
Draw It Yourself: What Would a Fair Pennsylvania Congressional Map Look Like? - pulisse
https://medium.com/@BobbyBigWheel/draw-it-yourself-what-would-a-fair-pennsylvania-congressional-map-look-like-ebf67ea5a340
======
jabretti
It seems that this "voting rights act" is a form of mandated gerrymandering,
which ought to be done away with. I can't say exactly what the boundaries
ought to be, but taking the colour of people's skin into account when drawing
them is clearly wrong.

It shouldn't be hard to just write a damn algorithm to divide the state into
maximally compact, equal-population regions.

If this results in very different sorts of people being binned into the same
district, then... well, good, I guess?

~~~
dragonwriter
> It shouldn't be hard to just write a damn algorithm to divide the state into
> maximally compact, equal-population regions.

It's trivial. Getting people to agree that “maximally compact” is the right
thing to optimize about districts is the hard part; of he many things which
have been suggested should be maximized in districting are compactness,
competitiveness, preservation of communities of common interest, and expected
partisan proportionality of the resulting system. Each of these conflicts with
then others, and has predictable partisan advantages and disadvantages
compared to each of the others and the status quo; the first prevents any
consensus algorithm among participants seeking an ideal without consideration
of partisan advantage, the second guarantees that at least one of the major
parties will oppose any algorithm because accepting it will lock in a
permanent disadvantage. You might overcome the second if you overcome the
first, but good luck with that.

