A constitutional design tool. The other prototypes in this suite put you inside a democracy: you cast a vote, you contribute a pitch, you place a marker among many. This one puts you above it, drawing the lines: 160 voters are already on the map, already in their parties; what you choose is the system they vote inside. Five draggable seeds define five districts (each voter belongs to its nearest seed); each district elects its plurality winner; the parliament plays the five winning voices. Move the seeds and the rules of representation change. The same voters can elect very different parliaments depending on the lines you draw.
How to play
- Drag any of the five numbered seeds across the map. Districts re-shape in real time around them. The closer a voter is to a seed, the more it belongs to that seed's district. The music shifts as the parliament re-elects.
- Hit a preset (fair, pack & crack, or stack) to jump to three different seed configurations on the same voters and hear how the parliament changes.
- The five parties play different melodies. A single party dominating means one voice loud; a balanced parliament means five voices in counterpoint.
Controls
SeedsFive draggable handles, one per district. The district owns whatever voters are closest to its seed (a Voronoi partition).
PresetsFair = seeds evenly spread horizontally, giving compact strip districts. Pack & Crack = one seed planted inside the largest party's stronghold (packing it into one district), the other four spread to the corners so its remaining voters are diluted and outvoted everywhere else: a classic gerrymander. Stack = seeds in a vertical column, producing horizontal-band districts: same voters, different axis, often a different parliament.
ReseedGenerates a new voter geography (clustered by party) and resets seeds to fair.
What this demonstrates
Most democratic activity happens inside a system: you vote, you petition, you organize. But every system has a designer, and the choice of system is itself a democratic act with its own politics. Plurality voting inside geographically-defined districts (the most common electoral system in the world) does not aggregate preferences in any neutral way: the choice of district lines, holding the underlying voters constant, can change which party gets the most seats, sometimes inverting the popular winner. Gerrymandering is the political art of choosing lines for outcomes, and this prototype makes that act audible. Compare what fair seeds sound like against packed-and-cracked seeds, on the same voters, and you can hear the mechanism. Where the other prototypes in this suite show how votes aggregate within rules, this one shows that the rules themselves are a choice.