[catpolice]

At this point I feel like it's worthwhile to remember to why we even have districts.

We could, in principle, get rid of the districts and just have some kind of statewide scheme for electing representatives proportional to the outcome of a popular vote. The idea behind retaining districts, as far as I understand it, is that people in similar locales will often have very correlated interests (e.g. with regard to decisions that affect that area) and that choosing representatives from particular locales is supposed to guarantee that people in that area are represented (and make the representatives to some degree beholden to them).

Ideally, we'd split the states into districts in a way that doesn't deviate from overall proportional representation very much, hence the idea of the efficiency gap. So gerrymandering can break that efficiency constraint.

But the notion of geographic correlation of interests makes it such that the population is unlikely to be distributed in the kind of uniformly random way you need to get weirdly shaped, efficient districts, and conversely having weirdly shaped districts at all effectively assumes that geographic correlation of interests isn't an important factor.

In other words: if we have to make weirdly shaped districts to maintain efficiency, then the assumptions that caused us to require districts in the first place probably fail and we should just ditch them.

[sova]

Ideally: the Representative who is chosen for a district (the weird shapes we are talking about) _represents_ everyone of the populous of that district. That way in Congress, when someone asks "hey do your constituents want a factory next to that highway plus a bunch of taxbreaks?" the representative knows which way to vote, as s/he _represents_ the local people. The weird shapes, even if they increase "efficiency" don't actually account for locality much. It'd be better to use something like commuting maps to draw regions to ensure locality.

[cr0sh]

Not only that, usually the "representative" doesn't even live in or near the area they are representing (sure, they may have an address in the area, but that isn't difficult to do).