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Gerrymandering -- drawing political boundaries to give your party a numeric advantage over an opposing party -- is a difficult process to explain. If you find the notion confusing, check out the chart above -- adapted from one posted to Reddit this weekend -- and wonder no more.

Suppose we have a very tiny state of fifty people. Thirty of them belong to the Blue Party, and 20 belong to the Red Party. And just our luck, they all live in a nice even grid with the Blues on one side of the state and the Reds on the other.

Now, let's say we need to divide this state into five districts. Each district will send one representative to the House to represent the people. Ideally, we want the representation to be proportional: if 60 percent of our residents are Blue and 40 percent are Red, those five seats should be divvied up the same way.

Fortunately, because our citizens live in a neatly ordered grid, it's easy to draw five lengthy districts -- two for the Reds , and three for the Blues. Voila! Perfectly proportional representation, just as the Founders intended. That's grid 1 above, "perfect representation."

Now, let's say instead that the Blue Party controls the state government, and they get to decide how the lines are drawn. Rather than draw districts vertically they draw them horizontally, so that in each district there are six Blues and four Reds. You can see that in grid 2 above, "compact but unfair."

With a comfortable Blue majority in this state, each district elects a blue candidate to the House. The Blues win 5 seats and the Reds don't get a single one. Oh well! All's fair in love and politics.

In the real world, the results of this latter scenario are similar to what we see in New York, though there are no good examples of where a majority party gives itself a clean-sweep. In 2012, Democrats received 66 percent of the popular House vote. But they won 21 out of 27 House seats, or three more than you'd expect from the popular vote alone. And from a purely geometric standpoint, New York's congressional districts aren't terribly irregular -- at least not compared to other states.

Finally, what if the Red Party controls the state government? The Reds know they're at a numeric disadvantage. But with some creative boundary drawing -- the type you see in grid 3, "neither compact nor fair" -- they can slice the Blue population up such that they only get a majority in two districts. So despite making up 40 percent of the population, the Reds win 60 percent of the seats. Not bad!

In the real world, this is similar to what we see in Pennsylvania. In 2012, Democrats won 51 percent of the popular House vote. But the only won 5 out of 18 House seats -- fewer than one third. This was because when Pennsylvania Republicans redrew the state's Congressional districts, they made highly irregular districts that look like the one below, PA-7, one of the most geographically irregular districts in the nation.

Now, this exercise is of course a huge simplification. In the real world people don't live in neatly-ordered grids sorted by political party. But for real-world politicians looking to give themselves an advantage at redistricting time, the process is exactly the same, as are the results for the parties that gerrymander successfully.

The easiest way to solve this issue, of course, would be to take the redistricting process out of human hands entirely. There is already software capable of doing just that -- good luck getting any politicians to agree to it, though.

More on gerrymandering:
This computer programmer solved gerrymandering in his spare time "
America's most gerrymandered congressional districts "
What 60 years of political gerrymandering looks like "
One easy way to end gerrymandering: Stop letting politicians draw their own districts "

Note: The chart above was adapted from one posted to Reddit this weekend. Credit to redditor N8theGr8 for finding the original image. He couldn't track down the original creator using a reverse image search, and neither could I. If you made the original chart, drop me a line so I can give you credit! UPDATE: The original creator reached out -- his name is Stephen Nass, and he posted the original chart on Facebook on Feb. 21.
Update: An earlier version of this post used California as an example of a majority party giving itself a bigger majority through redistricting. California's districts are drawn by an independent commission, not by the parties.

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This is the best explanation of gerrymandering you will ever see

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Gerrymandering -- drawing political boundaries to give your party a numeric advantage over an opposing party -- is a difficult process to explain. If you find the notion confusing, check out the chart above -- adapted from one posted to Reddit this weekend -- and wonder no more.

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Just after midnight Saturday, one of the most perplexing border disputes in the world officially ended. India and Bangladesh began the exchange of over 160 enclaves - small areas of sovereignty completely surrounded on all sides by another country - and in so doing ended a dispute that has lasted almost 70 years.

This act will have a major effect on the lives of more than 50,000 people who resided in these enclaves in Cooch Behar. Where they had been surrounded by a country they didn't have citizenship in for decades, now they will finally gain access to things like schools, electricity and health care.

For curious cartographers and others obsessed with geopolitical oddities, however, it's an end of an era. The exchange between India and Bangladesh means that the world will not only lose one of its most unique borders, but it will also lose the only third-order enclave in the world - an enclave surrounded by an enclave surrounded by an enclave surrounded by another state.

It's confusing, so let me spell it out: Dahala Khagrabari, the third-order enclave in question, was a part of India, surrounded by a Bangladeshi enclave, which was surrounded by an Indian enclave, which was surrounded by Bangladesh. If you're still confused, this close-up map may make things a little clearer:

Enclaves themselves are not so unusual. Plenty exist around the world - Llívia, for example, is a part of Spain that is completely surrounded by French territories. Second-order enclaves (an enclave within an enclave) are not as rare as you might think, either: There are a web of enclaves within enclaves in Baarle-Hertog, a Belgian municipality with pockets of Dutch sovereignty. It is important to note that enclaves aren't necessarily bad. As Frank Jacobs, an enclave-obsessed blogger wrote for the New York Times in 2011, Barle-Hertog is "a money-spinning tourist attraction." Before the modern age of cartography and nation states, there were enclaves all over the place.

The situation in Cooch Behar was clearly not good, however. Old stories say that the enclaves were the end result of a chess game between the Maharaja of Cooch Behar and the Faujdar of Rangpur many centuries ago, or the result of a drunk British colonial spilling ink on a map, both apocryphal stories but a good indication of how arbitrary the borders seemed ( modern scholars believe that the enclaves are actually the result of the Mughal empire's failed expansion into the kingdom of Cooch Behar in the 18th century). After the partition of India in 1947, the problems with this arrangement became apparent: The people who lived in these enclaves weren't stateless people, but they might as well have been.

The strange set-up made it not only difficult for people to access state amenities, it made things as simple as a trip to the market a potential problem. In theory, someone who lived in an enclave would need a visa to enter the foreign country that surrounded the enclave. However, the only way to get that visa was to travel to a major city in the main body of their country, something that was impossible without illegally entering the foreign country.

Attempts to rectify the situation have stalled for decades: An agreement for a land swap was reached in 1974, but India did not ratify it. In 2011, however, a new agreement was reached, which, after some stalling, was finally ratified in June. The enclaves will become territory of the states that surround them and the citizens who live within them will get to decide whether they want to stay put and accept new citizenship, or whether they want to keep their original citizenship and be relocated.

Problem solved for the people of Dahala Khagrabari? Not exactly. Some exclave residents say that they were left out of government surveys and worry they will not be able to choose their citizenship or keep their land. Some families within Dahala Khagrabari are being split as they choose different citizenships. Technically, one the world's strangest border disputes may be solved, but on the ground it is likely to be far more complicated.
More on WorldViews The simple way Google Maps could side-step its Crimea controversy Could this map of China start a war?

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Say goodbye to the weirdest border dispute in the world

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Just after midnight Saturday, one of the most perplexing border disputes in the world officially ended. India and Bangladesh began the exchange of over 160 enclaves - small areas of sovereignty completely surrounded on all sides by another country - and in so doing ended a dispute that has lasted almost 70 years.