Re:Gerrymandering and a cure for it – the shortest splitline...
by dragonwriter on Wednesday September 30, 2015 @09:07AM
(#10303592)
Its worth noting that almost any party-blind algorithm for drawing district lives is going to overrepresent Republicans, because Democratic support is very concentrated in large cities, resulting in most party-blind algorithms creating few super majority Democratic districts and many bare majority Republican districts. (Few and many both being in relation to the proportion of each party in the populace.)
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Re:Gerrymandering and a cure for it – the shortest splitline...
by randcraw on Wednesday September 30, 2015 @09:57AM
(#10303952)
In the rural US, any district outside an urban area is NOT a 'bare majority republican district'; they're all large majority republican districts. Rural America is devoutly republican, outside recently formed border districts (formed since 1980) that are largely immigrant.
Most gerrymandering doesn't bias rural districts; it biases suburban districts that are marginal majorities (usu republican) only after redrawing the lines. Any automatic line redrawing algorithm will defeat this, since it takes a lot of perverse effort to draw boundaries that are sufficiently biased to serve Machiavellian pols.