Objective Redistricting, Take 2



Well, they just submitted Arnold's redistricting plan, and apart from a few oddities is actually better than I feared. In particular, the 'special masters' are (as I asked) supposed to use objective criteria to evaluate plans, which can be submitted from (effectively) any interested party.

The proposed criteria aren't bad, but I have a few ideas on how to make it better (and perhaps simpler).

a) Defer Congressional redistricting until after the census, to mute Blue-state criticism, while pushing internal reforms immediately.

b) Only request plans for Assembly Districts. Then, use the 1:2:20 ratio for Assembly:Senate:Equalization seats to automatically find the best grouping after that, since its a computationally tractable problem.

c) Before accepting proposals, the special masters should:
i) define 'deviation' as either "standard deviation" or "maximal deviation"
ii) define 'compactness' mathematically (e.g., moment of inertia or fraction of an enclosing circle)
iii) list relevant "communities of interest" not to be split up (besides cities/counties)
iv) State their weighting criteria: compactness vs. connectedness vs. competitiveness

There should be a comment period for people to refine these, but it should close *before* plans are publicly submitted and evaluated. That way optimizers have something explicit to work on, and 'spoilers' can't invent arbitrary criteria after the fact to derail plans they don't like.

Posted: Sun - January 16, 2005 at 04:14 PM        

©