Is America A Natural GOP Gerrymander?

[muon2]

Ha.  Ye of goode faith.  I hope that it would work out so well, owing to netizens and bored scientists.

Of course the state lege would have to go for it.  What would be the odds of getting your colleagues in the state assembly to go along with such a plan?

The idea has gotten some nice media, but it will take the pressure of a citizen petition amendment to move the needle. The trick is getting the citizen groups to take off the blinders of a sole alternative of a CA-style commission drawing the map.

The core language might look like this:

The Commission shall provide to the public data and tools to create Legislative and Representative districts. The Commission shall accept maps for the redistricting of Legislative and Representative districts.

The Commission shall evaluate all submitted maps according to criteria as implemented by law and assign each map a score. The Commission shall eliminate maps by a majority vote of the members appointed that fail to meet federal and State law and shall eliminate maps that are substantially the same as other maps of equal or better score. The Commission shall give to the Senate and House the maps for Legislative Districts with the best three scores.

If the Senate or House has failed to file a redistricting resolution with the Secretary of State by the deadline, the Secretary of State shall certify the redistricting map that received the best score from the Commission.

It's only fair that some Republican states disarm themselves before any more Democratic states do.

I have and will continue to promote the idea in states (or Congress) controlled by both parties.

[jimrtex]

I noticed that the spline ignored populated areas.  I think there are advantages and disadvantages in doing that, but I liked the commission route as well.  muon's suggestion about crowdsourcing is intriguing, but it has the disadvantage of potentially making itself for sale to the highest bidder, whereas a commission of highly-vetted, thoughtful people might be less susceptible to marketing.

If there's a clearly defined set of measurable criteria, then there's little to worry about marketing. Some deep-pocketed interested party could invest in a plan, only to be bested by some netizens in their parents' basements or a couple of science professors playing with numbers in their spare time.

The splitline people have suggested using a contest to determine the best plan.

The objective of splitline is to minimize the (interior) perimeters of districts.  The particular algorithm they use, minimizes the perimeter at each split, but iterative decomposition doesn't necessarily lead to the best global solution.

But crowd-sourcing might lead to better solutions, and the simple algorithm would at least lead to a floor.

[they don't love you like i love you]

And they only say the state of the Representative they're yielding to, not the district number.