This is an interesting article, but the headline is deceptive. The article doesn't answer that question it poses. The reason the Supreme Court granted cert is because the court below, which in this case was a special 3 judge district court panel whose opinions skip the Court of Appeals, ruled in favor of the challengers.<p>If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this lower court opinion would have in effect (but not technically) stood as a nationwide precedent modifying existing Supreme Court decisions.
Re-posting my comment on <i>Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with Geometry</i> | <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252</a> 4 months ago:<p><i>[...] a need for expert witnesses who understand the mathematical concepts applicable to gerrymandering. To meet that need, she’s spearheaded the creation of a five-day summer program at Tufts [the first in a series of regional trainings] that aims to train mathematicians to do just that<p>[...] over 900 people have indicated their interest by signing up for a mailing list</i><p><a href="http://tufts.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7aa8ab22ea62&id=a979bdf71d" rel="nofollow">http://tufts.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7...</a><p>--<p>Quoting from the end of that article, calling out the "efficiency gap" as the spark for work towards a mathematical definition of "compactness" satisfying districting requirements in a way that is convincingly explainable as fair:<p><i>Recently there was a big media sensation in Wisconsin around something called the "efficiency gap." It was a new metric of partisan gerrymandering that, for the first time, a court said they liked. The way it was devised was that the people who created it, they went back and they read all of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s written decisions about measuring gerrymandering. By reading his words and by reading what he said he found convincing and less convincing, they designed a statistic to appeal to him.</i>
I wish SCOTUS would put out a Euclidian distance Voronoi metric, where the redistricting map presented with minimum error wins.<p>You quickly get into non-linear territory by using travel time instead of Euclidian distance. Roads and bridges become weapons for cutting or connecting districts. Bad bad stuff.
A proportional representation voting system would also largely solve the gerrymandering problem (no district would be dominated by a single party anymore so exploiting the gerrymandering system wouldn't help much), along with having many other benefits for democracy:<p><a href="http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation" rel="nofollow">http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation</a><p>> They complied with the Constitution’s one person, one vote requirement<p>That line is interesting. How is the electoral college system not in conflict with the Constitution then, if a person's vote in one state is much stronger than another person's vote in another state? Or is it enough that it satisfies the requirement technically (still "one vote"), even if not in <i>spirit</i>/based on a (I would think) more common <i>interpretation</i> of the Constitution?
I'm not convinced that the "efficiency gap" is a good metric. My main issue, aside from the difficulty in describing what a "good" map should look like, much less measuring it, is that it is sharply discontinuous around the "winning" criteria -- for a single district, in a 49-51 victory vs. a 51-49 loss, there's a 2% difference in the number of votes, but the wasted votes goes from -50 to +50.<p>It's not difficult to see that the optimal partitioning is 75/25 (in either direction), which seems very arbitrary.<p>From a democracy perspective, it seems like the ideal partitioning would be much closer to 50-50 -- hopefully even in the margin of error for the area, so that candidates would have to make a real effort to represent their entire district in order to be assured re-election. Even this feels very questionable, because as I understand it, the idea of congressional districts is that representation should follow groups of shared problems and interests, irrespective of proposed solutions to those problems.
"Gerrymandering" is a word difficult enough to grasp, and "partisan gerrymandering" (for me at least) doesn't ring any bells either, so for those of us who don't come from an USA background, but are interested in <i>how</i> someone could mathematically define that, I found this link:<p><a href="https://www.senate.mn/departments/scr/REDIST/Red2000/ch5parti.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.senate.mn/departments/scr/REDIST/Red2000/ch5part...</a><p>> Partisan (or political) gerrymandering is the drawing of electoral district lines in a manner that discriminates against a political party.
I'm so glad this is happening. Gerrymandering is for 2nd rate banana republics, not the greatest Republic of all time. This IS a national security threat.<p>I would add which party is mostly responsible, but apparently mentioning the party, although factually correct, would lead me to get in trouble here. Which is Grand, coz im really Old, and I dont like to Party... anymore!
Personally I wish my state would enact a law that says representative districts must be drawn to cross as few county lines as possible.<p>Yes, some manipulation would still be possible, but it would be greatly diminished.