A political cartoon, printed in 1812, satirises the bizarre shape of a gerrymandered district in Essex County, Massachusetts, as a dragon-like monster. Credit:WikiCommons Democratic House candidates had in fact won the most votes at the 2012 elections, yet Republicans still maintained a comfortable 33-seat majority in the chamber. The answer to Daley's question was gerrymandering – a phrase coined in 1812 to describe Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry's attempts to game the electoral process. It's a practice made possible by one of the more peculiar quirks of the US electoral system: politicians have traditionally been responsible for designing the boundaries of congressional seats, rather than an independent authority like the Australian Electoral Commission. Founding father of the gerrymander: Massachusetts governor and US vice-president Elbridge Gerry.

It sounds like a flagrant conflict of interest, and legislators from both parties have indeed used the power to benefit themselves. The most common ways to do this are known as "packing" and "cracking". The first strategy concentrates your opponents’ supporters into a small number of seats, leaving the other seats with a better chance of returning your party. The latter spreads them out over many seats, thus diluting their electoral power. At the 2012 elections in Pennsylvania, Democrats won 50 per cent of the House vote yet captured just 30 per cent of seats on offer. In 2010 the phenomenon was supercharged when Republicans embarked on an explicit attempt to lock in control of Congress by redrawing electoral maps to their advantage. It was known as REDMAP (the Redistricting Majority Project) and used sophisticated new software tools that allow political parties to pinpoint exactly where their supporters and opponents live. It was gerrymandering on a scale never seen before, and it worked a treat.

Republicans seized power in key swing states and redrew electoral maps so that they were virtually guaranteed to win a majority in Congress. At the 2012 elections in Pennsylvania, for example, Democrats won 50 per cent of the House vote yet captured just 30 per cent of seats on offer. It was the same story in states such as North Carolina, Ohio and Michigan: more votes for Democrats but more seats for Republicans. Amazed that no one had examined the phenomenon in detail, Daley wrote a book called Ratf*cked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy. He is now a senior fellow at FairVote, a group advocating electoral reform. Loading "You can’t understand the past decade of American politics without understanding the influence of redistricting and how Republicans used it as a systematic tool to run the country despite having fewer votes," he says.

But now things are changing. One of the most significant, if little noticed, outcomes from last week’s US midterm elections was the success of attempts to strip politicians of their power to game the electoral system. Voters in Michigan, Colorado and Missouri overwhelmingly supported initiatives to create independent redistricting commissions. This will move their systems closer to that used in Australia and all other industrialised democracies. Voters in Ohio decided to do the same thing in May, and voters in Utah may as well (election results are still being counted there). "One thing we heard loud and clear at this election is that the American public hate gerrymandering and want to take the power to draw lines away from politicians and give it to the people," Daley says. "We are now in an amazing position to reform what has been a cancer on our politics."

Justin Levitt, a constitutional law expert at Loyola Law School and a former Department of Justice official, says gerrymandering was once seen as a dry and esoteric topic. But voters are increasingly alarmed about it. "Like the sewer system or the electrical grid, redistricting is something you only notice when things go wrong," he says. "We expect it will work without us paying attention to it, so when it doesn’t work we are furious." The worst of the worst It is a competitive field, but among the contenders for the most gerrymandered state in America, Michigan is up there with the worst.

Earlier this year, emails were revealed showing Republican officials bragging about how they had crammed "Dem garbage" into a particular seat and how another district was shaped as if it was "giving the finger" to a Democratic politician. At the 2012 elections, 51 per cent of Michiganders voted for a Democratic House candidate and 46 per cent for a Republican. Yet the state sent nine Republicans to Washington and just five Democrats. US President Donald Trump offers the podium to North Carolina congressman Ted Budd, who ran in a district intentionally drawn to favour Republicans. Credit:AP Two days after the 2016 election, Katie Fahey decided it was time to take action. “I’d like to take on gerrymandering in Michigan,” Fahey said in a Facebook post to her friends. “If you’re interested in doing this as well please let me know.” Then she added a smiley face emoji.

Fahey, then 27, works as a project officer at a recycling non-profit. She had no previous involvement in politics besides voting and no particular interest in gerrymandering. But with so many people on both the right and left questioning the fundamentals of American democracy, she wanted to do something practical to fix it. The sense that the political system had failed was particularly intense in Michigan because of the water crisis in Flint that exposed 100,000 to lead poisoning. "No matter what issue you care about, the electoral system is at the heart of it": a protester in Flint, Michigan, in 2016. Credit:AP Fahey's post quickly morphed into a Facebook group, and then into an organisation named Voters not Politicians. Within three months, the group's volunteers had gathered 350,000 signatures - enough to put an initiative to create an independent redistricting commission on the ballot for this year's midterm elections. "A lot of people didn’t know what gerrymandering was so there was a lot of education we had to do," says Fahey. "We wanted to be non-partisan and worked very hard to make sure Democrats, Republicans and independents were involved."

The group held presentations across the state showing residents some of the nation's more outrageously gerrymandered districts. A congressional district in Texas has been nicknamed the “upside-down elephant” because of its strange shape; Maryland has the “praying mantis" and Pennsylvania “Goofy kicking Donald Duck”. Fahey also made a video jogging through a Michigan street containing just eight houses in three separate legislative districts, to show the absurdity of the system. "Goofy kicking Donald Duck": Pennsylvania's 7th congressional district. Credit:Google Last week the proposal to create an independent redistricting commission in Michigan passed easily, with 61 per cent support. Congressional districts there will now be drawn by a committee of 13 randomly-selected voters: four Republicans, four Democrats and five independents. Daley says reformers have learnt from mistakes made in Arizona, which created a "deeply flawed" independent commission in 2000. The Arizona commission has only five members - two Republicans and two Democrats, selected by the state legislature, plus an independent chair.

“It has had troubles the whole way through,” says Stan Barnes, a former Republican member of Arizona's state parliament. “For the most part it’s been viewed as not independent, full of politics and mostly benefiting Democrats." "The praying mantis": Maryland's 3rd congressional district. Credit:Google Subsequent states - like California, the most populous state in the US - have made their independent commissions larger, so power is not concentrated in an independent chair. They have also used lotteries to select commissioners, rather than leaving it up to politicians. Only one US state, Iowa, uses a system similar to that of the Australian Electoral Commission, where districts are drawn by non-partisan civil servants. Most independent commissions in the US have seats reserved for Democratic and Republican members. "At such a polarised time, it is difficult for Americans to put their faith in the idea of non-political technocrats," Daley says.

In other states, judges are taking action to combat gerrymandering. In January, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found the state's gerrymandered congressional map was unconstitutional and tore it up. Independent experts were called in to draw new districts for the November midterm elections. This year, Pennsylvania sent nine Democrats and nine Republicans to the US House, compared to 13 Republicans and five Democrats at the previous election. "This is a 50-50 state that now has a 50-50 delegation," Daley says. "That is a big deal." Justin Levitt says the trend towards more independent redistricting will have profound consequences for US society - even if many voters never realise it.