draw a 14-district North Carolina congressional map that best preserves communities of interest. Those are groups of people in one area who have common political, social or economic interests. North Carolina’s redistricting standards discourage splitting those communities between districts.

North Carolina’s redistricting process will be a complicated one as Republican lawmakers try to draw maps that will maintain their advantage but also will pass court scrutiny. For Fischer, using computer software known as Dave’s Redistricting, the process was much simpler. “It took me like four hours,” he said.

The result is a map of neatly formed districts without the tortured extensions and convolutions that characterize gerrymandered districts. “I want districts that people who live in a district can look at and say, ‘That makes sense,’ ” Fischer said.

Fischer estimates that his map would likely favor Democrats in five districts and Republicans in seven, with two as true swing districts. Even on a fair map, he said, Democrats are at a disadvantage because they tend to be concentrated in urban areas. “Their population distribution is inefficient,” he said.

But he said the partisan gaps are close enough on his map that the outcomes are not automatically in favor of one party. “The beauty of fair maps is districts can swing around and create competitive races,” he said.

Much as supporters of democracy may hope for it, Republicans are unlikely to replace Hofeller’s partisan wizardry with Fischer’s fervor for fairness. He was encouraged that North Carolina’s maps became less gerrymandered after courts forced them to be redrawn, but he is keeping his hopes in check for what the process will produce this time.

“Considering the amount of litigation North Carolina has had, I don’t want to have too much optimism and end up sad,” he said. “I think we will end up with a map that is a little disappointing or really bad.”

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-829-4512, or nbarnett@ newsobserver. com