On Wednesday, American Greatness posted an article about the gerrymandering of Congressional districts. Redistricting has been used by both parties for a very long time. At one point our Massachusetts congressional district was in the shape of a sea horse in order to dilute one Republican area.

The article reports:

Few events in politics are more consequential while being less understood than redistricting. The consequences are obvious. If your party controls a state legislature, then once every ten years, when it comes time to redraw district boundaries for state legislative seats and seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, you can redraw them to your advantage.

The methods are less obvious, but intuitive enough. Create geographical boundaries that concentrate registered members of the opposition party into a single district, thereby shifting the majority in your favor in surrounding districts. Or, equally effective, disburse registered members of the opposition party into carefully apportioned districts where they will not have a majority anywhere, completely nullifying their voting power.

The intelligibility of the process ends there. How redistricting commissions parse voter geolocations—deemed favorable or unfavorable based on precinct-level registration—is a complex science. And since the people drawing these new boundaries are almost invariably partisan hardliners, a lot of time and money is invested in calculating maps that precisely optimize the ruling party’s prospects of preserving and enhancing their advantages in the next election.

The article includes a map of the Congressional Districts of Los Angeles, California:

The logic in drawing the above districts is less than obvious.

The article notes:

In reviewing this map, it doesn’t take a cartographer to quickly recognize how the boundaries are twisted in ways that bear no resemblance to city limits or natural geographic features. These boundaries are contorted to the point of absurdity for one reason: to ensure California Democrats control 83 percent of the state’s congressional delegation, to ensure that California’s Republicans are denied 13 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives that they might otherwise have earned based on voter behavior in California’s statewide elections.

The article suggests a solution:

There are solutions to the practice of partisan redistricting that plagues every state, California most of all. It is to rely on algorithms that can assign district boundaries without taking into account voter demographics or party affiliation. It would automatically generate district borders, sorting at the precinct level, according to the following conditions:

(1) Maintain equal populations;

(2) select for district centers based on areas with the highest population density;

(3) solve for convex edges; and

(4) minimize the cumulative length of the polygons formed by the districts.

It would be naive to believe that this would totally solve the problem, but it might make Congress more representative of the people they are supposed to serve.