Toplak Jurij wrote"

Matemathically there are many ways we can arrange these 50 municipalities in 4 districts, but there is only one under which the population variance is smallest possible.  This procedure does not involve decisions of human factor, except for =
the decision on the procedure used and political units used. However, the decision on which procedure should be used will always be taken by humans.  It could be said that it was humans who drew the borders of the municipalities (or other political units used), but these borders have usually been drawn long ago and without intent of gerrymandering.

Matt replies:

Thank you.  That makes more sense than my inappropriate integer programming for perimeter compactness suggestion, which at best isn't practical and is indifferent to community, or road traffic and bandwith, which are poor measures of community and are manipulable.  Since there is a best solution we cannot argue about method bias.  Indeed, it seems to address most of Micah Altman's criticisms (or at least those he mentioned in the several dozen pages of his dissertation that I read).  However, I do see a problem.  What if the largest municipality is larger than all of the other municipalities combined?  For this to be a generally applicable approach I think we need a reasonably objective procedure for dividing large municipalities into smaller units and some reasonably objective procedure for identifying when a municipality should be divided into smaller units.