In his Capitol Annex blog Vince Leibowitz makes some favorable comments on the intervention by Jon Roland in the Texas Redistricting case. See http://www.capitolannex.com/ More discussion is needed on Roland's key point that what makes a map improperly "gerrymandered" is an attribute of the method and intent by which they are produced, not of the maps themselves. Efforts like the Voting Rights Act, amendments to which are currently being debated in Congress, have erred in treating maps as having such attributes, at least as the U.S. Department of Justice applies it. Any method that happens to dilute some group without there being any improper intent or even ability to intentionally do so, without information that could be the basis for doing that, cannot properly be held improper. The advantage of a mechanical process that has no such information on which to operate is that it makes the Voting Rights Act inapplicable, if its legislative intent is properly understood and applied. It should be amended to make that clear. Legislatures could then argue about the algorithms used in the districting software, whether, for example, they should tend to make districts of urban cores or split urban counties and join them to rural areas, and the algorithms would be a matter of public debate, rather than maps drawn manually out of public review. There is also a persistent erroneous tendency for people to identify districts of one map with districts of previous maps, and to retain some continuity in the numbering of them. One district cannot be "diluted" from one map to the next because all the districts of every map are different, unless they happen to have identical boundaries. If there is any difference in boundaries, they are not comparable, and should not be compared. This should be made more clear by randomly assigning district numbers from one map to the next. After a new map is adopted, there are no incumbents of a district. All of which points out the problems attending attempts by lawyers to deal with issues that are more properly the domain of engineers.
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