One interesting way of detecting gerrymandering that has been used in court [0] is to do a random walk on the graph of districting plans, where two plans have a

One interesting way of detecting gerrymandering that has been used in court [0] is to do a random walk on the graph of districting plans, where two plans have an edge between them if you can flip a precinct (the basic building block of a districting plan) in one plan to get the other plan. By randomly walking this graph, starting from the current plan and randomly flipping precincts, you can build a distribution of how compact the plans you saw were (there are some measures of compactness defined in TFA and the document linked below), and identify outliers, which are likely to be gerrymandered. [0] https://sites.tufts.edu/vrdi/files/2018/06/md-report.pdf https://sites.tufts.edu/vrdi/files/2018/06/md-report.pdf