Ask HN: How would you solve redistricting?

[jdthomas]

I caught part of a discussion on NPR this morning regarding California's newly drawn districts. There seem to be many complaints (most from different groups feeling like they were split, or combined unfairly).

While it's an improvement to have been done by an independent commission, the way these maps are drawn still seems archaic. Redrawing district lines, to me, seems like a problem that could pretty easily be solved algorithmically.

What do you think? What sort of inputs would you need? What factors would you take into account? Any good articles on this sort of thing? Any existing partitioning algorithms suitable for this? Would simply randomising districts be preferable?

Thoughts.

[shadgregory]

Turn each state into a multi-member district. Small states with only one rep can be combined with other states to form three-rep blocks, i.e., North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana can be combined into one election. Elections can be party-list elections. For example, Utah has 3 seats; each party puts forward a list of 3 candidates, and the voters vote for the party of their choice. There's no longer a need to redraw lines because there are no more lines.

[noahth]

There is some value in geography-based representation! Idealistically, well, there's idealistic value. Cynically, considering that many members of Congress are capable of bringing pork-barrel projects to their home districts, it makes sense for voters that their representative is accountable to the district.

While the idea of decoupling representation from geography is an interesting one and it may seem appealing, in practice I would not be surprised at all to see this result in a rapid deterioration in the quality of representation for areas in which representatives do not live and a corresponding rise in legislative effectiveness for the areas housing the representatives.

Following this line of assumptions a little further, it's easy to understand why Congress is divided into components where representation is based on different geographical scales.