This tool lets you randomly redraw the states to see how it changes the Electoral College

Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Al Gore all would have won the Electoral College under these state boundaries.

Artist and urban planner Neil Freeman put together this mesmerizing interactive feature that lets you randomly generate 50 new states based on existing counties, giving you the Electoral College results for the last six presidential elections. A few years ago, Freeman had created a viral map of 50 equal-population states, and this project was a logical next step. The above example map creates a nice patchwork of states (see a larger version here). Not only would 2016 and 2000 Democratic popular vote winners Hillary Clinton and Al Gore have won the Electoral College under these boundaries, but even 2004 popular vote loser John Kerry, too.

This tool helps underscore just how arbitrary the Electoral College is, since our modern state boundaries are legacies of political decisions taken sometimes centuries ago, and those boundaries of course haven’t changed despite the enormous transformation of America’s population over the generations. It also illustrates how Democrats’ Electoral College geography problem in 2016 wasn’t so much an intractable feature of living patterns—for instance, Democrats being overly “clustered” in a few elite coastal cities—but was instead the byproduct of historical political decisions about where to draw the lines.

Take a look at the tool and play around with it for yourself. It doesn’t take much to realize how easily possible it is to have wildly divergent Electoral College outcomes and even a different presidential winner if the states had been drawn in different ways.