Hm. This doesn't seem like it does much if there's a sufficiently high concentration of cracked districts, relative to packed districts. I gerrymandered during

Hm. This doesn't seem like it does much if there's a sufficiently high concentration of cracked districts, relative to packed districts. I gerrymandered during the define phase using classic packing / cracking strategies, such that I had 8 majority-B districts (2:3) and 2 majority-A districts (4:1 and 5:0), and unsurprisingly, the only districts I was able to combine that were majority-A were those that included the packed districts. If the overall split was, say, 27:23 instead of 25:25 such that we could define 9 majority-B districts in the define phase, then I would only have been able to define a single majority-A district in the combine phase. (And yes, all of these gerrymandered districts would be considered safe B seats, as one would expect with a 20% margin) There are also potentially issues if the packed districts are geographically clustered -- we see this a lot in states with a single predominant urban center (e.g. Kansas, Minnesota, Kentucky). In those cases, you might be forced to combine multiple packed districts due to pathological maps. For instance, consider a map where a Democratic bastion is districted into concentric rings -- that satisfies the contiguity requirement, yet only the outermost district abuts any Democratic-minority districts.