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by jojobas 2193 days ago
>Some interesting patterns emerge, such as how with you can have compact and republican-biased but not compact and democrat-biased maps for some numbers of cities. This is a direct result of one party being forced into a small geographic area (cities).

That's quite an interesting finding. I always understood that gerrymandeting is bad because the artificially winning parties get congressmen that are not representative of their districts. This guy uses "competitiveness" as a property worth optimizing for, achieving exactly that.

1 comments

I've long advocated maximal competitiveness. Mostly to motivate voter participation.

I love how antimander illuminates the tradeoffs.

Along the lines of "preserving community", preserving continuity can also be a factor. On the presumption that voters don't want to have their congressional district designation changed every 10 years. For example. I know this is a consideration during redistricting.

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Antimander is real progress. The cites are terrific. I'm delighted that I even learned some new things, like the Seats-Votes Curve.

I've spoken with the Dave Bradlee many times over the last 15 years. He created a redistricting app that got some national media attention last cycle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave%27s_Redistricting

Some of those talks were pretty bleak. I'm so glad so many more people have engaged with this issue.