
Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts - mathfan
http://dustingmixon.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/partisan-gerrymandering-with-geographically-compact-districts/
======
TSiege
Districting has time and time again proven to be a cat and mouse endeavor.
Someone is always going to be able to create models to game the system one way
or another. The real solution is abandoning districting for proportional
representation like a true democracy. This Vox opinion piece is a great
explainer, [https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2017/10/11/16453512/...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2017/10/11/16453512/gerrymandering-proportional-representation)

~~~
openasocket
"proportional representation" is a generic term for a wide variety of possible
representational systems. And each system has their own advantages and
disadvantages. Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for
specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to
vouch for their specific needs. This matters less in small states and
countries, but can mean quite a lot in very large states. Other solutions use
districts, but have multiple representatives per district, and have a method
for apportioning those representatives. These are still vulnerable to
gerrymandering, though its effectiveness is less pronounced as the number of
representatives per district increases. But apportionment can be complicated.
Some of these methods change the way voting works so that you vote for a
political party rather than a specific candidate, which comes with a bunch of
advantages and disadvantages.

All to say that, while different methods for representation should absolutely
be considered and discussed, it's important to remember that none of these are
a panacea, and we should be upfront about the nuances and disadvantages of
every option.

~~~
patrickmay
> Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-
> regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for
> their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but
> can mean quite a lot in very large states.

The solution to that, however politically difficult, is to break the larger
states into smaller ones. New York City, for example, shares very little
politically or economically with the rest of New York. Similarly with the
various regions of California -- Silicon Valley and Los Angeles are as
different from each other as both are from the areas north of San Francisco.

~~~
Jesus_Jones
Breaking up the big liberal states has been proposed by conservatives, because
they want to get more conservative leg members. We'd need to break up
conservative states too. There has been discussion of breaking Seattle off
into it's own state or country. That would add a Republican Senate and House
Rep, since the test of the state is more conservative, so you have to do a 3
way breakup of WA state. Anyway, these things are all hard to achieve and
infeasible in practice. IMHO.

~~~
rocqua
There is a similar issue with switching states away from 'winner takes all' in
the electoral college.

If a liberal state does it, it costs liberals votes. If a conservative state
does it, it costs conservatives votes. It seems pretty clear that such a
system is fairer, and yet no-one wants to actually do it.

~~~
lambertsimnel
Twenty-three states have already passed the National Popular Vote bill, which
will in effect switch all states from winner-takes-all when it covers a
majority of the electoral college: [http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/state-
status](http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/state-status)

------
openasocket
OT, but there's another really interesting, related problem at the
intersection of mathematics and politics, which is apportionment
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment)).
The US House of Representatives has a certain number of seats (currently 435)
and, based on the results of the census, those seats are assigned to the 50
states according to their populations. But the proportions don't always divide
evenly, and you can't give a state 7.35 representative seats, so you need a
method for determining the fairest division of representatives. And it turns
out there is no optimal solution in the general case
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_paradox)).

I point out this problem because it is one of the few times you will find
Supreme Court cases and writings by the Founders on what algorithm to use. A
bill changing the apportionment algorithm was subject to the very first
presidential veto. The first proposed amendment to the Constitution
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Am...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment))
was on the subject of apportionment. When else will you find the highest
levels of government debating the merits of algorithms and mathematics?

~~~
taoistextremist
It's actually one topic I've grown to agree with my extremely conservative
father on, that they should have never fixed the seats at 435. This was done
long after the founding of the country (relative to the age of the country,
that is), but if we had kept the original apportionment we'd have one of the
largest legislatures in the world. It wouldn't solve the apportionment
problem, but it would make the unfairness of any given solution much less
consequential and also it would make gerrymandering harder (though still not
impossible).

~~~
specialist
I think of it as a scale problem. A Representative's front office is basically
a call center & triage operation. The embodiment of the Politics of Attention
(squeaky wheel gets the grease).

What's the ideal size for a constituency? To maximize responsiveness,
accountability, effectiveness? 100k? 200k? 400k?

I don't know, but I'd like to find out.

~~~
itsameta4
The Republic of Ireland's constitution guarantees a member of the Dáil (Lower
Parliamentary house; similar to the US House of Representatives) for every
20-30,000 people, and districts are redrawn and reapportioned frequently.

This seems to be a pretty ideal number to me - it's about the size of the
township I grew up in. Many people in their district would have personal ties
to their representative, as a further detriment to attempts at
lobbying/corruption.

The US constitution used to have a similar provision, but this was abandoned
by the ammendment process in the late 1920's.

------
gumby
Redistricting commissions should recruit go players.

There can be an amusing side-effect to aggressive gerrymandering. Let's say a
state has a small majority of party A, but districts that are _strongly_
partisan (let's say 80%) for A or B. You only need 50% to win your district --
that extra 30% is "wasted" and would be more valuable if those voters were
pushed into one of B's districts.

Which is one of the things partisan redistricters do. Now they have more
districts with a comfortable 55% margin and an assured lock on more districts,
right? Umm, well, now they've made it easier for the other side to capture
districts too...and it happens.

There's no magic way to avoid bizarre results (check out the wikipedia pages
on the districting, and on voting methods, for some eye-opening problems), but
something close to algorithmic probably ends up the least controversial and
most comprehensible in the long run.

~~~
Retric
It's not just about party, an unusually disliked candidate can tank most
districts. In the end it's a very complex optimization problem with benefits
in the short term measured vs the risk of losing redistricting power in 10
years etc. Even a slight bias can let you shift resources to more competitive
races etc.

PS: IMO it's really a scale problem. If districts give a ~3% advantage that's
huge in aggregate, but races still feel competitive. However, we are currently
in a situation where nobody bothers to run in many races and that does not
promote democracy.

------
tantalor
Article mentions the efficiency gap metric; here is another:

"Assessing significance in a Markov chain without mixing"

 _We present a new statistical test to detect that a presented state of a
reversible Markov chain was not chosen from a stationary distribution... We
illustrate the use of our test with a potential application to the rigorous
detection of gerrymandering in Congressional districtings._

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02014](https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02014)

------
OliverJones
In an two-stage election system, rigging the districts to make the second
stage irrelevant to the outcome, well, makes the first stage relevant to the
outcome.

When the first stage elections are contested among isolated ideological
subsets of the electorate their results tend to extreme positions.

What I'm saying is this: it is inevitable that the REDMAP project that yielded
the kinds of district-level results shown in this article will continue to
generate more and more extremist election results.

Ryan and McConnell, and the whole US federal house of representatives, have
bought and paid for their dysfunction with this systematic gerrymandering. The
situation isn't going to improve as long as this holds.

Pouring money into contesting the general elections in these districts is
entirely a waste. It enriches nobody but robocall and television companies,
and doesn't affect the outcome.

~~~
int_19h
I very much agree with this. What gerrymandering (and partisan voter
suppression) does, is reduce the number of competitive districts in the
country. Next year, the expected number of competitive House districts is 23
to 38 - out of 450! So, in over 400 districts, primaries are the only thing
that matters.

On the other hand, primaries attract more motivated voters than the general.
And those motivated voters tend to be motivated by their ideological positions
- in other words, they're more extremist. From the perspective of candidates
in the primary, they _have_ to pander to those more extreme voters to get to
the general - but they have no incentive to pander to the center, because even
the more centrist members of their own party will vote for them over the
opposition candidate anyway.

This also sets up a positive feedback loop, where even less ideologically
radical voters, forced to vote for more and more extreme candidates of their
party in the general, adopt at least some of the positions of those extreme
candidates over time (making it easier to cast such a vote). Which in turn
makes primaries more extreme, and shifts the overall party platform in that
same direction.

We've already seen Republicans walk down that road, and where it got them. Now
Democrats are going through the same process (Indivisible etc). It looks like
we're undergoing the last political realignment possible in the current
system, and at the end of it, we'll have two "ideologically pure" parties,
with most voters going for straight party ticket, and with most legislative
votes going down party lines. At which point the system is going to deadlock,
because it pretty much requires some compromise to function properly.

~~~
squiggleblaz
But if this process is as you describe, won't the moderate voters eventually
start electing independent candidates?

~~~
int_19h
The problem is that this process drags aside the two parties to the point
where moderate voters in each are further away from each other than they are
from extremists in their own party. More specifically, the other party becomes
less acceptable - e.g. most people who voted for Moore in Alabama didn't
really like him, but they couldn't fathom voting for his opponent, because of
his position on one or the other wedge issue (e.g. abortion).

------
curun1r
While I'm as angry as anyone about the way that districts have been
gerrymandered in the US, it also bugs me when I see critiques about
gerrymandering that try to provoke outrage by showing the shapes of the
districts and implying that districts should be square or otherwise
simplistically shaped when viewed aerially. Humans don't fly, so the aerial
view seems irrelevant and disingenuous to me.

It reminds me somewhat of a program on The History Channel called "How the
States Got Their Shapes." And one of the really interesting parts was how
states in the eastern part of the country had their lines drawn before the
railroads and most in the west after the railroads. And so you see many more
rivers, mountains and other natural features affecting state borders back east
and a lot more straight border lines in the west. There's a very good reason
(the Potomac) why Maryland's border looks the way it does, but if you just
showed people the shape and told them it was a congressional district, it
wouldn't be hard to convince them it was the result of gerrymandering.

I wonder whether there's a better way to visualize voting districts, perhaps
using Google Maps transit data to visualize public transport/drive times to
polling stations. There would still be the issue of deciding where to place
polling stations, but it seems like once that's been decided, a district's
shape should be derived from including all addresses that are most easily able
to travel to those polling places. This would naturally create odd shapes,
especially along freeways, bus/train lines and such. But making it as easy as
possible for people to vote seems, to me, more important than having a simple
shape.

------
froindt
For some more content on gerrymandering, I suggest FiveThirtyEight's "The
Gerrymandering Project". Episode 1 goes through the two major ways
gerrymandering gets applied, and also discusses that just because a district
has a weird shape doesn't necessarily mean it is gerrymandered.

And because I've never seen a social media post about gerrymandering favoring
democrats, I'd like to add the efficiency gap chart from [2]. 8/26 states
listed on the efficiency gap chart here are listed as favoring democrats. I
fully recognize right now gerrymandering favors republicans significantly,
however I'd like to note in some areas democrats _are_ favored.

[1] [https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-
project/](https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/) [2]
[https://www.azavea.com/blog/2017/07/19/gerrymandered-
states-...](https://www.azavea.com/blog/2017/07/19/gerrymandered-states-
ranked-efficiency-gap-seat-advantage/)

------
CivBase
Gerrymandering is a problem because we have a poor voting system. I'm not sure
if a single transferrable vote (STV) is the best system, but it would
significantly reduce the benefit of gerrymandering (and probably result in
better candidates from both parties).

CGP Grey did a great video on STV:
[https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI](https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI)

~~~
specialist
FWIW, I now advocate Approval Voting because a) superior election integrity
prospects and b) nearly ideal fairness.

Score Voting and Instant Runoff Voting are a bit more fair than Approval
Voting, but much more difficult to implement, execute, audit, describe /
educate, etc.

~~~
dragonwriter
Approval voting and score voting are problematic for reasons standard analyses
overlook; there's no obvious mapping from actual preferences to ballot
markings. Ranked preference ballots don't have this problem (well, _unforced_
ranking that allows ties doesn't, forced rankings do, but to the degree that
approval and score voting do.)

Both scores and approvals are ambiguous in meaning and different people with
the exact same preferences would map ballot papers differently. (In situations
other than standard public elections, this may not be the case: approval is
great for voting on group activities where either “approve” is a binding
commitment to participate if the choice is chosen, or “disapprove” is a
binding opt-out if the option is chosen.)

~~~
specialist
I supported instant runoff voting until I figured out that it's difficult to
explain, implement, audit. Pretty much all the reasons election administrators
dislike it.

Approval Voting seems like the best compromise between fairness and simplicity
(to better ensure election integrity).

------
garmaine
Dammit. For some years now I have been pointing out to people who would listen
that what we need are policy solutions rooted in mathematical analysis, my go
to case being gerrymandering. It seemed quite obvious that we could use
geometric smoothing to set district boundaries based on census data to remove
people from the process and therefore gerrymandering. Guess I had an untested
assumption which wasn’t true, which is humbling.

~~~
dragonwriter
Removing people from the process doesn't remove gerrymandering, it means that
the gerrymandering will be done by analyzing the short and long-term (based on
demographic trends) effects of different mathematical criteria, with partisan
actors legislating the most advantageous criteria.

You eliminate gerrymandering by eliminating single-member FPTP legislative
districts in favor of multimeter districts with a system producing
proportional results (Single Transferrable Vote or some similar candidate-
centered method, or a party-list method, though I prefer the former.)

~~~
squiggleblaz
You don't eliminate gerrymandering in that way. You limit it.

STV works best in limited magnitude districts (three or five seems to be
preferred) or else the number of options becomes too difficult for humans to
express a coherent useful and accurate set of preferences. Once you limit
magnitude, you can draw your districts to benefit you. For instance, perhaps
you'll discover a preference for two or four seaters in reasonably strong
Democrat areas and three seaters in reasonably strong Republican areas. You
need fifty percent plus one to get a majority of seats in an odd numbered
district, but fifty percent plus one only gets you fifty percent of the seats
in an even numbered district. I can imagine Americans spending huge amounts of
political capital for years getting STV in, only to discover that one party
still has a manufactured majority because they wasted votes efficiently.

Its true that gerrymanders per se become harder and harder the higher the
magnitude, but if your problem is you have a political system that is opposed
to hearing the will of the people they're going to find a way to stuff their
ears no matter what voting system you pick.

(Aside: Open list PR is both candidate centred and party-list. You vote for
Fred Nurk of the Purple Party. That helps the Purple Party win more seats, and
it moves Fred Nurk up in the list. It seems to be the only tick-a-box election
system which doesn't devolve into FPTP in a district magnitude of 1 so it
might be appealing in the US, where several states only elect a single
representative. e.g. You vote for Gregory Hsien of the Maroon Party, who
stands in a group with Josephine Yusuf of the Red Party. The Red-Maroon group
win one more vote than the Blue-Cyan group even though the Blue party got more
votes than the Red party. Reds win because you voted for their ally, the
Maroons.)

------
niftich
I'm reading the paper, but the example on the webpage is pretty contrived.
Yes, the resulting "nice looking" districts are mathematically simple to
specify, but narrow triangle-shaped wedges won't pass the smell test for most
people. Or any triangles!

The world underneath is full of other facts on the ground, like municipal
boundaries, county lines, and the like. Districts that deviate too far from
these other entities -- entities that are already being used for governance
and administration -- then clearly some trickery is going on to deliberately
cherry-pick people for some reason.

Tying districts to more closely resemble existing administration boundaries
won't magically solve this issue -- packing, cracking, nonsensical groupings
are still a danger -- but it's a sensible baseline expectation that can be
used to build on. When applied together with nonpartisan redistricting,
perceived compactness, and efficiency gap metric, as the article notes, it can
produce reasonable results.

~~~
mathfan2
> the example on the webpage is pretty contrived

That's true, but the point of the demonstration is simply that the snaky,
salamander-looking shapes are not necessary.

There's every reason to believe that you can achieve stunning examples of
partisan gerrymandering under various "nice shape" criteria. You are correct
that the "n-1 split lines" is simply very easy to state mathematically.

------
phjesusthatguy3
Michigan Radio reported this morning[0] that some group turned in a petition
with more than 400,000 signatures for getting how in-state districts are drawn
revampted.

[0][http://michiganradio.org/post/redistricting-drive-step-
close...](http://michiganradio.org/post/redistricting-drive-step-
closer-2018-ballot)

------
seanalltogether
I've been wanting to play with code for awhile to see how effective a "huddle"
algorithm might be. The idea being that people with similar interests tend to
huddle together into areas of a large city or regions of the state they feel
match their lifestyle.

I'm not sure exactly how it would work but I imagine some kind of flood fill
where you start with a population center and grow outward from it. Those
should fill up quickly and by the end you should have large rural districts to
finish off the state.

~~~
maxerickson
Effective at what? One potential goal of gerrymandering is packing your
opponents into as few districts as possible.

Which is ultimately the problem with algorithmic approaches; "fair" isn't an
objective measure.

~~~
smelterdemon
Efficiency gap is a decent objective metric of fairness.

~~~
maxerickson
It's not an algorithm for drawing districts though, it's a score computed for
a given plan.

And it depends on selecting binary sides. How do you objectively deal with a
popular moderate?

------
vpeters25
I have been thinking on a "simple rule" that could mitigate gerrymandering:

1\. No congressional district can span more than 1 partial city and/or county.

This will force districts to be drawn to cover whole cities/counties and would
stop ridiculous districts such as the Texas 34th which covers parts of at
least 8 counties from the gulf coast up to San Antonio

~~~
dragonwriter
> No congressional district can span more than 1 partial city and/or county.

State legislatures control the definition of administrative subdivisions of
the state just as much as they do Congressional districts, so that rule does
nothing. A state that is really committed to gerrymandering will just move
city and county lines when it redistricts.

A smarter but still corrupt state legislature that wants to gerrymander
without disrupting functional local government will make “city” and “county”
names of ceremonial subdivisions used for limited purposes, so that redrawing
their lines doesn't have much practical effect, and adopt a different set of
subdivisions with overlapping lines for most functional local government
purposes (“urbanizations” and “parishes”, perhaps.)

------
realcoopernurse
Here's a relatively new PR method developed by a grad student at Harvard. It's
an interesting twist on STV that avoids the ballot complexity.

[https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-
explained-129...](https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-
explained-129e65cbb625)

I agree with others on this thread that the only solution to gerrymandering is
some form of PR. PLACE voting is interesting because it doesn't require a
change in the ballot and retains the notion of geographic districts.

~~~
dragonwriter
Not requiring a change of ballots when you are doing very different things
with them is, IMO, a negative traits because it creates a false familiarity.

When you are changing how ballots work, this should be _unavoidably obvious_ ,
even to people who spent the time the change was being debated in a coma or
Antarctic research expedition.

Also, STV in small (~5 member) districts gets much improved proportionality
from the status quo, keeps geographic districts, and increases the proportion
of people with someone representing both their ideology _and_ district
simultaneously.

~~~
Sniffnoy
> Not requiring a change of ballots when you are doing very different things
> with them is, IMO, a negative traits because it creates a false familiarity.

I don't think that's something you can really do with voting systems, though.
Lots of voting systems are based around the same input assumptions, i.e.,
people are submitting a rank-order of preferences. And nothing's saying you'd
have to switch to PLACE from STV rather than from FPTP. Regardless I think it
doesn't make a lot of sense to associate ordinal ballots with STV specifically
rather than just, well, what they are, which is a rank-order of preferences,
that will get used somehow.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I don't think that's something you can really do with voting systems

You can sometimes, you can't others.

> Lots of voting systems are based around the same input assumptions, i.e.,
> people are submitting a rank-order of preferences

But FPTP is _not_ based on that input, so changing from FPTP to a more
proportional system (many of which rely on that kind of input) provided a
clear opportunity to have a clean break without false familiarity.

> And nothing's saying you'd have to switch to PLACE from STV rather than from
> FPTP.

The false familiarity is FPTP -> PLACE.

~~~
Sniffnoy
Ah! I misunderstood. You're talking about the possibility of "check one, go by
that candidate's endorsed ballot". (Something that could really be added to
just about any voting system; I hadn't really considered it as essential to
PLACE in particular.) Yeah, that's an interesting point against that feature,
then. Hadn't considered that.

------
eli
Sadly it is a bit out of date (requires Flash), but there is a neat
game/simulation where you can test out different redistricting strategies
SimCity style:
[http://www.redistrictinggame.org/](http://www.redistrictinggame.org/)

There are no easy answers. I believe the game makers advocate for independent
non-partisan commissions who are restricted in how they're allowed to create
maps.

~~~
lambertsimnel
You might be interested in this web-based/mobile/PC game about gerrymandering
from this year: [https://chequered.ink/districts-
game/](https://chequered.ink/districts-game/)

------
skj
Here's an idea:

1\. decide how many congresspeople there should be

2\. allow anyone to run

3\. allow anyone to vote for anyone

4\. once someone has #voters/#congresspeople, they become a congressperson

5\. no one else can vote for that person

So, you're not actually competing against another person. You're competing get
enough people to say "this person represents me".

~~~
tzs
Interesting idea. It has a some troubling flaws, though.

First, in order to make the lockout in #5 work it would seem that the votes
need to be tallied in real time as they are cast.

This could be addressed in a couple of ways.

(A) Allow votes of the form:

    
    
      Vote for candidate C1
      If C1 is locked out, vote for C2
      If C2 is locked out, vote for C3
      ...
    

That would allow processing votes in batches, ordered by time stamp.

(B) Instead of a lockout, allow a candidate to receive more votes than the
#voters/#congresspeople threshold. Each voter starts with a weighted vote with
weight 1, and provides a list of alternative candidates similar to from (A).

If C1 gets a total weighted vote above the election threshold, choose t such
that if each voters weight is multiplied by t the total for C1 will exactly
equal the threshold.

For each C1 voter, split their vote giving t of it to C1, and 1-t of it to
their C2.

Iterate through this until it converges. (I think it must converge, but
offhand do not have a proof).

Second, you need to know the number of voters in advance to set the threshold.
Note that you need the actual number of people who will vote, not just the
number of eligible voters, because if you use the later you will be setting
the threshold too high.

Third, if the number of people running is large, it is quite possible nobody
reaches the election threshold. You need a procedure to whittle down the
number of candidates.

~~~
squiggleblaz
Congratulations, you've just devised the single transferable vote used in
Ireland, Malta and Australia. Assuming that "the procedure to whittle down the
number of candidates" is "exclude the worst-performing candidate and continue
to their C2".

------
pmc1
We desperately need to get away from the hyper-partisan, two party system. An
Either-Or system was not what the framers had in mind and is damaging. While
not the most popular position, I ALWAYS vote for the 3rd party candidate with
reasonable policies for the sake of our country.

~~~
unabridged
I used to think the same way about 3rd party, but now I'm beginning to view
the 2 party system including the primary as just a 2 round playoff. If you
really have enough support to contend as a third party, you can easily win the
primary of one of the major parties.

Your most important vote is in the primaries (especially in areas dominated by
a single party), and I think the country as a whole is beginning to realize
it.

~~~
sedtrader
We shouldn't have to go through one of the 2 major parties to contend as a
third party candidate. One way to solve this could be putting caps on campaign
financing which would level the playing field for smaller 3rd parties. But
that would never happen because the major 2 parties make the rules and that
would hurt their dominance. By voting for either party we are essentially
enabling the either-or system to continue

~~~
unabridged
>By voting for either party we are essentially enabling the either-or system
to continue

I used to agree, but the parties have no ideology attached to them. Their
names are just generic terms regarding democracy and you can see how much
their platforms have changed and moved over the last century. At this point
they are just the Urban and Rural divisions of our election playoff.

They are just the ideology of the people elected. If you change the candidates
of the party, you have changed the ideology of the party. Trump figured this
out and instead of sticking with the Reform party, he just took over the
Republican nomination.

~~~
sedtrader
> the parties have no ideology attached to them

That statement is simply incorrect. Both parties have a clear ideology that
ebbs and flows for the sake of remaining in power

> If you change the candidates of the party, you have changed the ideology of
> the party.

That is also incorrect. The 2 parties may slightly adjust their ideology for
the sake of power but the core of their ideology remains the same.

------
greyfox
Does anyone know why gerrymandering only includes Democrat and Republican
parties? Surely some states like New Mexico who, at the time, had a third
party Governor must have had districts that voted in majority for third party
candidates.

------
mannykannot
The framers of the US constitution were remarkably prescient about a number of
things, but my guess is that they did not anticipate gerrymandering, or at
least its effectiveness. I would be very interested to hear otherwise.

~~~
NelsonMinar
Gerrymandering is a very old idea. The term itself was coined in 1810, and was
in practice well before then. The 1788 election in Virginia was gerrymandered,
the same year the Constitution was ratified.
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-
lea...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-league-
of/309084/)

There's a significant difference in the modern era in that gerrymandering can
be much more precise. The 2010 districts the Republicans drew in several
states are very sophisticated works of statistics, GIS, and political science.
I fear what machine learning techniques are going to do in 2020.

