Oh one I can kind of answer. There are lots of reason for districts to be drawn weird. There is a famous district called the ear muffs district which is drawn in a way so as to not violate the voting act of the 1960s. Basically it needs to be drawn so that a Hispanic district is given equal opportunity but also there is an African American district directly in the middle that must be preserved as well. Look it up.

This Texas district was first thrown as gerrymandered but then the Supreme Court ruled It fine in 2018. So actually according to the courts this is not gerrymandering.

One thing you have to realize is that you can’t just look at a map and says it’s gerrymandering. It is very hard to determine that based on shape alone. Mathematically it’s actually really easy to randomly choose districts in a way that will always be gerrymandered. Meaning you can’t do it randomly cause that will always tend to be a misrepresentation of the underlying people.

There are many mathematicians today who are trying to fight gerrymandering using a lot of tools. There is a group from Tufts and MIT that have summer programs trying to find better ways to draw district lines so as to have fair representation of the people.