Arnold Schwarzenegger brags in his X profile that “I killed the Predator”, but even he was shocked when, as the freshly elected governor of California more than 20 years ago, he saw how unfairly the state’s electoral boundaries were carved up.
One district in the eastern part of the state had such a long, thin middle section it was nicknamed the “swan”. Another was known as the “Jesus district” because you had to walk on water to get from one side to the other. Yet another, in Los Angeles’s San Fernando calley, was memorably described by the Stanford law professor Pam Karlan as “a ghastly – looking, multi-headed, insect-like polygon with 385 sides”.
