A math test for 'extremeness' shows the most rigged voting maps are in California and Illinois, not just the usual suspects.
March 19, 2026
Original Paper
How Extreme Are America’s Electoral Maps? A Tail Probability Test for Gerrymandering
SSRN · 6181142
The Takeaway
By applying a party-neutral probability diagnostic to seat outcomes, researchers found that several 'blue' states have more extreme statistical deviations in their representation than the 'red' states usually highlighted in news cycles. This challenges the assumption that electoral map distortion is a localized problem or exclusive to a few notorious partisan battlegrounds.
From the abstract
<div> How extreme are American electoral maps in practice? This question is answered with a party-symmetric probability diagnostic that converts observed vote-seat outcomes into a one-sided tail probability under a transparent multinomial null distribution (implemented via its binomial marginal). The extremeness statistic is reported on an unbounded log-odds scale, enabling direct comparison across states, chamber sizes, and election windows and allowing persistence to accumulate across cycles r