Gerrymandering and a cure for it – the shortest splitline algorithm
Isn't gerrymandering a much more complex problem than that makes it out to be?  I've always thought the problem was that it's actually difficult to even come up with a definition of what fair is.  For instance, do you want each district to be as representative of the population as possible?  Or do you want the house of representatives to be as representative of the population as possible?  I suspect that you can't have both.  For instance, if you have a state that is 60/40, then do you want each district to be 60/40?  Or if it has ten representatives/districts, do you want 6 reps of one party and 4 of the other?  What is districting even supposed to aim for?  I don't think there is one reasonable answer to this question, which is why I think any attempt to answer this question for all states is doomed to fail.<p>The only way I can think of to get both is to increase the number of representatives.  The House of Representatives was originally supposed to scale with the size of the population, and they eventually put a stop to that.  If they had continued, then we'd have a house with a makeup that matches national polling much more closely than it does now, and gerrymandering wouldn't be as much of a problem.  Isn't it true that as you add more representatives, gerrymandering distortions lessen?