[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.)

[ihaveajob]

This sounds like a good idea at first, but I'm sure you would run into issues of large disparity in the importance of each vote. Not that it doesn't happen right now, but this would exacerbate the problem by introducing a force granularity level (beside the state level).