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by niftich
3108 days ago
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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. |
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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.