jdthomas

I caught part of a discussion on NPR this morning regarding California's newly drawn districts. There seem to be many complaints (most from different groups feeling like they were split, or combined unfairly).

While it's an improvement to have been done by an independent commission, the way these maps are drawn still seems archaic. Redrawing district lines, to me, seems like a problem that could pretty easily be solved algorithmically.

What do you think? What sort of inputs would you need? What factors would you take into account? Any good articles on this sort of thing? Any existing partitioning algorithms suitable for this? Would simply randomising districts be preferable?

Thoughts.