From: Allan Wechsler <acwacw@gmail.com> I am wondering what Warren would think of a slightly different approach. Rather than legislate a process that arrives at a reasonable district map, why not legislate a constraint on such maps, letting the legislators be as corrupt as they want within those constraints? I think some very simple constraints would go a long way in placing a ceiling on the amount of possible corruption. For example:
A. All districts should be the intersection with the state of a convex region.
B. All districts should be the intersection with the state of a latitude-longitude rectangle.
It is true that these schemes permit maps to be marred with a few long, thin regions, but the amount of possible horror is greatly reduced.
--well, sure. I think some such constraint, but then be as corrupt about gerrymandering as you want subject to that constraint... would be better than now (i.e, unconstrained corruption) but worse than something that actually removes the intentional bias from the picture, like (my) splitline algorithm. One could go on... e.g. in the USA, in many states, the elections are supervised by somebody with hire+fire power over everybody in the system, who by design, is the single most biased person in the entire state, e.g. in the 2000 presidential election, Bush-Cheney campaign chair K.Harris was the Florida secretary of state in charge of elections (crucial state). In Ohio 2004, Bush-Cheney campaign chair K.Blackwell was the Ohio SOS, ditto. It is kind of like when Obama recently appointed, as head of the FCC, a reasonable candidate for "the single most biased person in the entire country" i.e. cable/telco lobbyist Tom Wheeler, who appears to be about to destroy "net neutrality" then return to a rich future life as a continued lobbyist. Point is... aside from the danger of getting me started with ranting... the problem is the intentional bias. In the USA, similarly, districts are most commonly drawn by the top 10 most biased people that exist in that entire state. It isn't just bad. It is maximally bad. And election predictability over the 1995-2005 decade in the USA was over 98%, see http://www.rangevoting.org/NonVoters.html for proof, meaning USA has, to a good approximation, 96% rigged and 4% democratic elections, plus with that 4% sliver in turn being near maximally lame in the sense we have 2-party domination and the ultra-bad plurality voting system. It's a hell of a way to run the world. And I've been trying to save the world via the rangevoting.org website I am the main creator of -- all help by others appreciated! -- but I am highly unequal to the challenge and getting more and more cynical and burned out. The splnoff group "center for election science" (I was first president, but they've got rid of me) electology.org hopefully will outperform rangevoting.org but that remains to be seen, there's reasons for major pessimism and minor optimism.