[EM] WSJ Gerrymander story

[Forest Simmons]

Compactness means closed and bounded.  All districts on planet earth are
bounded.  They can be closed iff nobody lives precisely on the boundary,
so that boundary points can be in more than one neighboring district.

In other words, compactness (insofar as it is feasible) doesn't stop
Gerrymandering.

Perhaps you meant "compactness" in some non-technical sense.

We could require minimization (over all districts) of the maximum
diameter, for example.

Forest

On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, Narins, Josh wrote:

> A more reasonable measure might be, rather than convexity, compactness.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Forest Simmons [mailto:fsimmons at pcc.edu]
> Sent: Monday, March 18, 2002 7:12 PM
> To: election-methods-list at eskimo.com
> Subject: Re: [EM] WSJ Gerrymander story
>
>
> One solution would be to require all districts to be as convex as possible
> while respecting state boundaries.
>
> This brings up the question of how do we measure deviation from convexity?
>
> It could be the difference in the area of the convex hull of the region
> and the area of the region, or it could be the difference in the number of
> voters in the convex hull of the region and the number of voters in the
> region itself. Of course, there are other measures of deviation, too.
>
> Forest
>
> On Sun, 17 Mar 2002 DEMOREP1 at aol.com wrote:
>
> > D- A story from reality land----
> > -------
> >
> > Wall Street Journal
> >
> > JOHN FUND'S POLITICAL DIARY
> >
> > Red-Light District
> >
> > It's time to draw the line on gerrymandering.
>
> <big snip>
>
> > Two hundred fifteen years later, incumbents are using high-powered
> > computers to create lifetime sinecures for themselves.  That kind of
> > privilege and protection is certainly not what the Founding Fathers had
> > in mind when they overthrew a monarchy to form a republic.