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BRAXTON BREWINGTON: Hey, you coming to vote?

SPEAKER 1: Yes.

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: Awesome. We're getting on the shuttle right now.

ANNIE MINOFF: So it's last April, the middle of the afternoon, at North Carolina A&T State University. Though, to be honest, this could kind of be any campus around primary season.

ELAH FEDER: Mhm.

SPEAKER 2: Do you guys want to vote? Have you voted yet?

ANNIE MINOFF: You've got this group of student activists standing outside the class building, and they're trying to convince their fellow students essentially, to cut class, and to go vote instead. Early voting just started in North Carolina's congressional primary. And for the next four hours, the school shuttle is making round trip runs to the polling place. Student activists are calling this event "Roll To The Polls."

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: We try to make it seem as sexy as it can, but really it's just voting. And it's just that simple.

ANNIE MINOFF: That's Braxton Brewington. He is one of those student activists. And I'm willing to bet you probably knew somebody like Braxton in college.

ELAH FEDER: Alex Kerner.

ANNIE MINOFF: You know, it's the Poli-sci major with the great handshake, and wide smile, and you're like, this guy's totally going to run for office someday. And Roll To The Polls is Braxton's baby.

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: Come on, we're about to leave. Go vote.

ANNIE MINOFF: He passed out 200 flyers about this event, which means at this point he has heard every sad excuse not to get on this bus and go vote. Like, people keep trying to tell him, I don't have time to wait in line.

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: There's no wait time.

ANNIE MINOFF: They're like, I don't even know who to vote for.

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: I'll tell you. I literally know all the candidates. I know, I really can tell you about all of them.

ANNIE MINOFF: But even as Braxton is wheedling, and cajoling, and telling people, you need to get on this bus, you need to vote. There's something bothering him. There's this doubt lurking just under the surface, that maybe none of this matters.

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: Yeah. I wouldn't even say in the back of my mind. I mean, it's right there in front of us that when we go to the polls, does it really matter? It's like, I want to get everyone to vote. But then it's like, well the people who didn't vote, it's like, honestly part of you thinks, does it even matter?

ANNIE MINOFF: Braxton's thinking this way, because something happened two years ago. Republicans redrew North Carolina's congressional maps. They cut up the state into new congressional districts. And in the process, they sent a district line straight through Braxton Brewington's campus. Like, the second largest historically black university in the country. So today, about half of A&T lives in District 6, half of campus lives in District 13, and Braxton and his friends have a name for this--

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: Gerrymandering.

SPEAKER 4: Campus is being gerrymandered.

SPEAKER 2: Gerrymandered, right up the middle of the campus--

ELAH FEDER: Gerrymandering. You have probably heard of it. It's when politicians divide up a state into voting districts that benefit-- well, that benefit them. Right? Like, it helps them lock in seats for their party, get reelected more easily. You might have also heard that this is not the best for democracy. It skews election outcomes. Like, look at Maryland, for example. Republicans won more than a third of the vote in Maryland last election.

ANNIE MINOFF: Not too shabby, Republicans.

ELAH FEDER: Not so bad. But they end up with only one seat in congress-- out of eight. So time and again, voters have gone to the courts and said, like, judges, stop this. Like stop this gerrymandering madness, generally without a lot of success. But that might be about to change. Because now, voters are going to the courts with a new weapon-- math.

ELAH FEDER: I'm Elah.

ANNIE MINOFF: And I'm Annie. So you’ve probably heard a lot of stories this election about how our democracy is broken. Well today, we have the story of someone trying to fix it! With math. Today on Undiscovered, we’ve got a story of a mathematician who goes to court. He takes the stand to try to prove that his state’s congressional map is rigged. The outcome of this case might just redraw Braxton Brewington’s line and district lines all across the country. That's coming up.

[MUSIC]

ANNIE MINOFF: So I think we have to start with a little, like gerrymandering 101.

ELAH FEDER: A how to guide.

ANNIE MINOFF: A how to guide to gerrymandering. Say that you, Elah, want to gerrymander a map. There are basically two ways you can do this.

ELAH FEDER: Mhm.

ANNIE MINOFF: Way number one is to pack your opponents. You're going to draw your district lines so all of your political enemies are kind of shoved into just a few districts.

ELAH FEDER: Mhm.

ANNIE MINOFF: They will win those seats, kind of like a consolation prize, but you, my friend, will walk away with the rest.

ELAH FEDER: Excellent.

ANNIE MINOFF: Or, option number two, you can crack your opponents.

ELAH FEDER: Could you slow down? I'm taking notes.

ANNIE MINOFF: So this time you're going to divide them up between districts-- dilute their vote, so that they can't elect anybody.

ELAH FEDER: Like, spread them out thin.

ANNIE MINOFF: Mhm. Yeah. And that's what Braxton thinks is happening at A&T.

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: To me that line represents, like an attack. It's like, how can we diminish your voting power?

ANNIE MINOFF: To Braxton, it feels like North Carolina's Republicans looked at A&T and thought--

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: --you are young, you are mostly African-American. I mean, that's a huge voting block of not just the makeup of the U.S., but specifically of the Democratic Party, which I think most of our campus tends to lean towards.

ANNIE MINOFF: They do. A&T votes overwhelmingly Democrat.

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: So with a Republican-leaning state legislature, I think that the intent is very noticeable.

ANNIE MINOFF: The intent, according to Braxton, was to crack campus. To drown out A&T students’ votes by taking this pocket of blue Democratic support and splitting it up between two Republican districts.

ELAH FEDER: Yeah, and looking at North Carolina's history, this is not a crazy theory. In North Carolina gerrymandering is kind of a way of life. For decades it was the Democrats who were actually doing it. Every 10 years after the census, Democrats would redraw district lines, try to lock in those seats, and that worked really well for them, until 2010 when the script flips.

SPEAKER 5: We now project the Republicans in the next Congress will be the majority--

SPEAKER 6: If you really want an idea of how big this Republican wave is, North Carolina House and Senate, flipped to the Republicans for the first time since 1870.

ANNIE MINOFF: 2010 is the year of the Tea Party. It's a massive red wave. And suddenly, North Carolina Democrats are out. Republicans are in. And it is the Republicans turn to gerrymander. Draw the congressional map in their favor. And they're not shy about it.

DAVID LEWIS: I acknowledge freely that this would be a political gerrymander, which is not against the law.

ANNIE MINOFF: That was Republican state representative David Lewis copping to gerrymandering on camera in 2016, in front of a roomful of legislators. I was like, I couldn't believe what I was hearing the first time. So this was happening, because North Carolina Republicans were about to unveil a new congressional district map. One that Lewis tells us upfront is gerrymandered. And he goes even further. He essentially says, we are going to gerrymander this map so well, it's going to elect 10 Republicans to Congress and just three Democrats. So, Democrats, cool?

SPEAKER 7: So I'm trying to understand why you feel this would be fair.

ELAH FEDER: That was a Democratic legislator piping up with a question that will translate loosely as WTF, man? To which Representative Lewis says--

DAVID LEWIS: Thank you for the question, Senator. I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it's possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans, and two Democrats.

ELAH FEDER: We reached out to Representative Lewis for an interview. His office said he wasn’t available. Emailed three other Republican legislators-- they never responded. But anyway, a few days later, the Republican’s new map passes and it drives a line straight through through A&T. So Lewis’ comments actually didn’t make a big splash in North Carolina at the time that he said them, which kind of surprised me.

ANNIE MINOFF: Yeah.

ELAH FEDER: It’s kind of a big deal. But there was at least one guy in North Carolina who was pretty taken aback by what Lewis said.

BOB PHILLIPS: I mean I used to work with him. He was our champion.

ANNIE MINOFF: Bob Phillips is the executive director of Common Cause North Carolina. Common Cause is a nonpartisan, good government group.

ELAH FEDER: Yeah, Braxton from A&T, he's a fellow with Common Cause.

ANNIE MINOFF: Mhm. Right. So Bob was particularly surprised by what Representative Lewis had said, because just a few years earlier, he'd worked with Lewis on gerrymandering reform. He had worked with him to stop gerrymandering. And now Republicans were drawing a new map, Lewis was in charge, and he's bragging about how darn good his gerrymander is?

BOB PHILLIPS: I don't know whether that was strategic, or whether he was just a little bit too glib, and, you know, maybe arrogant, so to speak, to say that.

ANNIE MINOFF: It didn't matter, though. For Bob, this was too much.

BOB PHILLIPS: It was over the top for us. It was kind of like, that's our tipping point.

ELAH FEDER: In August 2016, Common Cause sued, alleging that the Republican's new district map was a partisan gerrymander, and unconstitutional.

ANNIE MINOFF: But you might think, like, pretty easy case. Like, come on.

ELAH FEDER: Yeah, I mean, he admitted it on camera.

DAVID LEWIS: I acknowledge freely that this would be a political gerrymander.

ANNIE MINOFF: And that really helps, but Bob and Common Cause I still have one very big problem, which is up until this point, no one had ever won a case like this. No one had ever taken a congressional map to federal court and had the judges agree, yeah, this is a political gerrymander, needs to go. Never. And in 2004 now former Supreme Court Justice, Anthony Kennedy, laid out a few reasons why. So Kennedy and the court had just heard a case that actually sounds a whole lot like Bob’s, where some Pennsylvania voters suing and saying, hey, our state map congressional map is a political gerrymander. Politicians are cracking and packing people based on their party. And Kennedy's like--

ANTHONY KENNEDY: I would concede that what happens here is unfair in some common parlance. It looks pretty raw.

ANNIE MINOFF: Kennedy's like, look, I get it. OK. Gerrymandering sucks. I wish it weren't happening.

ELAH FEDER: It is unfair, in the common parlance, as the ordinary folks say--

ANNIE MINOFF: As the common folk say, unfair. But Kennedy's point is like, look if you want the Supreme Court to throw out this map, I need more than your sense that this is unfair.

ELAH FEDER: OK.

ANNIE MINOFF: Like I need two things, actually. I need, a quote, "limited and precise rationale." I need some kind of legal principle that's going to tell me when a map has gotten so partisan, that it is actually legit infringing on people's constitutional rights.

ELAH FEDER: OK.

ANNIE MINOFF: So that's the first thing I need. And then I actually need evidence that this map that you have brought me, is in fact, that bad. Like you show me that, and then maybe I can help you. Otherwise--

ANTHONY KENNEDY: It seems to me that we're at sea.

ANNIE MINOFF: Like no dice, sorry. And ever since, people have been looking for the legal principles, and the evidence that might finally sway the court. And get them to intervene and to do something about partisan gerrymandering. And up to 2016, the search was not going so great. Cases come and go. The courts say, basically no to all of them.

ELAH FEDER: Which is not what you want to hear, if you are suing the state of North Carolina for partisan gerrymandering.

ANNIE MINOFF: Yeah.

ELAH FEDER: But Bob and Common Cause, they have reason to hope. They think that their case is different, in part because they have really, really good evidence. They think they have way to calculate just how rigged a map is. They think they can solve Justice Kennedy's evidence problem.

ANNIE MINOFF: Yeah, and the guy who figured this out--

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: My name is Jonathan Mattingly. I am a professor of mathematics and statistical science, here at Duke University.

ANNIE MINOFF: I went to visit Jonathan last June at Duke. We were sitting in his office, surrounded by a bunch of falling over math books, sipping coffee out of some department mugs that say in all caps across the front, math. Just in case you forget where you are. And he told me up until five years ago, he'd never used math for anything political.

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: No, not really. No. No.

ANNIE MINOFF: But then the 2012 election happens. North Carolina went for Romney. But look further down the tickets at who North Carolinians sent to the House of Representatives and it starts to get interesting. In 2012--

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: Over 50%-- just over 50% of North Carolinians voted for a democratic candidate, but yet 4 out of 13 Democrats were elected. So a tiny fraction, nowhere near half.

ANNIE MINOFF: Half of North Carolina voters cast a vote for a Democrat for congress in 2012. But somehow, Democrats win less than a third of the state’s congressional seats.

ELAH FEDER: Okay, that sounds a little fishy.

ANNIE MINOFF: And for some people, this is pretty clearly evidence that the state’s congressional map is a partisan gerrymander. But Jonathan, again, math professor. He's not totally convinced. Like you have to remember, we don't have a political system where if you get 40% of the votes, you get 40% of the seats. We don't have proportional representation. So if you really want to prove a gerrymander, you have to go deeper. Like--

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: OK, maybe you might agree that only getting 4 out of 13--

ANNIE MINOFF: 4 out of 13 congressional seats--

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: --seems a little, maybe not desirable. But maybe it should have only been-- instead of four, it should have been five, or six. You know, how do you decide that?

ANNIE MINOFF: What would have happened in this election if the maps had been nonpartisan? Like how many seats could Democrats have expected to win? And then Jonathan realized he could answer that, by drawing thousands of new nonpartisan maps for the state of North Carolina, and re-running the 2012 election thousands of times. And so that's what he does. Jonathan and his students, they use an algorithm to generate new district maps for the state of North Carolina at random. Although, they do give it a few constraints. Stuff like, districts have to have roughly the same number of people in them. The borders of the districts can't be too scraggly, or tortured-shaped. And so by the end of this, Jonathan and his students have upwards of 24,000 new plausible district maps for the state of North Carolina. Maps that were not drawn by Democrats, or by Republicans, but by a computer.

ELAH FEDER: Which is presumably, unaffiliated.

ANNIE MINOFF: Right. The computer is not trying to edge out Democrats or screw Republicans. It is literally just drawing shapes. So in that sense, these maps are completely non-partisan. And then for every one of those new non-partisan maps, Jonathan and his students re-tally the 2012 election. So they plug the actual votes that North Carolinians cast into each of their new, non-partisan maps and every time, they’re counting up--

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: --who won, and how much did they win by. And do this over and over again. We get some idea of what we would expect to happen from that vote.

ANNIE MINOFF: They start to see how the 2012 election could have played out if the maps had been non-partisan. Like, how many seats could Democrats have won? And let me tell you, it is not four. About 3/4 of the time in Jonathan's model, Democrats won six or seven of the state's 13 congressional seats. Sometimes they even won eight. And the chance that you elect just four Democrats to congress using a non-partisan map, it’s less than 1%. Nearly impossible. This map was a gerrymander.

So it takes a little while before the law people realize that this math professor might have just solved their evidence problem. But eventually they do. The way it happens, it's 2016, Jonathan is presenting on some of this work to some public policy types at Duke. And afterwards, he gets this call from a lawyer, who's like--

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: Hey, that's really interesting what you said. Could you just write down your results?

ANNIE MINOFF: Basically, could you write us an expert report? Which Jonathan does. And then it's like, hey, that's really interesting what you wrote down, would you testify as an expert witness at our trial?

ELAH FEDER: Because by now, Bob Phillips and Common Cause have sued. They're taking the state’s Republican’s map drawers to court, and they want to put Jonathan on the stand to try to convince a panel of North Carolina judges their state’s map is rigged. in a bid to end partisan gerrymandering once and for all, not just in North Carolina, but potentially across the country. And they want Jonathan in their corner.

ANNIE MINOFF: Coming up, a gamble that might just end partisan gerrymandering once and for all. And not just in North Carolina-- potentially around the country. After this.

[MUSIC]

The trial starts last October at the Middle District Court in Greensboro. It's this very classy place-- the building’s art deco style, lots of limestone and granite. On the first day, Common Cause has a press conference set up outside. And who's there, but Braxton Brewington the--

ANNIE MINOFF: Of course.

ELAH FEDER: Yes, the A&T Poli-sci major. He's outside explaining for the cameras why the district line running through his campus is not OK.

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: And for each and every student who lives on campus, their vote has essentially been diluted.

ANNIE MINOFF: Meanwhile, inside this courtroom, math professor Jonathan Mattingly’s trying to get his head in the game.

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: The plan was that I was going to be witness, I don't know, four or five or something--

ANNIE MINOFF: This is all new to Jonathan. Like, he's never actually been in a courtroom before, for anything. And now he’s an expert witness. Luckily for him, though there are a bunch of political people who are supposed to testify first in front of this panel of three federal judges. But this morning, these judges come in and they're like, you know what? Skip the political stuff. Like, straight on to the math. Jonathan remembers this lawyer coming up to him, saying--

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: Mattingly, you're up. And yeah, there was a moment of like, oh my god.

ANNIE MINOFF: So Jonathan takes the stand, and Common Cause's lawyer starts asking him questions. And one of things the lawyer asks him about is the Republican’s 2016 district map. So this is the map that Representative Lewis said he hoped would elect--

LEWIS: 10 Republicans and three Democrats--

ANNIE MINOFF: --to congress. And in 2016, that map delivered. Just three Democrats elected to Congress from North Carolina. But when Jonathan does his analysis, when he plugs the actual votes that people cast in 2016 into his 24,000 maps, most of the time, he sees something really different: Five Democrats elected, not three. In fact, the chance of electing just three Democrats to congress in 2016, using a non-partisan map, it’s less than 1%. Which means, this map didn’t just happen, right? It was precision engineered to do one thing: Elect Republicans to congress, as many as possible. And when you precision engineer a map, Jonathan found it is truly staggering what you can pull off. So, case in point, the last time Republicans drew one of these political gerrymanders, the map used in 2012, the map sent four Democrats to congress. But you could ask, what if Democrats had drawn the map that year? What if Democrats were the gerrymanderers? Jonathan saw, looking at his simulation, that they could’ve sent nine Democrats to congress, not four.

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: I saw in my analysis, that by not changing a single vote, that by only redrawing the districts, I could change the number of Democrats elected from four to nine out of 13.

ANNIE MINOFF: You, the map drawer, have that power to turn a red state blue. To decide whether North Carolina elects four Democrats to congress, or nine.

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: And we would consider each of those-- you know, we would call that a wave election. Either of those, right? And extremes. But with the same votes, you can create a wave election for the Republicans, and a wave election for the Democrats.

ANNIE MINOFF: And that's a problem, because you imagine the morning after election we all pick up our papers, and we want to read about, you know, what did that election mean? Does it mean that voters are fed up with the status quo? Right. They want change. Or maybe it means people's attitudes are changing on x issue or y. But if we can get a red wave or a blue wave with the very same votes, it means that that election didn't say anything, or what they thought. The only thing it revealed is who was drawing the lines.

ANNIE MINOFF: Jonathan testified for 2 and 1/2 hours about this, and a bunch of other analyzes that his team did. And afterwards he felt good about it. A political scientist took the stand after him and corroborated a lot of Jonathan's findings, using a different algorithm. Now it's just a waiting game to see how the judges would rule. In the meantime though, like I'd kind of been wondering, it seems pretty clear, at this point, that people should not be allowed to do redistricting at all. That's my conclusion. So my question is, why not just let Jonathan's algorithm draw the maps?

ELAH FEDER: The non-biased, non-partisan algorithm.

ANNIE MINOFF: Yeah. So I ran this idea by Jonathan. I caught him on his cell phone in the car. It turns out he's not such a big fan of that idea.

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: Yeah, I don't want this to be an automated, like, where we have the "Map-O-Tron," and you come in, you press the button, it spits out the answer, and then we say, well that's the law. That's our map.

ANNIE MINOFF: This could actually be kind of fun.

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: We could have a little robot. "Hello, I am the Map-O-Tron. I am here to make your maps."

ANNIE MINOFF: Ultimately though, it's just a little bit problematic. Because the fact is there are just so many judgment calls that go into drawing a quote unquote “fair district map.” Making decision like is it OK to divide a county between two different districts? How do you deal with natural boundaries like rivers, or unnatural ones like highways? Is it OK to divide a city into districts? Is it OK to divide a Latino neighborhood? Is it OK to divide the nation's second largest historically black university? These are questions about fairness, and algorithms don't decide what's fair. People have to do that. So Johnson's proposal is, have people draw the maps, people from both parties, and then, just to make sure no one’s walking away with an election, have an algorithm check their work.

[PHONE BUZZING]

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: I got a phone call, and I was in the middle of something.

ANNIE MINOFF: So a little less than three months after this trial, Jonathan gets a call from Common Cause's lawyer, Steve Epstein.

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: I said, hey Steve, I'm in the middle of something. Is there something important? And he goes, you want take this call. And basically, he was like, you know, we want the opinions coming down. It's not public yet, but they agreed with almost everything.

ANNIE MINOFF: This was huge. Back in 2004, Justice Kennedy said show me the evidence. Show me that this partisan gerrymander is infringing on people's constitutional rights. Well, thanks partly to Jonathan’s math, these North Carolina judges had plenty of evidence. They had evidence that North Carolina Democrats were being discriminated against by their state government for their political beliefs. And according to these judges, that's a violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. In other words, this map is a gerrymander. Throw it out.

JONATHAN MATTINGLY: And that was amazing. That was pretty fantastic.

ELAH FEDER: But as big as this win was, this was not the final word.Jonathan and Bob expected the Republicans to appeal to the Supreme Court, which, they did. And ever since, we’ve been waiting. For months, this case has ping-ponged back and forth between the Supreme Court and the district court in North Carolina--

ANNIE MINOFF: Ugh, yeah.

ELAH FEDER: -- over, essentially, legal technicalities.

ANNIE MINOFF: In the middle of this, Justice Kennedy retired.

ELAH FEDER: Right. So, earlier this month, the case went back up to the Supreme Court where it’s shaping up to be one of the biggest cases the court could hear this term.

ANNIE MINOFF: The stakes could not be higher. If Common Cause wins this case, it could fundamentally reshape our democracy. Like, it could change whose votes count, and by how much. And if it fails, one election law expert who I talked to, he kind of compared it to what people say about New York City, except in reverse. He said, if it can't make it here, it can't make it anywhere. Meaning, if this case can't convince the Supreme Court to intervene in partisan gerrymandering, maybe no case can. If what happened in North Carolina goes, maybe anything goes.

When Jonathan was on the stand last October, he talked about another analysis that his team did. This one lets you actually zoom in on specific groups of districts to see if they've been cracked, or packed. They were trying to show who this gerrymander was actually hurting, and how. So there's a district in the middle of the state, a little bit to the west. I think this is just me, but to me, it really looks like one of those Pomeranian dogs leaping. No one else is going to see this. But this district is probably cracked, and it's also where Braxton Brewington lives, the student from A&T. This fall is going to be his last time voting as an A&T student. It's going to be his third time voting in a district that a federal court has declared unconstitutional. And he is very, very frustrated.

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: I was talking with my friend a while ago and we were saying-- so I was born in '96. I want to say she was born in '97, but either way, around that time we were legally allowed to vote in 2014, 2015. So all of the congressional elections that we've voted in, 2014, 2016, and 2018, will all be unconstitutional maps. And so we were just talking about what it means to have literally never voted in a constitutional congressional election. And at what point do the elections we get to vote in, at what point will they be democratic? Like, when does it count? And it's like, none of them have really counted.

ANNIE MINOFF: But when I asked Braxton if there's anything else he wants to say--

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: Well first, if any students are listening, please vote in November. Please vote.

ANNIE MINOFF: A&T students-- Braxton will help you figure out what district you're in and where your polling place is. If you do not know the candidates, he will tell you. He knows all of them. No really, all of them. Braxton will tell you, go vote. And in the next breath--

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: How do you get people to the polls when it's like, hey, the district you live in is unconstitutional, but still go and vote. And you know, your vote still matters. And it's like, does it? It does, but it matters a little less.

ANNIE MINOFF: Gerrymandering. Your vote matters. It just matters a little less.

[MUSIC]

ANNIE MINOFF: Undiscovered is reported and produced by me, Annie Minoff.

ELAH FEDER: And by me, Elah Feder. And this is your friendly Canadian reminding you that election day in the United States is Tuesday, November 6th, which is a week from today.

BRAXTON BREWINGTON: Please vote in November. [LAUGHS] Please vote.

ANNIE MINOFF: On a smaller note, if you’ve ever finished an episode of our show, and wondered, wait a second, How?

ELAH FEDER: Why? Or that reminds me of a time, you’re a scientist, you’ve got a story to share that’s related? Email us. We are at undiscovered@sciencefriday.com.

ANNIE MINOFF: We might just use your feedback in a future episode. Undiscovered’s senior editor is Christopher Intagliata, our composer is Daniel Peterschmidt, and our production intern is Kaitlyn Schwalje.

ELAH FEDER: We got fact-checking help from Robin Palmer this week. I Am Robot and Proud wrote our theme. Eddie Garcia was our reporter on the ground at A&T.

ANNIE MINOFF: A very special thanks this week to Thomas Wolf and the Brennan Center for Justice. Also, Justin Levitt, Gregory Herschlag, and Jonathan Mattingly’s data plus students.

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