[awjr]

I suspect Gerrymandering isn't uniquely a US problem. I do a lot of UK Census spatial analysis and the district centroids that are used create problems. In the article the 'ear muffs' shape would create a centroid for the voting district outside of the district, given that the shape of the district was designed to give a certain ethnic group a voice, whereas the process for creating districts in the UK are done usually on the idea of 'belonging' to a town/village/area and are decided and audited at a national 'neutral' level.

The data scientist in me wants centroids around circles with fuzzy edges. If we could all agree that fuzzy circles is the way forward we could solve gerrymandering over night.

The reality is though, that I create these amazing pieces of analysis then have to explain away why that district is odd, y'know, cos the shape is just weird.

Locally they are redoing the district boundaries which is giving me an opportunity to submit my own district shapes that work better with Census data :D

[sova]

Fuzzy circles! Great idea. That, or repeated boundary drawing that brute forced every possible district combination and gave a probabilistic result of elections based on where districts were drawn.