LogFAQs > #976930942

KainWind posted...

I legitimately know nothing about how maps should be drawn. Is there some accepted way it should be done so there is as little bias as possible? Seems like either way you're adding people from either side wherever you draw the lines.

There are a number of different desirable properties that come up in various districting laws. E.g. Nebraska used to want (in order of importance):

1. (roughly) Equal population per district (required by Constitution)
2. Follow county lines as required by Nebraska state constitution
3. Must comply with Voting Rights Act
4. Compact districts
5. Contiguous districts
6. Follow city/village boundaries
7. Follow other political boundaries
8. Create districts with communities of common interest
9. Use easily identifiable boundaries (landmarks, etc.)
10. Create districts with population deviations near zero.
11. People currently holding office can't be gerrymandered out of their district without serving their full term.

So you can see there are a lot of different factors. Part of the problem though is that even among "legal" maps you can follow these rules and still have wildly varying outcomes, at which point you just have a computer churn through possibilities and give yourself the optimal map you can that satisfies those conditions.

What you kind of want to do is use something like simulated annealing to explore the space of valid districtings, because if you set your parameters right the "more natural" districtings are more likely to be chosen and you can have a pre-determined source of randomness so that no one is making any choices.