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 lo

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.