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March 28, 2024

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Redistricting should be mapped by math wonks, not politicians

Can we agree it’s a bad idea to allow politicians to draw the boundary lines on voting districts?

Look where it has gotten us.

Only 6 percent of likely voters think Congress is doing a good job, according to a new Rasmussen Report poll. And yet about 93 percent of the 435 members of the House of Representatives are overwhelming favorites to be re-elected in November.

To a large extent, the culprit here is gerrymandering, a 200-year practice perfected by both parties to carve out boundaries of voting districts that create safe havens for re-election.

When you let the winning team umpire the game, the winning team tends to keep winning.

Florida’s Republican-led Legislature “made a mockery” of the process by working in secret to carve out districts that violated the state’s constitution, Leon County Circuit Judge Terry Lewis ruled last month.

Since the judge’s ruling, the Legislature made some cosmetic changes to the map, but they aren’t enough, according to a voters’ coalition, which now wants the judge to redraw the boundaries himself.

Some states, such as Iowa, California, Washington and Arizona, have taken the redistricting job away from the two political parties by creating nonpartisan committees to draw up the boundaries.

This is a step in the right direction. But human impartiality is easier to imagine than achieve.

The best way to make redistricting fair is to turn it over to the mathematicians.

Math wonks have been working on this for years. The algorithms have already been written.

In math terms, it’s easy to identify a gerrymandered district.

John Mackenzie, a professor of resource economics and geographic information systems at the University of Delaware, arrived at the following formula:

G=gP/A

To put that into words: “G”, the gerrymandering score, is equal to a district’s boundary length (g) multiplied by the district’s perimeter (P), and then divided by the district’s area (A).

The more gerrymandered a district is, the higher is the value for “G.” Or to look at it a different way, ideal districts tend to be those that have large areas (A) relative to their length and perimeters.

So, box-like districts are better than jigsaw-shaped districts or ones that are long slivers with tiny areas but run for many miles in their perimeters.

Algorithms used to draw up the districts could be as complicated as the model created by computer engineers at the University of Texas at El Paso, who came up with mathematical formulas for district boundaries that sort voters by income, rural vs. urban status, number of children and other variables.

But I like the simple “shortest-splitline algorithm,” which has been promoted by Ph.D. mathematician Warren D. Smith for the Center for Range Voting, a group that advocates a drastic revamping of the voting process.

The shortest-splitline method starts by dividing each state into two sections with the shortest straight line that puts nearly an equal amount of people on each side of the line. And then the state is similarly subdivided again and again, with the rule being that each additional subdivision is made by drawing the shortest line possible that puts equal numbers of people on each side.

“The advantage of having our simple splitting algorithm draw the congressional districts is obvious,” Smith wrote. “There is one and only one drawing possible given the number of districts wanted, the map of the state, and the distribution of people inside it. Which of those people are Liberal, Conservative, Republican, Democrat, Black, White, Christian, Jewish, polka-dotted, or whatever has absolutely zero effect on the district shapes that come out.”

Smith has already produced the computer-generated district maps for all 50 states using the shortest-splitline method, which divides states into a simple patchwork of straight-sided polygons.

You can see how they look here: http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html.

Judge Lewis’ complaint about the Florida district maps having “unusual boundaries and bizarre shapes, as if some abstract artist had been given free rein,” would be gone when a computer blindly draws the map based on mathematical calculations instead of political ones.

It’s time to stop allowing elected officials to hand-pick their voters.

Let the mathematicians reign.

Frank Cerabino writes for the Palm Beach Post.

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