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Gerrymandering has a long and unpopular history in the United States. It is the main reason that the country ranked 55th of 158 nations — last among Western democracies — in a 2017 index of voting fairness run by the Electoral Integrity Project
[...] Lawsuits fighting partisan gerrymandering are pending around the country, and a census planned for 2020 is expected to trigger nationwide redistricting. If the mathematicians succeed in laying out their case, it could influence how those maps are drawn.
[...] States such as Arizona and Iowa, which have independent or bipartisan commissions that oversee the creation of voting districts, fared much better. In a separate analysis, Daniel McGlone, a geographic-information-system data analyst at the technology firm Azavea in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ranked each state’s voting districts for compactness as a measure of gerrymandering, and found that Maryland had the most-gerrymandered districts. North Carolina came second. Nevada, Nebraska and Indiana were the least gerrymandered.
[...] In the summer of 2016, a bipartisan panel of retired judges met to see whether they could create a more representative set of voting districts for North Carolina. Their maps gave Mattingly a chance to test his index. The judges’ districts, he found, were less gerrymandered than in 75% of the computer-generated models — a sign of a well-drawn, representative map. By comparison, every one of the 24,000 computer-drawn districts was less gerrymandered than either the 2012 or 2016 voting districts drawn by state legislators
[...] Political scientist Nicholas Stephanopoulos at the University of Chicago, Illinois, takes a much simpler approach to measuring gerrymandering. He has developed what he calls an “efficiency gap”, which measures a state’s wasted votes: all those cast for a losing candidate in each district, and all those for the victor in excess of the proportion needed to win. If one party has lots of landslide victories and crushing losses compared with its rivals, this can be a sign of gerrymandering.
Note: Please try to keep the discussion on the topic of gerrymandering.
http://www.nature.com/news/the-mathematicians-who-want-to-save-democracy-1.22113
https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8796
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday June 09 2017, @01:12AM
The reason it's not a solvable problem is that the people with the power to solve it don't want it solved.
And this isn't just a matter of one party using district-drawing to their own advantage, although that certainly happens. Another reason that party hacks like the current system is that it allows them to eliminate the districts of inconvenient politicians, thus eliminating the politician's ability to hold office. The Democrats were A-OK with doing that to my Democratic congressman in 2010, for instance, in large part because he had opposed parts of Obamacare. You could also easily imagine a panel with 2 parties represented using gerrymandering to eliminate the district of any third-party congressman or state legislator that managed to establish themselves. And this maneuver also works on a municipal government level: If somebody comes in to challenge a political machine, guess what, their ward mysteriously disappears the next chance redistricting comes around.
So feel free to try this as an academic exercise, bearing in mind everything Ken Arrow has to teach about voting systems, but don't expect any of it to be applied in real life anytime soon.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.