Gerrymandering - America's dumbest tradition

Fun fact: the word gerrymandering came from 1812 when the Mass. Governor Gerry signed a map shaped like a salamander. Gerry - mander. Also it was a hard G, more like Garymander phonetically.

Get rid of it! It's dumb, pointless, skirts legality which requires constant judicial intervention. The consequences are real. Competitive elections become rare. Incumbents calcify with more accountability to their parties (win the primary) than to their constituents, which reward extremism and penalize compromise. Minority voices are marginalized. In this disgraceful landscape, public cynicism becomes rational.

Right or left. Democrat or Republican, communist or fascist. Get rid of it!

Getting rid of gerrymandering is harder than it sounds.

Redistricting is a normal and sometimes necessary act. It's done to account for demographic shifts. Proving the extent to which district lines were redrawn with nefarious intent can be complicated because redistricting itself is complicated.

Every state should appoint bi-partisan committees to minimize political bias for this.

So how would an algorithm look like, that could be accepted by all?

Like this

Start
Calculate the number of voters per district
Begin at the NW-corner of the state.
Add counties until starting fromthe Nothwest:

repeat
add neighbouring county that is most to the north,
if none more to the north, then to the south east
if none to the south east, then to the south,
if none to the south then to the south west.
until no more neighbouring counties.

after each addition check sum of voters to an expected number (+- a few perscent)

Then go to the most northwestern county and repeat the process until you arrived at the most south eastern.

@vivify said
Getting rid of gerrymandering is harder than it sounds.

Redistricting is a normal and sometimes necessary act. It's done to account for demographic shifts. Proving the extent to which district lines were redrawn with nefarious intent can be complicated because redistricting itself is complicated.

Every state should appoint bi-partisan committees to minimize political bias for this.

@wildgrass said
Other countries manage to do it just fine, it doesn't seem hard.

It has to be mandated federally, otherwise you end up with our current situation where the federal government pressures states to get rid of their previous independent redistricting commissions in order to hold onto power.

@vivify said
Redistricting should be done by independent, nonpartisan committees. So you're right, the answer is simple.