Michael wrote: >Draw a line between the population centroid and the >voting centroid (or population median and voting median), and continue until >you have the number of districts you want. That way, roughly equal voters >and residents would be in each district.
As you implied before, this could easily end up slicing population centers and producing bizzare, sliver-shaped districts. Also, the population/voter equality in this approach is by no means guaranteed... it could in fact end up pretty radically skewed just depending on the angle between the two. Imagine putting San Antonio on one side of the line and Houston/Dallas on the other, to pick an easy example. While I stress that I don't think these sorts of simplistic algorithms are likely to produce satisfying results, a more reasonable way to partition two districts might go something like this: - start with the geographic centroid of the region. - draw the minimum-distance line containing this point that bisects the region. - without changing the angle, shift this line towards the side with greater population until the sides are equal in population. Jurij, I for one would be interested in seeing some details on your automatic districting scheme, which I assume is far more sophisticated than this. -Adam
