Gerrymandering Heights

Slate has a interesting piece up on the upcoming gerrymandering free-for-all we can expect after the 2010 census and what the mathematicians are up to the make sense of it all.

When you look at the accompanying slide show of The Most Gerrymandered Congressional Districts, you can easily see why finding a better way makes sense.

Under the Hirsch plan, any public proposal would have to comply with the law and current standards for equal population, continuity, and so forth. For all the plans that passed this threshold, there would be three further metrics:

- County integrity (matching district lines with county lines when possible);

- Partisan fairness (roughly half the districts should be more Democratic than the state as a whole, while the other have should be more Republican—the system doesn't include third parties);

- Competitiveness (a little more complicated, but recalculating previous election data according to the new districts).

The advantage of a plan like Hirsch's, which draws heavily on a lot of the mathematicians' research, is that it's quantifiable. Once plans start rolling in, any future proposal would have to score higher on those three metrics to be considered. And it would be fairly easy to substitute metrics if a particular state wanted, say, to value compactness (or nonbizarreness) over country integrity.