[jrockway]

My mind is not boggled, I guess. Gerrymandering exists because the government in the US exists to maintain the status quo. So if you are elected as a member of some political party, it's your mandate to do anything you can to ensure that you stay in office, or if that's not allowed because of term limits, that your clone stays in office. There is an additional power dynamic; states control congressional districts, so if you want to be noticed by senpai (and get the support from your party to have their job when they get bored or too seizure-ridden to continue in their role), it's your job to make sure they win their election by a landslide. Hence, gerrymandering.

I think the way out of this mess is to generate districts algorithmically with well-defined fair constraints. (Minimize perimeter, basically.) But I worry that those setting the constraints will find a set of constraints that codifies gerrymandering.

In the end, I'm not sure how much it matters. I feel like the House of Representatives has pretty much no actual power. At the end of the day, the Senate has to approve everything, and we gerrymandered that 200 years ago. (We could fix that by adding DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam as states, split California into North/South, split Texas into East/West, etc. It will never happen, though, because the goal of Congress is to never change anything, and they already have a nice 50/50 split that assures that.)