Missouri Voters Reject Congressional Map After Months of Being Carefully Drawn Around Them

JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri voters rejected a Republican-backed congressional map after it reached the ballot through the courts, leaving the map to seek legal advice about its feelings. The result reminded everyone that voters remain involved in democracy, even after democracy has been arranged into a collection of very particular shapes.

The map looked as though somebody had spent months carving it for an audience they already hoped to select. Its borders crossed Missouri with the purposefulness of a man avoiding an unpaid tab. Some communities were joined; others received a courteous detour. In a few places, the lines appeared to have concluded that geography was optional when personal preference was nearby.

“I was designed to bring people together,” said the map, represented by a laminated rectangle beneath a paperweight, “as long as they live in the precise wedges where I put them.” The rectangle would not explain why those wedges resembled puzzle pieces after someone had replaced the picture with a list of preferred outcomes.

“We designed a district so welcoming it already knows who belongs.” — Marlowe Quist, deputy assistant director of the Institute for Rectangular Accountability

Marlowe Quist, deputy assistant director of the Institute for Rectangular Accountability, said voters had shown a troubling attachment to ordinary shapes. “We made a district so welcoming that it already knows who belongs,” Quist said. The institute is considering a public education campaign to explain that a line can be arbitrary and still carry itself with tremendous confidence.

That confidence has now had its day in court. The map’s trip to the ballot offered a tidy example of modern political procedure: draw a boundary, inspect it, argue about it until the room changes ownership, then ask the public whether it wishes to live inside a diagram that seems to have emerged from a competitive game of Tetris.

The public’s answer was fairly plain. A nearby man said he had no objection to complicated maps in principle. “I object when one understands my political future better than I do,” said Lyle Pender, carrying a sandwich and never invited onto any committee.

Officials have taken the rejection in their usual administrative manner. A spokesperson for the Committee on Cartographic Feelings said the map would spend several weeks staring at a wall and reconsidering its relationship with the electorate. Speaking from inside a filing cabinet, the spokesperson said the committee still intended to produce boundaries that respected voters, once voters had been persuaded to respect the boundaries.

At press time, the rejected map was applying for a district of its own, shaped like a tasteful question mark and containing no residents. Linda Sources notes that the vote and the map’s journey through the courts are real. The map’s opinions, luggage, sandwich-related concerns, and proposed career change are not.