I tend to avoid blogging about politics but I couldn’t help but rant against gerrymandering. The concept is rooted in the idea that political parties can divide voting areas in order to bias the populations in their favor. It doesn’t make any sense that in a functional democracy voting districts can be so easily manipulated.

The fact that one sees numerous examples of the ridiculous geographic shapes that can develop should be sign-enough that it’s an irrational approach.

Gerrymandering example from the Washington Post.

Instead, why not impose some constraints? The entire point is to come up with geometric shapes and there’s a ton of mathematical research to design the outcome we want. The goal should be a system that has enough constraints that only a single outcome is possible. Maybe it has something do with the convexity of the shapes or the relationship between the dimensions but it’s shocking how terrible and prone to manipulation the current system is.