Originally shared by Colin Sullender
Gerrymandering is a practice that attempts to establish a political advantage for a particular party by manipulating district boundaries to create partisan-advantaged districts. Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly more common across the United States as partisan state legislatures attempt to secure greater control. During his final State of the Union speech, President Obama suggested that non-partisan third parties should be responsible for drawing districts, not the politicians that directly benefit from their manipulations.
Computer-generated districts have been proposed as a potential solution to human interference. This particular example uses the 2010 Census data to create “optimally compact” equal-population congressional districts in each state. Since it draws lines relative to the Census blocks, there is no risk of arbitrary lines cutting through individual houses or neighborhoods. And since compactness is the goal of the optimization, there is no risk of the squiggles and extensions so characteristic of gerrymandered districts.
#Politics #Gerrymandering #Congress #Congressional #Districts #Elections #Computer #DataViz #Maps #Statistics #Census #US #USA
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