Killing the Gerrymander With Math: Yes, the Geeks WILL SAVE DEMOCRACY...

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Saw this on Twitter, jumped into the article at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Meet the Math Professor Who’s Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry

And we're not talking about the polyhedral dice used in Dungeons & Dragons, oh no. Although rolling a d20 for critical would really make Killing the Gerrymander SOOOOOOOO WORTH IT.

Moon Duchin is an associate professor of math and director of the Science, Technology and Society program at Tufts. She realized last year that some of her research about metric geometry could be applied to gerrymandering — the practice of manipulating the shape of electoral districts to benefit a specific party, which is widely seen as a major contributor to government dysfunction.

At first, she says, her plans were straightforward and research-oriented — "to put together a team to do some modeling and then maybe consult with state redistricting commissions." But then she got more creative. "I became convinced that it’s probably more effective to try to help train a big new generation of expert witnesses who know the math side pretty well," she says...

Due to the Supreme Court ruling Selby County v Holder that gutted the district enforcements of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, there's been an uptick in court cases fighting the extreme gerrymandering that's kicked in over the last 10 20 years.

What Duchin is attempting to do is clear up one of the more confusing elements of congressional districting: what the actual shape of the district should be:

(Duchin direct quote from interview) In redistricting, one of the principles that’s taken seriously by courts is that districts should be compact. The U.S. Constitution does not say that, but many state constitutions do, and it’s taken as a kind of general principle of how districts ought to look.

But nobody knows exactly what compactness means. People just have the idea that it means the shape shouldn’t be too weird, shouldn’t be too eccentric; it should be a kind of reasonable shape. Lots of people have taken a swing at that over the years. Which definition you choose actually has stakes. It changes what maps are acceptable and what maps aren’t. If you look at the Supreme Court history, what you’ll see is that a lot of times, especially in the ’90s, the court would say, Look, some shapes are obviously too bizarre but we don’t know how to describe the cutoff. How bizarre is too bizarre? We don’t know; that sounds hard...

...I was surprised to see that even though there were different mathematical attempts at a definition, you don’t ever see mathematicians testifying in court about it. So our first aim was to think like mathematicians about compactness and look at all the definitions that already exist, and compare them and try to prove theorems about the relationships between the definitions.

What courts have been looking for is one definition of compactness that they can understand, that we can compute, and that they can use as a kind of go-to standard. I don’t have any illusions that we’re going to settle that debate forever, but I think we can make a contribution to the debate...

From what I'm getting from the interview, the goal of Duchin's efforts seems to be getting rid of some of the more egregious spread-out districts, of trying to get more districts placed in actual population density centers like major cities/metro areas, rather than carved out as pieces to the edges of large sprawling districts made up of underpopulated rural zones (look at how cities like San Antonio and Orlando are divided between 4-5 different districts without a single district actually dedicated to that metro).

As long as this achieves a viable goal: Getting Congressional districts set to places where people actually live, and fully reflective of the population percentages between party identifications. I'm tired of the Republicans representing about 45 percent of the people and yet controlling 60 percent of the districts...