Source: Peter Kohnke from October, 2006[]
Content contribution for Platform.For-Pgh.org and community discussions.
Background[]
Congressional electoral districts are currently drawn with the heavy hand of the party in power, in order to give their party and not the citizens at large the maximum advantage. As a result, the districts often have very weird shapes. The word 'Gerrymander', now synonymous with this practice, came from an 1812 Massachusetts district that looked like a salamander. I have always lamented this practice. A proposal has been put forth to have retired judges draw the districts.
Kohnke: I have another plan.[]
Why not draw the districts so as to minimize the lengths of the boundaries, ensuring compact electoral district shapes and automatically eliminating the political process? I propose doing this with the help of a computer. Engineer/computer progammer that I am, here is the plan in broad outline:
1. Generate a large table (database) of information that includes the population of each jurisdiction, as well as the lengths of the borders with all neighboring jurisdictions.
2. Write a program to determine districts with a minimum total of border length. I would be willing to write the program for free. Alternatively, there could be a competition or it could be contracted out.
Both the database and the program would have to be moved to the public domain, so that anyone could study it for errors, to eliminate the possibility of charges of wrongdoing.
Of course, the program would have to be rerun after every census, correcting the input for populaton changes and border shifts.
This process would permanently eliminate ALL political tinkering with the electoral map, and result in much more compact districts!
There is one question left: Shall we give priority to county boundaries as opposed to boundaries inside a county? I, for one, think we should. This could be easily accomplished by a 'knockdown factor' such as 0.5. In other words, if a jurisdiction on the edge of a county had 3 miles of boundary within the county, and 2 miles along the county line, the 2 miles would be reduced to 1 mile for purposes of the computer program.
I think that we should move to such a system as quickly as possible. I am open to ideas how best to get this plan accepted by our state legislature. Then, after this is accomplished for the congressional districts, it should be applied to the districts of the state legislature itself.