US House Redistricting: Texas

[Linus Van Pelt]

Indeed, it is a mess, and the culprit is the combination of (a) single-member districts with (b) representation for non-geographic minorities.

If you gave up (a), you could get (b) quite easily without any erose (as you like to put it) maps. For instance, STV is used in Northern Ireland for just the reason that the main social cleavage there doesn't correspond to a clear geographic segregation, and the same ought to apply to the southern US.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Wait, what is this "touch-pointed"? That doesn't make sense. Mathematically, you shouldn't be able to skip over the center point like that - if you could, then any noncontiguous district with two parts at opposite ends of a state could be made "contiguous" by an infinitely narrow point-wide connection with a Dedekind cut on either side.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Yeah, you're right about NC-13 and NC-6 in Greensboro - never noticed that before.

Still, already done doesn't mean legal; it just means never challenged on that basis, and I still maintain it ought not to be legal. Jimrtex's suggestions with millimeters are legalistic but coherent; with these X's, on the other hand, the district's width must be literally just a point, because any larger surface area at all would cut off the other district. And if you allow districts to have sections that don't extend at all in two dimensions then there is effectively no requirement of contiguity at all.