Princeton University has developed an online tool to help voters see whether state lawmakers are drawing fair congressional and legislative district maps.
The nonpartisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which was launched a couple of years ago, uses math and probability to score each map that lawmakers draw and give them a report card grade. The goal is to make it easy for non-experts to be able to tell whether lawmakers are rigging voting maps to favor their own party.
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Helen Brewer, a legal analyst with the project, said Wednesday that computers generate every possible version of a state's voting maps – up to a million of them. They then compare the averages of those maps to whatever lawmakers propose.
"If it compares to the vast majority of the maps, it's going to be a better grade," Brewer said. "If it's an outlier that, say, disfavors one political party way more than most of a million maps did, you know, that's sort of an indicator that maybe the map was set out to do that intentionally. And so, that's going to produce a lower grade."
The maps North Carolina lawmakers have drawn in recent weeks have gotten plenty of F's.
A congressional map created by Sen. Warren Daniel, R-Burke, that would create an 11-3 split in U.S. House seats in favor of Republicans has scored the worst so far. The Princeton researchers gave it a political bias rating of 28.6 percent and noted that it also would likely reduce minority representation.
Meanwhile, several congressional maps drawn by Sen. Ben Clark, D-Hoke, received A's. They showed no sign of political bias, and it wouldn't reduce minority representation.
The Princeton group has failed a lot of Democratic-drawn maps elsewhere, including in Illinois and Oregon.
Whichever party is in power in a given state has a strong incentive to rig the maps to stay in power, but that's not fair to voters, Brewer said.