[EM] Competitive Districting Rule

[Dave Ketchum]

Agreed that redistricting should be based only on the decennial census - 
what was done in Texas needs forbidding.

Likewise what they were doing about safe seats.  Still, any formula based 
on parties is dangerous, for there is too much temptation to make it favor 
the formula writers.  What happens if Frisco is heavily Dem and LA is 
heavily Rep?

So I favor neutrality, based on the formulas not being allowed to KNOW 
anything about registration or voting.

BUT, I would expand "contiguous" - some initial thoughts:
      Hudson River:  Lower Hudson is not crossable, so should be 
considered a solid wall when measuring distances.  It is crossable at 
bridges, so consider them an expense to cross.
      Other boundaries such as lakes, railroads, and expressways - 
consider crossability.
      Manhattan - count most of the bridges and tunnels a solid wall.
      Staten Island - water around it is mostly a solid wall except, if it 
is worth 2.5 districts, count the bridge to Brooklyn as connecting two 
half districts.
      County boundaries:
           Need a bit of porosity, for some counties cannot hold whole 
districts.
           Need some resistance, to discourage excessive crossing.
      Other boundaries such as towns and cities - still trying to favor 
keeping communities together - and having districts share boundaries.

DWK

On Fri, 07 Jul 2006 07:01:03 -0400 raphfrk at netscape.net wrote:

> I was reading
> 
> http://bolson.org/dist/
> 
> about fair redistricting.  He suggests using the distance to the centre 
> of the district as the parameter to optimise.
> 
> A computer algorithm is then run to try to minimise this parameter 
> while keeping all the districts approx equal in size.
> 
> I wonder if an additional constraint might be to try to balance the 
> vote in each district so as to reduce the number of safe seats.
> 
> It would work something like:
> 
> The votes for each party is examined from the previous election.  Are 
> totals released on a polling booth by polling booth basis?  In not, 
> then it would have to be based on a survey or something.
> 
> This gives a geographic spread of support for each of the parties.
> 
> The constraints that are used for re-districting are then
> 
> 1)  The districts have reasonably similar populations (say +/- 1%)
> 
> 2)  The average distance between each person and the centre of their 
> district is no more than double the minimum determined when ignoring 3) 
> and 4)
> 
> 3)  Consistant with 1) and 2), pick a district configuration that 
> minimises the square of the estimated difference between the top two 
> parties in the district
> 
> One possible problem with this is that it basically hands all districts 
> to the larger party in the previous election.  If a party gets 55% of 
> the vote, then a configuration where they have 55% in every district 
> minimises 3).
> 
> So, adding 4
> 
> 4)  Randomly order the districts.  When calculating 3), the weighting 
> given to each district shall be X% smaller than the weighting given to 
> the district that occurs immediately before it in the ranking.  (X 
> could be some value, say 33%)
> 
> This means that the districts near the start of the list shall be very 
> close to 50/50 while the districts near the end of the list will be 
> more unbalanced/safe seats.  The net result is that there would be some 
> safe seats and some not so safe seats.  However, they would be selected 
> at random.

-- 
  davek at clarityconnect.com    people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
            Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
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