[curun1r]

While I'm as angry as anyone about the way that districts have been gerrymandered in the US, it also bugs me when I see critiques about gerrymandering that try to provoke outrage by showing the shapes of the districts and implying that districts should be square or otherwise simplistically shaped when viewed aerially. Humans don't fly, so the aerial view seems irrelevant and disingenuous to me.

It reminds me somewhat of a program on The History Channel called "How the States Got Their Shapes." And one of the really interesting parts was how states in the eastern part of the country had their lines drawn before the railroads and most in the west after the railroads. And so you see many more rivers, mountains and other natural features affecting state borders back east and a lot more straight border lines in the west. There's a very good reason (the Potomac) why Maryland's border looks the way it does, but if you just showed people the shape and told them it was a congressional district, it wouldn't be hard to convince them it was the result of gerrymandering.

I wonder whether there's a better way to visualize voting districts, perhaps using Google Maps transit data to visualize public transport/drive times to polling stations. There would still be the issue of deciding where to place polling stations, but it seems like once that's been decided, a district's shape should be derived from including all addresses that are most easily able to travel to those polling places. This would naturally create odd shapes, especially along freeways, bus/train lines and such. But making it as easy as possible for people to vote seems, to me, more important than having a simple shape.