[eig]

In real-life, before the election there is a margin of error on the support of a bloc.

If you interpret a "tie" in this game as "either party could win within the margin of error", then it becomes a lot closer to solving the problem that gerrymandering algorithms try to solve in real life!

[dmurray]

Have you played the game? The board today has three parties and the winning solution is to make sure your party wins one district and the other parties tie in the other four.

Under any real world system, you will lose this election if you rig it this way. You just can't predict who will win it instead.

[rainsford]

Edit: Per a comment below, this does not seem like a regular feature of the game, just an oddity of today. It would still be worth figuring out a way to eliminate the tie issue or at least ensure it's less of a factor in future games, but the game is much more fun on average overall than today's game suggests

Yeah I don't know if that was just the puzzle today, since this is the first time I've heard of or played this game, but that feature seemed like a disappointing execution of an otherwise genuinely unique idea.

Winning a single district for your extremely minority party while locking the other two parties out of winning anything isn't even remotely analogous to how real world gerrymandering works, at least in the US where the term is typically used. It also feels like cheating, since it relies primarily on exploiting a flaw that exists exclusively in the game but not in real life. I'm all for simplification of real world factors in games, but not to the point where the entire path to victory relies on that simplification.

A more accurate and more interesting variation would be to just have two parties with puzzles that rely on crafting districts where the party with fewer voters wins the majority of seats, with the challenge coming from voter distribution patterns that make it hard to create winning districts while following the game's rules. The addition of a third party and ties that result in nobody winning seem both unnecessary and worse.

[waterTanuki]

The goal of this puzzle appears to be to get more people to talk about the issue and push for change. In these things, you can have either popularity or nuance but not both. The average American can't even read, let alone understand the nuance or complexity in how gerrymandering "actually" works.