But history, sociology, geography, and practicality are.

Let’s start with practicality.

As I had posted, I had re-mapped around with the 8 congressional districts of Eastern Massachusetts back in 2002. No software in existence could have provided me with population per square grid. I did have the population for each municipality, which were readily available from online sources. As I explained then, I wanted to aim for compactness and the respect of municipal boundaries.

And this is what Open Source is all about. If I didn’t have the data, there was no way I could have produced a candidate map (and without the Internet, I could have, at best, mailed it to Seth Gitell at the Phoenix). If there were a law which required rectalinear districts, there would be very few software tools to allow people to draw competitive maps, and with fewer tools, they’d be more expensive, and be in the hands of fewer people.

Jon, this is a laughable. It is a completely irrelevant point.

Did you take avec’s suggestion to _also_ mean one of the following:
a) Each rectangle is the same shape
b) No rectangle can overlap
c) math is hard

In retrospect, I think the real problem of a geometric/mathematical constructions is that the innumerate masses are too confused by “complicated math”.

If your’re local, and care to meet, I can explain how this simple, very workable, plan is quite achievable.

BTW, here’s the answer toChicago:

Cook County covers mostly 7 congressional districts; each is neatly drawn so that its representatives, well, represent the makeup of their districts: 3 black, 2 Jewish, 1 Polish-American, 1 Hispanic… in the 4th. Geographically “bent” but ethnically quite orderly.

Here is how it is done in Canada.
http://www.mapleleafweb.com/features/electoral/boundaries/boundaries-canada.html
http://www.mapleleafweb.com/features/electoral/boundaries/readjustment-canada.html

And here is a map of ridings for one province. It is not perfectly geometrical, but at least there are less of the imprint of long, crooked fingers.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6a/Bc2001.PNG

You vote for every candidate that you approve of. You don’t vote for any candidate you don’t approve of. The one with the largest majority vote wins.

That addresses the either-or dilemna of say Kerry-Nader, Perot-Clinton and Perot-Bush. If you want change, and you are comfortable with a president without any constituency in Congress, you vote for Nader and Perot, as well as the safe Republican or Democrat that you hate to see win, but at least you don’t vote for the evil Democrat or Republican.

There is a mathematical measure called compactness, and Johnathan brought up a website which calculates it for you (the Massachusetts districts, btw, seemed a bit off). And yes, in various reform efforts, district reformers have called for compactness as an explicit goal. Similarly, as I pointed out, choosing a straight line comes at the expense of recognized municipal boundaries, which, here in the East, tend to be irregular.

tbrucia: your point is nonsense. Any decision made by elected officials in a democracy must be responsible to the people who elected them. By your argument, there is no reason to discuss any policy decision of the government, like war, because well, we have no influence over it. Furthermore you argue that the minority can’t even label something a problem, because somebody else calls it a solution. “No amount of citizen indignation…” whatever. It may likely be highly difficult in Massachusetts. But a study of American history shows that reforms have taken root in the West: Wyoming (women’s suffrage, 1890), Iowa (nonpartisan redistricting, 1980), Oregon (vote by mail, 2000).

Ok, you are “simply being realistic.” You could have argued that there isn’t much actual harm done as a result of noncompact or gerrymandered districts. But you didn’t.

A simple way to prevent gerrymandering is to pass a law requiring that every district’s borders be rectangular (which could extend meaninglessly outside of the state of course).
— avecfrites

Avec, this is a fantastic idea! Basing the boundaries in a mechanical/algorithmic/purely geometric method is clearly the only way out of the madness.

I am guessing that when you were in school you solved geometric problems and chose not to throw your notebook and pencil on the ground declaring them “utter frivolity”.
I am still awaiting patiently for a genuine critisism of your suggestion.

http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/0607/krasno.php

Check out his “Gerry Index” page here for the mathematical details and a simple calculator that lets you punch in any existing state and district number for a quick look:
http://www.dailysonic.com/gerrymander/

IMO this would be a reasonable way to regulate districts. Require all districts in a given state to have “Gerry” scores under a certain hard limit, as well as within a given range of one another.

But forget about third parties: Tavis Smiley did a segment this weekend with the authors of the new book One Party Country: The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century – http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-0471776726-0 – which implies that we’re headed for gerrymandered and financially insured single party dominance.

Hear that sucking sound? That’s the last vestiges of our 18th century constitution’s attempt to offer democracy spiraling down the toilet.

Here’s the relevant link to the Smiley show: http://www.tavistalks.com/TTcom/TSradio/H2_Wallsten_n_Hamburger072806.html

And, “avec”– I understand your point. I had mostly objected to your and chuck’s certitude in the idea of rectalinear districts. To give TW some credit, he or she post his or her suggestion with a good sense of uncertainty. I speak with a fair degree of confidence here as I’ve done a little bit of work in this field.

To bring up a fresh angle, I suppose a good question to ask a researcher is actually whether the research bears out that a compact district is cheaper to campaign in, and/or cheaper to serve (e.g., # of district offices).

And furthermore, one could research how much a representative pays attention to his or her districts by logging visits and communications, etc.

If we do away with local districts and make all elections state-wide, it will make it more expensive to run, especially in large states. This will reduce the chance of a non-wealthy person getting elected. It will also make all of the campaigns resemble eachother, with a handful of hot-button issues instead of a variety of issues of local interest. I think we need to preserve a way for non-wealthy people to get elected, and localized districts are a good way of helping with that.

Wouldn’t it be simpler, and more democratic, if we went with proportional representation & did away with district boundaries altogether? Each state gets its number of House seats, each party puts together a slate with up to that number of candidates, and you can vote for the whole slate or for individual candidates, regardless of what part of the state you live in. If the state has 25 House seats, the top 25 vote-getters win – that’s it. I’m sure there are scads of problems with this approach, too, but without getting into all of them, just think about how many problems this solves – all just by letting go of the outmoded idea of the “local” district?

Are there any researchers or advocates out there promoting this type of approach?

Let’s not get lost in the details. The basic principle is to use simple rules to limit the degrees of freedom that politicians have in creating district boundaries. It doesn’t matter much if we use hexagons, squares, whatever. Any reasonable geometric rules would do. But of course the simpler the better, so voters can sit at their kitchen tables and say “damn right!” to the idea.

The geometric rules do a lot to limit flexibility, in a very understandable way. And any natural feature such as a river that a boundary crosses is a minor deviation from perfection compared to the horrors of the current system.

What is the big objection to this simple idea? Let’s not let the Perfect be the enemy of the Good Enough.

But then you would realize, with many irregular natural boundaries and municipal boundaries, and then you find that there would be no need at all to put a straight line or a 90 degree angle (or even a 120 degree one) where none existed.

Still, as I said before, you are free to produce for me a map of your design using your rules.

Now stop being a bully and think like a mathematician. You dismissed the suggestion without even reading it because twice you say that state borders are not straight, but both posters who have suggested rectangular districts have both specifically talked about borders and that would be the exception.. obviously.

Think and read closer, please.

If the question is how to get closer to what Iowa looks like and less like Massachusetts (or apparently Texas) then it is easy to do with simple rules and the same damn computers they use now to create their gerrymandered masterpieces.

I know this might be a nice jumping off point for lots of discussion about all the changes that would make our system better, but I would rather just solve one problem first and then address all that other stuff later.

Right now we have politicians with computers picking the voters instead of voters picking the politicians and rectangular districts would put a nice big ole wrench in their works.

It’s fair and non-partisan; the kind of thing the Dems would do if they get a chance.

I’ll see if I can find more nerdy detail on how it’s done…

Proportional representation would do much more than rendering unnecessary the skullduggery called gerrymandering. It would enable a much broader and healthily competitive national political conversation.

I heard recently on NPR that the fastest growing party affiliation for registered voters is ‘Independent’. This implies that the country needs third (and fourth and fifth!) party options; yet these parties hardly ever form. Why? Because the constitutional mandate of representation by individuals instead of by parties necessitates a polarized political environment: Conservative vs. Progressive, with the stakes too high in that battle to leave any breathing-space for parties of true centrists. Hence the Constitution unintentionally creates a two party state – a duopoly.

We take it as a given that monopolies are unhealthy for economies, and that one-party states are just as unhealthy for their peoples. Duopolies aren’t much better. Sure, the second entity enables competition, but the duopoly will also conspire to fix the rules, making the political collectivity in effect a two-headed monopoly.
Is this what democracy should be? Is this the best we Americans, so proud of our innovative history, can do?

Can anyone seriously argue that this strangulating duopoly isn’t the condition of the current US body politic? I realize I’m somewhat stretching the meaning of ‘body politic’, but it’s a metaphorically useful stretch: do human bodies prosper better on a diet limited to two starchy staples, or on a diverse diet?

Proportional representation will not only rid us of gerrymandering, it will rid of us of PAC’s and of lobbyists – the corruptive bane of our republic-as-constituted. The countries with the most lobbyists per capita are the USA and Great Britain: the western industrial giants that elect their national legislatures by individuals instead of by party-proportional allotment.
This is no coincidence. Why? Because each representative is a free agent: a policy-making entity of one. An entity, therefore, dependent on parochial financing and therefore prey to the parochial influences of the biggest contributors.
Is it any wonder then that the Republicans consistently troll up the biggest campaign treasuries while the Democrats are stuck with the less affluent leftovers? And is it any wonder then that the Republicans, whose true constituents are but a very small percentage of the electorate, nevertheless out-propagandize their way to one victory after another?

Parties in proportional representation architectures create detailed platforms of policy and then compete by advertising their detailed policies to the voters. The parties craft the policies, not lobbyists.
The competition of ideas in multi-party states innovates many more policy options than any monopoly or duopoly can. Such innovation is the ‘healthy diet’ for the body politic.

Proportional representation is the best imaginable solution – even though it will splinter the Democratic Party. Because the GOP will splinter too – some suggest it’s on the verge of such a split even now. I doubt this, but only because the Elephants must continue to huddle together so long as the Donkeys continue to hang together in their barely articulate loose herd.
We’re prisoners, in other words, of an 18th century artifact: a constitutional structure that belongs in a museum of political innovations once laudable but now obsolescent.

Since the 18th century, Democracy as a form of governance has evolved everywhere else in the world but here.
Let’s join the 21st century.
Here’s how it works: The most widely appealing parties gain pluralities of votes, and then form governing coalitions truly representative of the People.
Isn’t that what democracy should be? Collective instead of by the most moneyed of the special interests?