<x-flowed>In his Capitol Annex blog Vince Leibowitz makes some favorable comments
on the intervention by Jon Roland in the Texas Redistricting case. See
http://www.capitolannex.com/
More discussion is needed on Roland's key point that what makes a map
improperly "gerrymandered" is an attribute of the method and intent by
which they are produced, not of the maps themselves. Efforts like the
Voting Rights Act, amendments to which are currently being debated in
Congress, have erred in treating maps as having such attributes, at
least as the U.S. Department of Justice applies it. Any method that
happens to dilute some group without there being any improper intent or
even ability to intentionally do so, without information that could be
the basis for doing that, cannot properly be held improper. The
advantage of a mechanical process that has no such information on which
to operate is that it makes the Voting Rights Act inapplicable, if its
legislative intent is properly understood and applied. It should be
amended to make that clear. Legislatures could then argue about the
algorithms used in the districting software, whether, for example, they
should tend to make districts of urban cores or split urban counties and
join them to rural areas, and the algorithms would be a matter of public
debate, rather than maps drawn manually out of public review.
There is also a persistent erroneous tendency for people to identify
districts of one map with districts of previous maps, and to retain some
continuity in the numbering of them. One district cannot be "diluted"
from one map to the next because all the districts of every map are
different, unless they happen to have identical boundaries. If there is
any difference in boundaries, they are not comparable, and should not be
compared. This should be made more clear by randomly assigning district
numbers from one map to the next. After a new map is adopted, there are
no incumbents of a district.
All of which points out the problems attending attempts by lawyers to
deal with issues that are more properly the domain of engineers.
-- Jon
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