Today's Talking Point

[lollardfish]

Gerrymandering is an affront to the core principles of representative democracy. Citizens of all parties must seek to end this abomination in all 50 states.

Comments

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

Not disagreeing at all, but do you know if there's any good algorithm or principle for drawing district boundaries appropriately? I mean, if there's several reasonable ways to do it, and one way created a Latino district, for instance, which would put a Latino representative into office, is this a good thing or bad thing to do?

[groomporter.livejournal.com]

That's the problem, if it gives the Latino an unfair advantage it may be bad, but then again, if Latinos are under-represented in that state is that then redressing a wrong?

Public radio had a recent discussion of the difficulties of redistricting that was kind of interesting, but I couldn't find the what show it was on their website.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Math is so not my forte, but I assume you can plot the population of a state on the map, then divide it into X number of units without regard for the identity (voting preferences, income, ethnicity, etc.). Just - numbers of people. Remove all other data from the decision.

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

But, see, if you're dividing into districts that are equal in population size, they're going to be very uneven in size even if none of them look like efts. Maybe it could be done from, say, upper left corner to lower right corner based strictly on equal blocs of population. You'd have to know the exact position of every voting soul in the state in order to map it, yes? Not sure that's practical.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Districts are already divided based on being equal in population size. They are also gerrymandered into wierd shapes to suit various interests - either to cram everyone in one particular voting bloc into one district, so the rest of the districts don't have to deal with them or to divide them up so they don't have a chance at a minority in any districts, depending on who you are trying to screw out of what!