Unfortunately, the question of what balance of Democrats to Republicans (to others) the state delegation should reflect is a political question, too. If one were to say that the ratio of Democratic representatives to Republican representatives should basically reflect the ratio of Democratic voters to Republican voters *statewide*, you'd probably even have argument on that point.
I think that it's best to focus on a strategy that would lead to the districts being as *responsive* (competitive) as possible. Anti-incumbency, as much as possible. And a method that would have that as an aim should show how that would be achieved.
On Feb 14, 2005, at 2:11 PM, Steven Barney wrote:
Many of the states are now focusing on the gerrymandering or redistricting problem. It seems to me that one possible solution may be to require that length of boundaries of all the state senate districts in the state, for example, have the minimum, or close to the minimum sum total. My intuition is that this would mean that the districts would have to be as close to being regular polygons as possible, since, for example, the 4 sided polygon with the shortest boundary is a square, and the infinite sided polygon with the shortest boundary is the circle. Is this a good idea?
If we had to redistrict a rectangular state, such as Wyoming, it seems to me that might be a reasonable possible solution. However, I am concerned about irregular states, such as, say, Wisconsin, which includes a lot of squiggly border lines and even some islands. I don't even know if this is a mathematically solvable problem. What do you think?
Steve Barney
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