The word for rigged districts comes from a governor who hated the bill he signed
A 1812 Massachusetts map, a dinner party joke, and a name that outlived everything else its namesake did.
Elbridge Gerry signed the Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Constitution (though he refused to sign it, holding out for a Bill of Rights), and served as James Madison's vice president. None of that is why you know his name.
In 1812, as governor of Massachusetts, Gerry reluctantly approved a state senate redistricting map drawn by his own Democratic-Republican party to squeeze out their Federalist rivals. One new district, snaking along the edge of Essex County to scoop up favorable towns while excluding unfavorable ones, looked so unnatural on paper that guests at a Boston dinner party started comparing it to an animal. An illustrator sketched it with claws and a scaly tail. A poet at the table supplied the name: not just a salamander, but a Gerry-mander. The cartoon ran in the Boston Gazette that March, and the word stuck so completely that Gerry, whose name was actually pronounced with a hard G, like "Gary", is now remembered with the soft G of the word that mocked him.
The district worked, by the way. It flipped three seats. The tactic is two centuries old; only the graphics software has improved.