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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @03:55PM
A constitutional amendment:
All members of congress are allowed to submit one distracting map (these maps are kept secret until a deadline).
The map that will become the new districting map is the one that is both legal and "best".
A legal map:
1) Covers the entire area of the map with exactly one district
2) Divides the area into the correct number of districts
3) Has a least populous district that has at least 95% of the population of the most populous district
4) Has contiguous districts
The "best" map minimizes the total perimeter of the districts:
1) District lines that cut through "normal" land are weighted at 1
2) District lines that follow county lines are weighted at 1/2
3) District lines that follow previous district lines are weighted at 1/2
4) If a thin strip of district runs along a reduced weight line, only one of the proposed lines can be ON the line
4a) Thus the two lines bordering the thin strip must be weighted at 1.5 (1 + 1/2) total
4b) This may not be true if the thin strip is a pre-exiting strip, in which case it will be weighted at 1 (1/2 +1/2)
Bootstrapping:
For the purposes of this amendment, the district maps made under other methods do NOT count as valid, thus point (3) of picking the "best" map doesn't apply to the first redistricting under this rule.
Additionally, if a Congressman (or congressional candidate that got on the ballot) ran in the last election, but his district has changed he can:
1) Run as normal in his (new) home district
2) Run in the district that now contains the largest number of his previous constituents (this right continues until he fails to get on the ballot for a relevant election)
2a) The second district might not be distinct from the first.