For many reasons (pragmatic and otherwise), democratic countries often have a representative system of government. This means that rather than voting on issues directly, people vote for "representatives" that, in turn, vote on the issues.

A simple system for choosing representatives is as follows: the state is divided into districts and each district votes to chooses a single representative that best represents that district.

For example, if the state looked like this:

x	o	x
x	x	o
o	o	o

and got to choose three representatives the districts could be divided up like this:

x o x

x x o

o o o

where X would get a representative from the top and middle districts (as the X's are the majority in those districts) and the O's would get a representative from the bottom.


However, the state could also be divided as follows:

x x o

o x o

x o o

in which case the O's would get two representatives (from the right and middle districts) and the X's would get only one (from the left).