The laptop was cracked open well after midnight, as was a bottle of Sprite. Then, Daniel DiDonato, a college freshman, got to work.
But he wasn’t pulling an all-nighter to complete his assignments at the University of Alabama. Instead, fueled by soda and an unusual teenage interest in the wonky workings of redistricting, he set out to create new legislative maps for State Senate Districts 25 and 26 in Alabama.
A legal fight over those districts in Montgomery, Ala., had been brewing since 2021, when plaintiffs filed a lawsuit arguing that state officials had violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and created maps that effectively diluted the power of Black voters. In October, a federal judge ordered that those districts be redrawn and invited the public to submit maps for consideration. It was widely expected that the selected map would come from the team that had redrawn the state’s congressional districts in 2023, which included a cartographer.
Enter Mr. DiDonato, 19, a curly-haired political science major who was born in Alaska, raised in rural Alabama and obsessed since high school with redistricting.
He sent in six maps in October and carried on with his college education in Tuscaloosa, Ala., periodically checking the court docket online in the weeks after, like a young actor eager to hear whether he got the role. One morning in November, he received a text from a friend with a link to an article about the map that had just been selected. It was one of his.
Mr. DiDonato, who was still in bed, replied with an all-caps expletive.
He was stunned, to say the least. He couldn’t stop smiling as he hustled out of bed to walk to his early-morning “Intro to American Politics” class. As the professor lectured, Mr. DiDonato got out his Chromebook, the same one he had used to create the map, pulled up the opinion from Anna Manasco, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, and felt a surge of adrenaline.
“Three hundred thousand Alabamians will be voting under some new districting lines that I redrew in my college dorm room at 3 in the morning,” he said in an interview. “It’s surreal.”
The outcome shocked political enthusiasts in Alabama, as well as close observers of redistricting efforts across the country.
Those efforts, which normally take place near the start of each decade, were thrust into the limelight this year, after President Trump set off a redistricting arms race by asking Texas Republicans to find five additional seats for their party. California quickly moved to redraw its maps, and other states have joined the partisan battle for supremacy in the 2026 midterm elections.
For Mr. DiDonato, the selection of his map was a capstone of a longtime fascination with not only the partisan tug of war of politics, but the process and technical systems that shape it. (Mr. DiDonato is a Democrat, but he emphasized that he didn’t allow partisanship to influence his mapmaking.)
Mr. DiDonato said he became obsessed with the 2016 election when he was in the fourth grade.
In middle school, he pulled up news websites to follow the 2020 election results late into the night. “I didn’t understand what was happening, but it was still really cool,” he said. He often brought up politics with classmates at his lunch table.
Then, around 2023, he started a debate team at his high school in Russell County, Ala., because he wanted an outlet to express his ideas about politics.
It was around that time, when he was roughly 16, that he began creating election maps for fun.
He drew precinct maps for the 2024 primary election for Alabama’s newly redrawn congressional district. He drew some state legislative maps, right down to the precinct, for Alaska. He mapped out the mayoral results in Montgomery for 2023, when Steven L. Reed, the city’s first Black mayor, won re-election. And he sketched a map of the Russell County School Board districts after he saw a paper version of it hanging on a wall at the local courthouse.
Why was he so fascinated by maps, especially at such a young age?
“Elections tell a story, and there are very few things I enjoy more than being able to tell a story,” he said. “They tell a story of the people who voted in that election, everything from their needs to their desires and their wants in government.”
Mr. DiDonato had been following the legal fight over Montgomery’s State Senate redistricting since it started in 2021, when he was 14. He used a free online app called “Dave’s Redistricting” to help draw the lines for Alabama.
Now, it’s likely his map will be the one used in next year’s election, though an appeal is pending.
Davin Rosborough, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the plaintiffs objected to Mr. DiDonato’s map because the remedy did not create enough opportunities for Black voters to elect Black candidates. In their analysis of past election results in one of the districts proposed by Mr. DiDonato, data showed that Black candidates would often lose and white candidates nearly always won.
The A.C.L.U. has not yet decided whether it will appeal, Mr. Rosborough said.
Mr. DiDonato said his map followed the guidelines that had been ordered by the judge.
Either way, Mr. DiDonato said, he was thrilled. Last month, he messaged The Alabama Reflector, a news outlet that closely covered the legal battle, to explain that he was the creator of the map. He was eager to take credit.
This week, he was enjoying time off from school. His family planned to give him a bicycle for Christmas to use when the spring semester starts. He was happy to have it, he said, but it was hard to think of any present that would top the excitement of seeing his Montgomery-area map emerge as the victor.
“I got to be part of the decades-long fight for civil rights,” he said, “for people of color in the Deep South.”
Eduardo Medina is a Times reporter covering the South. An Alabama native, he is now based in Durham, N.C.
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