7 ms·

This is the best explanation of gerrymandering you will ever see

56 points by knoxa2511 10y ago

e28eta 10y ago
Obviously the title is hyperbole, but in order to be the "best explanation" I'd like to see some of the reasonable arguments that are used to justify "non-compact, non-fair" districts. Maybe that's because I remember reading this article (TBF, it is linked), particularly the section about "community of interest": https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/03/this-computer-programmer-solved-gerrymandering-in-his-spare-time/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/03/this-... Essentially the graphic shows how compactness can be unfair, but doesn't tell us what reasonable explanations can be used for non-compact districts.
- tunesmith 10y ago
  Even the word "fair" implies the belief that a state's district breakdown should track with the state's population breakdown. This is not necessarily axiomatic. If you want competitive districts with a smaller incumbency advantage, then maybe you don't want that. IOW it depends on how you define "fair".
waqf 10y ago
If people are even thinking about gerrymandering, then it's apparent that the system of having one representative elected by each district no longer serves its supposed purpose of making sure each "community" is represented. In that case, there's no reason not to switch to some more fairly representative system, for which there are various possibilities but PR systems are the best known (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation).
- davidw 10y ago
  Those can have some serious problems in practice too. I spent a number of years in Italy, and several come to mind that I saw there: * Representatives are beholden to the party, not to some local area. * Smaller parties can play 'kingmaker'.
  - Lazare 10y ago
    Yes, and yes. It has some real advantages (it's nice being able to vote for someone that actually agrees with you AND not have your vote be wasted), but my experience in New Zealand is that: 1. It enhances the power of parties and thus increases partisanship 2. It allows small parties to play kingmaker. In the NZ case, the perennial kingmaker party is corrupt and virulently nativist. If, hypothetically, you were concerned about the partisanship, corruption, and nativist policies of current American politics, PR may not be the panacea you hope. I think it was quite unlikely for the American system to yield Trump as president (we just got very unlucky) but it would be quite likely for a PR system to yield Trump as a kingmaker with a vastly outsize influence on the policy of the resultant government. That's not obviously better, on balance.
    - waqf 10y ago
      Thanks, I was expecting a rebuttal based on experience with PR but this is a particularly interesting one. Actually I'd be interested in seeing some kind of delegative democracy system like Liquid Feedback. It has some features in common with PR (mostly the emphasis on having to negotiate a coalition given the voting results), but I'm hoping it wouldn't share the problems you outlined?
    - waqf 10y ago
      > Trump as a kingmaker with a vastly outsize influence Hmm, now you mention it, didn't something like that happen to the Weimar Republic?
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        Arguably, it's what failed to happen; Hitler ended up leading a minority government with the largest party (well, tied with the Communists), no one acted as kingmaker with a small party putting some other coalition over the top extracting concessions for that boost. There was kingmaking of a more personal kind going on behind the scenes, but not of the minor-party-exercises outsized influence kind.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
- tr1ck5t3r 10y ago
  Don't you trust yourself and your fellow citizens to vote properly? If you do trust yourself and your fellow citizens then why cant each and every person in a country be paid like politicians do, to have a say in the way their country works based on the facts and have a Direct Democracy, or is voting TV voting the best you aspire too? You can never trust a Govt that operates in secret! Divide and Conquer its been around since Roman times.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > If people are even thinking about gerrymandering, then it's apparent that the system of having one representative elected by each district no longer serves its supposed purpose of making sure each "community" is represented. The gerrymandering problem isn't created by individual districts, it's created by first past the post voting. Suppose you replace this with range voting or approval voting. Now it doesn't matter where you draw the district lines, because there can be twelve viable candidates and no matter where you draw the lines, each district will choose the candidate who best represents the district. A candidate can run, and win, on a platform which is specific to that individual district without having to align with an existing party's platform because winning is no longer contingent on the backing of a major party. Which means you can't draw the lines to favor your own party because all it will do is cause some new party/candidate to appear that better represents whatever arbitrary district you created than you do. And then you get to keep all the advantages of individual districts and avoid all the disadvantages of PR.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > The gerrymandering problem isn't created by individual districts Yes it is. > it's created by first past the post voting. FPTP creates other problems, but not the gerrymandering problem. OTOH, systems that support parties may mitigate some effects of gerrymandering. > Now it doesn't matter where you draw the district lines, because there can be twelve viable candidates and no matter where you draw the lines, each district will choose the candidate who best represents the district. The problem with gerrymandering is that single member districts let you choose what kind of candidates will be elected by how you draw draw district lines, and by doing so you can assure that some interests are over or underrepresented in the legislature compared to their prevalence on the population. You've not stated a way in which range or approval voting change that (and you won't find one, because they don't.)
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      > You've not stated a way in which range or approval voting change that (and you won't find one, because they don't.) Sure they do. If you concentrate all the people who care about a particular issue into one district, and you make candidates not affiliated with a major party viable, then that district can elect a representative who cares about that issue a lot and will be willing to trade issues the district cares less about in order to get it, without having to worry what the party leadership wants. And how is PR supposed to solve this problem? It only replaces districts with parties, and then you're stuck choosing from a small handful of parties whose members all stick to the party line and you're forced to choose one that doesn't represent you on some subset of issues. The only better way to solve that problem is direct democracy, which would bring in a whole different set of problems.
devdoomari 10y ago
another explanation of gerrymandering by CGP grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY
molmalo 10y ago
This video was really simple to understand too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY
bhauer 10y ago
On the subject of districting, the ideal is shortest splitline [1]. Combine this with Approval or Score voting and I'd be a very happy voter. [1] http://scorevoting.net/SplitLR.html http://scorevoting.net/SplitLR.html
- civilian 10y ago
  And a video by CGP Grey that shows the shortest split-line in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A
- hibikir 10y ago
  While I am no friend of gerrymandering, arguing that there is a geographic ideal is disingenuous: Voters clump up, and thus any automated mechanism that just looks at geography will be skewed, and, in the US today, Very often skewed towards republicans compared to the ratio of voters in a state. There is no such thing as a fair way to assign representatives without making some judgement call on what fair means. If you prefer short split line, that's because of your very personal preferences, which might have something to do with good looking maps, but they absolutely have nothing to do with making sure that groups of people are epresented in a way that will match proportional representation. Shortest split line will still give you a state that is 50/50 in a senate vote, but hands you a congress that is a 7/3 split.
- specialist 10y ago
  Geometric esthetics aside, I'm eagerly awaiting the Supreme's ruling on voter efficiency (wasted votes). I anticipate it'll moot (supplant) most of the arguments about compactness, shapes, etc.
egwynn 10y ago
[2015] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9235619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9235619
favorited 10y ago
Fun fact: "gerrymander" is a portmanteau of the name "Gerry" and "salamander." Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed the state's initial electoral districts into law (which his party had drawn in their favor), and one of the districts looked like a salamander.
- caf 10y ago
  Compared to the utterly indefensible PA-7, the salamander district looks like a model of propriety ( http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Globe_Graphic/2007/05/31/1180605109_1489-1.jpg http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Globe_Graphic/2007/05/31/... )
  - tunesmith 10y ago
    Can PA-7 be deemed indefensible for reasons other than how it looks? Not a leading question, I wonder if there are statistical data about it. You could argue that if you drew proportional representation as districts (basically: pointillism) it'd make PA-7 look wonderful in comparison.
    - caf 10y ago
      It is abundantly clear that that district has been drawn in the way it has for nakedly political reasons, and not to group together contiguous communities of interest. You could argue that if you drew proportional representation as districts (basically: pointillism) it'd make PA-7 look wonderful in comparison. If you argued that, you'd be wrong. Proportional representation districts should group together communities of interest in exactly the same way as single-member districts - the only difference is that PR districts are represented by more than one representative.
      - tunesmith 10y ago
        Sure, if you just completely redefine my point. But if you take a PR "district", like a state, with multiple representatives, and imagine them a a collection of single-representative districts, they're about as far from contiguous as you get. I'm not arguing PA-7 isn't a problem. But I don't think "looks" is a good standard. What's better is something like the standards being argued in the current Wisconsin case that I think might still be going to the Supreme Court.
mymex1 10y ago
It won't solve the problem of "how" to redistrict, but as far as finding out if gerrymandering IS happening it seems like there are good ideas out there such as the "efficiency gap" used in a recent Wisconsin case. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/wisconsin-redistricting-found-to-unfairly-favor-republicans.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/wisconsin-redistrictin...
justinzollars 10y ago
Gerrymandering results in more competitive districts. So it will be a fact a life because every party wants more. From the point of view of actual Representation it does not make sense. For example, my former Congresswomen was personally heartbroken to lose the town of Bowling Green, in Ohio. Her new district isn't really representative of any logical organization of people, so its hard to be responsive to the needs of the people. I think my preference is that a computer cut it in a way that considers the geography and land topology and types of communities whether cities or towns - with the goal of being as square as possible.
- pasquinelli 10y ago
  or just keep the same process for drawing district boundaries but take away the notion of a district to higher elections. that's the source of the bad incentives that lead to gerrymandering.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Gerrymandering results in more competitive districts. Only when the goal of gerrymandering is to maximize competitive districts, but it's usually not; it's usually to maximize safe districts and districts in which one party has an electoral advantage. (Also, frequently, it's designed to create particular benefits or problems for particular incumbents.)
my_first_acct 10y ago
Even "compact, fair" districts can lead to outcomes that one party, at least, would find unfair. For instance, in the US, Democratic voters tend to be clustered in cities, so urban congressional districts (even "compact, fair" ones) vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. This means that there a lot of "wasted" Democratic votes contributing to landslide victories in urban districts, instead of bringing about Democratic victories elsewhere. Even if the Republicans have only a narrow majority in the suburban and rural districts, and are an overall minority of voters in the state, they are able to win the majority of congressional districts. See this 2014 article (sorry, behind NYTimes paywall) for more details: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/its-the-geography-stupid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/its-the-ge...
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Right. Any method of drawing single-member FPTP districts will, unless voters of different persuasions are perfectly uniformly distributed, will: (1) Produce disproportionate advantage for some party, and/or (2) Produce some number of safe seats where the general election is a forgone conclusion and the mechanism that selects candidates decides the winner in practice. You can select methods to choose which of these effects predominate, and which party benefits from either disproportionate representation or safe seats (there's a certain tension -- you get disproportionate representation for your party by giving the other party super safe seats), but you can't avoid them unless you throw out FPTP, and really single-member independent districts entirely.
coldcode 10y ago
While I like the article, do modern newspapers have editors? "But the only won 5 out of 18 House seats".
tunesmith 10y ago
There isn't really yet an operational definition of gerrymandering. Such that, if x conditions exist, it's gerrymandering, and if they don't, it's not. You can't do it without pointing at results and going, "Well that's clearly unfair." I believe there is a recent legal case that is still in the courts where they are trying to arrive at a legal standard. Something about the percentage of unrepresented voters in a state's average district. So there might be progress on that point. But even politicians that complain against gerrymandering are inconsistent. Some politicians complain about "safe" districts not being competitive enough, and also complain that house elections don't mirror the popular vote breakdown enough. Those are actually on opposite sides of the loose tradeoff. As you move towards your house results mirroring the popular vote (like if today's House were 48.2% Democratic and 46.1% Republican), then you move towards less competitive districts (except for primaries), like the "perfect representation" example in the article. Because, in order to guarantee that your state's district breakdown will mirror your state's vote breakdown, you basically would want all Republican-voting people in their districts, and all Democratic-voting people in their own. So, what do you want? Do you want a House that is overall representative of the national popular vote? Do you want districts where the maximum number of citizens are represented? Do you want competitive districts? Do you want compact, contiguous districts? Do you want districts that respect traditional neighborhood boundaries, district history, and geography? Because they all imply different districting strategies. And saying "let's just let a computer split-line it!" means explicitly rejecting some of these principles - you can't get past making choices about tradeoffs, because it is inherently messy.

56 points by knoxa2511 10y ago

Obviously the title is hyperbole, but in order to be the "best explanation" I'd like to see some of the reasonable arguments that are used to justify "non-compact, non-fair" districts. Maybe that's because I remember reading this article (TBF, it is linked), particularly the section about "community of interest": https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/03/this-computer-programmer-solved-gerrymandering-in-his-spare-time/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/03/this-... Essentially the graphic shows how compactness can be unfair, but doesn't tell us what reasonable explanations can be used for non-compact districts.

tunesmith 10y ago
Even the word "fair" implies the belief that a state's district breakdown should track with the state's population breakdown. This is not necessarily axiomatic. If you want competitive districts with a smaller incumbency advantage, then maybe you don't want that. IOW it depends on how you define "fair".

waqf 10y ago

If people are even thinking about gerrymandering, then it's apparent that the system of having one representative elected by each district no longer serves its supposed purpose of making sure each "community" is represented. In that case, there's no reason not to switch to some more fairly representative system, for which there are various possibilities but PR systems are the best known (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation).

davidw 10y ago
Those can have some serious problems in practice too. I spent a number of years in Italy, and several come to mind that I saw there: * Representatives are beholden to the party, not to some local area. * Smaller parties can play 'kingmaker'.
- Lazare 10y ago
  Yes, and yes. It has some real advantages (it's nice being able to vote for someone that actually agrees with you AND not have your vote be wasted), but my experience in New Zealand is that: 1. It enhances the power of parties and thus increases partisanship 2. It allows small parties to play kingmaker. In the NZ case, the perennial kingmaker party is corrupt and virulently nativist. If, hypothetically, you were concerned about the partisanship, corruption, and nativist policies of current American politics, PR may not be the panacea you hope. I think it was quite unlikely for the American system to yield Trump as president (we just got very unlucky) but it would be quite likely for a PR system to yield Trump as a kingmaker with a vastly outsize influence on the policy of the resultant government. That's not obviously better, on balance.
  - waqf 10y ago
    Thanks, I was expecting a rebuttal based on experience with PR but this is a particularly interesting one. Actually I'd be interested in seeing some kind of delegative democracy system like Liquid Feedback. It has some features in common with PR (mostly the emphasis on having to negotiate a coalition given the voting results), but I'm hoping it wouldn't share the problems you outlined?
  - waqf 10y ago
    > Trump as a kingmaker with a vastly outsize influence Hmm, now you mention it, didn't something like that happen to the Weimar Republic?
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      Arguably, it's what failed to happen; Hitler ended up leading a minority government with the largest party (well, tied with the Communists), no one acted as kingmaker with a small party putting some other coalition over the top extracting concessions for that boost. There was kingmaking of a more personal kind going on behind the scenes, but not of the minor-party-exercises outsized influence kind.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
tr1ck5t3r 10y ago
Don't you trust yourself and your fellow citizens to vote properly? If you do trust yourself and your fellow citizens then why cant each and every person in a country be paid like politicians do, to have a say in the way their country works based on the facts and have a Direct Democracy, or is voting TV voting the best you aspire too? You can never trust a Govt that operates in secret! Divide and Conquer its been around since Roman times.
AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> If people are even thinking about gerrymandering, then it's apparent that the system of having one representative elected by each district no longer serves its supposed purpose of making sure each "community" is represented. The gerrymandering problem isn't created by individual districts, it's created by first past the post voting. Suppose you replace this with range voting or approval voting. Now it doesn't matter where you draw the district lines, because there can be twelve viable candidates and no matter where you draw the lines, each district will choose the candidate who best represents the district. A candidate can run, and win, on a platform which is specific to that individual district without having to align with an existing party's platform because winning is no longer contingent on the backing of a major party. Which means you can't draw the lines to favor your own party because all it will do is cause some new party/candidate to appear that better represents whatever arbitrary district you created than you do. And then you get to keep all the advantages of individual districts and avoid all the disadvantages of PR.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > The gerrymandering problem isn't created by individual districts Yes it is. > it's created by first past the post voting. FPTP creates other problems, but not the gerrymandering problem. OTOH, systems that support parties may mitigate some effects of gerrymandering. > Now it doesn't matter where you draw the district lines, because there can be twelve viable candidates and no matter where you draw the lines, each district will choose the candidate who best represents the district. The problem with gerrymandering is that single member districts let you choose what kind of candidates will be elected by how you draw draw district lines, and by doing so you can assure that some interests are over or underrepresented in the legislature compared to their prevalence on the population. You've not stated a way in which range or approval voting change that (and you won't find one, because they don't.)
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    > You've not stated a way in which range or approval voting change that (and you won't find one, because they don't.) Sure they do. If you concentrate all the people who care about a particular issue into one district, and you make candidates not affiliated with a major party viable, then that district can elect a representative who cares about that issue a lot and will be willing to trade issues the district cares less about in order to get it, without having to worry what the party leadership wants. And how is PR supposed to solve this problem? It only replaces districts with parties, and then you're stuck choosing from a small handful of parties whose members all stick to the party line and you're forced to choose one that doesn't represent you on some subset of issues. The only better way to solve that problem is direct democracy, which would bring in a whole different set of problems.

devdoomari 10y ago

another explanation of gerrymandering by CGP grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY

molmalo 10y ago

This video was really simple to understand too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY

bhauer 10y ago

On the subject of districting, the ideal is shortest splitline [1]. Combine this with Approval or Score voting and I'd be a very happy voter. [1] http://scorevoting.net/SplitLR.html http://scorevoting.net/SplitLR.html

civilian 10y ago
And a video by CGP Grey that shows the shortest split-line in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A
hibikir 10y ago
While I am no friend of gerrymandering, arguing that there is a geographic ideal is disingenuous: Voters clump up, and thus any automated mechanism that just looks at geography will be skewed, and, in the US today, Very often skewed towards republicans compared to the ratio of voters in a state. There is no such thing as a fair way to assign representatives without making some judgement call on what fair means. If you prefer short split line, that's because of your very personal preferences, which might have something to do with good looking maps, but they absolutely have nothing to do with making sure that groups of people are epresented in a way that will match proportional representation. Shortest split line will still give you a state that is 50/50 in a senate vote, but hands you a congress that is a 7/3 split.
specialist 10y ago
Geometric esthetics aside, I'm eagerly awaiting the Supreme's ruling on voter efficiency (wasted votes). I anticipate it'll moot (supplant) most of the arguments about compactness, shapes, etc.

egwynn 10y ago

[2015] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9235619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9235619

favorited 10y ago

Fun fact: "gerrymander" is a portmanteau of the name "Gerry" and "salamander." Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed the state's initial electoral districts into law (which his party had drawn in their favor), and one of the districts looked like a salamander.

caf 10y ago
Compared to the utterly indefensible PA-7, the salamander district looks like a model of propriety ( http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Globe_Graphic/2007/05/31/1180605109_1489-1.jpg http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Globe_Graphic/2007/05/31/... )
- tunesmith 10y ago
  Can PA-7 be deemed indefensible for reasons other than how it looks? Not a leading question, I wonder if there are statistical data about it. You could argue that if you drew proportional representation as districts (basically: pointillism) it'd make PA-7 look wonderful in comparison.
  - caf 10y ago
    It is abundantly clear that that district has been drawn in the way it has for nakedly political reasons, and not to group together contiguous communities of interest. You could argue that if you drew proportional representation as districts (basically: pointillism) it'd make PA-7 look wonderful in comparison. If you argued that, you'd be wrong. Proportional representation districts should group together communities of interest in exactly the same way as single-member districts - the only difference is that PR districts are represented by more than one representative.
    - tunesmith 10y ago
      Sure, if you just completely redefine my point. But if you take a PR "district", like a state, with multiple representatives, and imagine them a a collection of single-representative districts, they're about as far from contiguous as you get. I'm not arguing PA-7 isn't a problem. But I don't think "looks" is a good standard. What's better is something like the standards being argued in the current Wisconsin case that I think might still be going to the Supreme Court.

mymex1 10y ago

It won't solve the problem of "how" to redistrict, but as far as finding out if gerrymandering IS happening it seems like there are good ideas out there such as the "efficiency gap" used in a recent Wisconsin case. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/wisconsin-redistricting-found-to-unfairly-favor-republicans.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/wisconsin-redistrictin...

justinzollars 10y ago

Gerrymandering results in more competitive districts. So it will be a fact a life because every party wants more. From the point of view of actual Representation it does not make sense. For example, my former Congresswomen was personally heartbroken to lose the town of Bowling Green, in Ohio. Her new district isn't really representative of any logical organization of people, so its hard to be responsive to the needs of the people. I think my preference is that a computer cut it in a way that considers the geography and land topology and types of communities whether cities or towns - with the goal of being as square as possible.

pasquinelli 10y ago
or just keep the same process for drawing district boundaries but take away the notion of a district to higher elections. that's the source of the bad incentives that lead to gerrymandering.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Gerrymandering results in more competitive districts. Only when the goal of gerrymandering is to maximize competitive districts, but it's usually not; it's usually to maximize safe districts and districts in which one party has an electoral advantage. (Also, frequently, it's designed to create particular benefits or problems for particular incumbents.)

my_first_acct 10y ago

Even "compact, fair" districts can lead to outcomes that one party, at least, would find unfair. For instance, in the US, Democratic voters tend to be clustered in cities, so urban congressional districts (even "compact, fair" ones) vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. This means that there a lot of "wasted" Democratic votes contributing to landslide victories in urban districts, instead of bringing about Democratic victories elsewhere. Even if the Republicans have only a narrow majority in the suburban and rural districts, and are an overall minority of voters in the state, they are able to win the majority of congressional districts. See this 2014 article (sorry, behind NYTimes paywall) for more details: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/its-the-geography-stupid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/its-the-ge...

dragonwriter 10y ago
Right. Any method of drawing single-member FPTP districts will, unless voters of different persuasions are perfectly uniformly distributed, will: (1) Produce disproportionate advantage for some party, and/or (2) Produce some number of safe seats where the general election is a forgone conclusion and the mechanism that selects candidates decides the winner in practice. You can select methods to choose which of these effects predominate, and which party benefits from either disproportionate representation or safe seats (there's a certain tension -- you get disproportionate representation for your party by giving the other party super safe seats), but you can't avoid them unless you throw out FPTP, and really single-member independent districts entirely.

coldcode 10y ago

While I like the article, do modern newspapers have editors? "But the only won 5 out of 18 House seats".

tunesmith 10y ago

There isn't really yet an operational definition of gerrymandering. Such that, if x conditions exist, it's gerrymandering, and if they don't, it's not. You can't do it without pointing at results and going, "Well that's clearly unfair." I believe there is a recent legal case that is still in the courts where they are trying to arrive at a legal standard. Something about the percentage of unrepresented voters in a state's average district. So there might be progress on that point. But even politicians that complain against gerrymandering are inconsistent. Some politicians complain about "safe" districts not being competitive enough, and also complain that house elections don't mirror the popular vote breakdown enough. Those are actually on opposite sides of the loose tradeoff. As you move towards your house results mirroring the popular vote (like if today's House were 48.2% Democratic and 46.1% Republican), then you move towards less competitive districts (except for primaries), like the "perfect representation" example in the article. Because, in order to guarantee that your state's district breakdown will mirror your state's vote breakdown, you basically would want all Republican-voting people in their districts, and all Democratic-voting people in their own. So, what do you want? Do you want a House that is overall representative of the national popular vote? Do you want districts where the maximum number of citizens are represented? Do you want competitive districts? Do you want compact, contiguous districts? Do you want districts that respect traditional neighborhood boundaries, district history, and geography? Because they all imply different districting strategies. And saying "let's just let a computer split-line it!" means explicitly rejecting some of these principles - you can't get past making choices about tradeoffs, because it is inherently messy.