USA :: minguo.info

The following diary is very pertinent in the current discussion about gerrymandering:
Stop saying Republican electoral-vote rigging is constitutional. It's not. Here's why.

Many of the comments make the parallel between Republican's current plans to rig 1016's electoral college and gerrymandering. It's worth reading, and probably documenting here, too.

Kossack Noddy wrote :

I always felt that districts should be drawn according to population and with as few angles as possible - none of this creating teeny little "spider legs" and narrow twisty "chimneys" and long, winding "snakes" intruding into other districts just to snatch up a few more constituents.

All nice, tidy rectangles. Or maybe untidy rectangles but still recognizably rectangularish - with no "fingers" digging into other districts.

The idea of an open source software to draw electoral district boundaries was mentioned by Kossack The Dead Man.

If such a software is designed and used, then it should imperatively be open source. But then, the idea does not really solve the problem: it is merely being displaced. A software is designed according to definite algorithms. We would then have at least the following two problems:

• No specific algorithm has yet been offered.