Current Events > CE Discussion Topic: Gerrymandering

(+) Yeah! (+)

Darkman brings up a good point, which is related to my question:

Why are geometric standards such as convexity/compactness bad?

As technology has improved, we've become better at measuring gerrymandering but at the same time gerrymanderers have become more powerful as well. For reference, compactness in this case is a loose idea of how close a shape is to a circle (high area to perimeter) and convexity is the property that given any two points in your district, the line between them stays inside the district. Given a "fair" map that satisfies these properties, you can have a computer manipulate the boundaries ever so slightly to have little impact on the geometry but plenty of impact on the results. And that's just when you start with a fair map. If you start from nowhere, you can easily say "Find a map that satisfies X and Y which maximally benefits my party".

This is true of any requirements that you give, but geometry is one that is easier to make "look nice", which is the biggest red flag for regular people. See Alabama's current districting:

https://imgur.com/a/xsFam

This doesn't contain any glaring geometry errors, especially if you don't know the geography and can handwave some of the juts as river boundaries.

As another example of "playing the system", we can look at a North Carolina districting that was struck down. Part of the Voting Rights Act is the creation of majority-minority districts, which are districts where sizeable minority populations can elect a representative that fits them. This was in response to many southern states intentionally making districts that disenfranchised African Americans. Very loosely, if African Americans make up 20% of your population, 20% of your districts should have a large enough minority population that they can have representation.

The North Carolina legislature solved this "problem" by making two districts overwhelmingly African American, so that they essentially had no power whatsoever outside of those districts. This map was eventually struck down, but it gives weight to the claim that partisan entities will follow the rules as minimally as possible to benefit themselves.

This is why we ultimately should have independent commissions drawing these maps and we shouldn't think of these requirements as a "If you pass these, your map is good" list but rather as a "If you don't pass these, your map is probably bad" list.
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Anteaterking posted...

https://imgur.com/a/xsFam

This doesn't contain any glaring geometry errors, especially if you don't know the geography and can handwave some of the juts as river boundaries.

Uh...district 7? District 6 also.
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Darkman124 posted...

Anteaterking posted...

https://imgur.com/a/xsFam

This doesn't contain any glaring geometry errors, especially if you don't know the geography and can handwave some of the juts as river boundaries.

Uh...district 7? District 6 also.

Compared to districts usually held up as examples of geometric gerrymandering, I don't think it looks that bad. Really, the interaction between 6 and 7 is the only really questionable part (if you were looking at these without knowing the geography. It's obvious once you know that it's trying to connect the large black population centers together). The southern part of 7 is just a sideways version of the interaction between OK 1 and 2.
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