Short of forcing everyone into a single district, with resulting guaranteed huge campaign costs for small parties or obscure candidacies, it's NOT necessarily easier to maximize overall geographic fitness or 'utility' of an apportionment scheme by using PR.
By the way, usual PR presumes that voters want to be proportionally represented ONLY according to political party, not other criteria, including geographic proximity. That's as mistaken as the present one-rep one-locality fiasco. Also by the way, we would get much better 'PR' using PAV applied to individual candidates, not parties. Given a set of social and political and geographic criteria, including district compactness - measured e.g. as Alex suggests or by sum of some function of distance of each voter from a minimiziing 'central' point in her/his district - it would probably be impossible even with current computing power to choose the VERY best apportionment scheme. However, each voter, or each of a large class of undeniable experts, could each be allowed to nominate an apportionment scheme, and then computer checking could verify which scheme among those nominated would be best or near best. Or, a legislature or court would be mandated to choose from among the top 100, or top 5, or maybe instead the top 1%, of the nominated schemes. ----Original Message Follows---- From: "Alex Small" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re:[EM] Gerrymandering Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 18:42:56 -0800 (PST) Probably the simplest measure I can think of, and the most easy to justify (at least in a simple case) is the average perimeter of each district. Simple case: Suppose that we have a square region with uniform population density. Draw a straight line that divides it in half. Here's an obvious gerrymander: __________ | | | | _ _| | | /|_| | | \ ____ | | | | | | | |_| _| | |______|___| (I don't know if I got the area exactly 50-50, but you get the point.) Those two districts give a much higher average perimeter. Now, I realize that people want districts to respect city and county lines, give fair representation to ethnic minorities, represent distinct economic interests, and solve every other problem under the sun, so maybe simple rectangles aren't the best solution. But trying to solve all those problems with single-member districts requires King Solomon. PR is much easier. (Yes, I realize that I just preached to the choir.) Alex Small _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
