We used gerrymandered voting district maps and voter addresses at the center of Gerry’s Partisan Pizza. Data revealed how US politicians were rigging American elections, and we turned it into a more easily digestible and understandable activation. We centered the concept for Gerry’s around the data from the maps and turned it into a pizza delivery zone. We used people’s address data to target our audience, allowing us to literally speak face to face with them.

On September 27, 2021, Texas announced its new congressional district map, which added a new 37th district that included much of the city of Austin. Legislators used gerrymandering to diminish the voting power of minorities. Non-profit, anti-corruption organization RepresentUS needed to create a campaign that would make more Americans aware of the corruption of gerrymandering before the maps were confirmed. Gerrymandering is a complicated political issue, so we needed to explain the problem in simple terms to encourage people to join our protest.

Three weeks after Texas’s district maps were unveiled, we opened the doors of Gerry’s Partisan Pizza, a corrupt shop that served and delivered free pizza only within the bounds of the gerrymandered 37th voting district. We used the district maps and the voter address data to determine who lived in the 37th district and thus who was eligible for free pizza. We exposed the corruption of gerrymandering by handpicking our customers in the same way as politicians were handpicking their voters. We opened a brick-and-mortar shop and delivered, using pizza as a metaphor for political corruption.

We then went on a two-week food-truck tour, giving out pizzas to residents of gerrymandered districts across the United States, from Texas to Wisconsin. We used the maps and voter address data in the same way in each city to determine who was eligible for free pizza and who was gerrymandered out of it.

We took the voting district maps in Texas and five other American states and created a database of addresses that were in each district. We did this for each district that we wanted to target, including Texas’s 37th voting district and districts in North Carolina, Maryland, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. When someone entered their address into the website, it determined in which district they lived and thus whether they lived in one of Gerry’s delivery zones.

Using addresses allowed us to precisely target the people who were living in gerrymandered districts.

When people entered Gerry’s Partisan Pizza or ordered at home, they entered their address into a website we created to see whether they lived within a targeted district. Based on the map and address data, if they lived within the 37th district, they qualified for free pizza. If their address was not within the 37th district, they didn’t qualify for free pizza, and couldn’t get any pizza. The district data was central to the concept of gerrymandering people out of free pizza.

The data was used to show people how politicians are manipulating votes to their own selfish advantage. We took the data politicians use to rig elections and turned it on them to expose their corruption.

From Texas to Wisconsin, we covered more than 5,000 miles (8,046 km) of gerrymandered land and served more than 6,000 pizza slices.

Gerry’s was hugely popular in the press, resulting in more than 360MM earned media impressions and a reach of more than 2.18MM. Gerry’s was featured on broadcast news in every city the pizza truck stopped and was featured everywhere online, from pop culture publications like Eater to CBS news.

Governors and mayors from multiple states came out to Gerry’s Partisan Pizza and spoke on broadcast news about the activation. Of the individuals who engaged with Gerry’s Partisan Pizza, 35% called their lawmakers via our CTA phone number and demanded change. After our activation, the US Department of Justice for the Biden administration sued the state of Texas, alleging that the gerrymandered or redrawn map infringed the voting rights of minority voters.