Ease-of-communication got me thinking. I think the map should be non-geographic, and, instead, road-based.
Dense networks of roads should not be separated into separate districts. An urban area on two sides of a bridge could easily be divided. Ignoring real geography in exchange for the human-built road-topology of an area isn't actually ignoring geography, since there will be few (and windy) mountain roads. This also completely plays to the hand of the candidate who actually wants to visit his constituents. The road network they would travel would be minimal. Please pardon my lack of effective mathematical terminology for this. I do recognize that the problem is the kind with relative minima, and no direct course to the solution. However, we could leave the program running for years, looking for best examples. -----Original Message----- From: Michael Rouse [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2002 11:45 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [EM] More on Gerrymander prevention After surfing the web for information on how to divide maps without gerrymandering, I think I found a standard that won't offend most people. The ideal district under most standards has the following features: 1. Equal Population 2. Contiguous 3. Compact If we were to define the ideal districting map to be a centroidal Voronoi diagram where each Thiessen polygon has the same number of people, then the map that comes closest to this standard should be the one we choose. (See http://www.math.iastate.edu/gunzburg/voronoi.html#quan and http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~ajsecord/npar2002/html/stipples-node2.html for examples -- phrases like "Voronoi diagram" and "Thiessen polygon" look impressive, but the ideas behind them are easy to understand.) In practice, we would say something like "The districting map of the (country, state, county, city) shall be a Voronoi tessellation where each polygon contains equal (population, citizens, adults, voters) and the cumulative distance between Voronoi generators and Voronoi centroids is minimized." By their nature, these polygons are contiguous and compact -- they are also convex, simply shaped, and just look nice (which may not seem important, but federal judges view gerrymandering as they do pornography -- "They know it when they see it"). Just as important is having the ability to compare two or more competing plans with a set standard, and allowing interested citizens and groups of citizens to offer their own plans. On the down side, these polygons ignore roads, rivers, and ridges, communities, city limits and county lines, etc. And while they are easy to calculate for most states, states like New York, Florida, Texas, and *especially* California might be looking at a problem that is impossible to solve exactly -- and redistricting an entire country (not necessarily the U.S.), we would have to settle for "excellent" rather than "perfect" districting. Still, "excellent" is better than the "godawful" method we have now. Michael Rouse [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This message is intended only for the personal and confidential use of the designated recipient(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient of this message you are hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. This communication is for information purposes only and should not be regarded as an offer to sell or as a solicitation of an offer to buy any financial product, an official confirmation of any transaction, or as an official statement of Lehman Brothers. Email transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free. Therefore, we do not represent that this information is complete or accurate and it should not be relied upon as such. All information is subject to change without notice.
