Districting Reform
I studied political districting for several years, while at the Harris School of Public Policy and the Center for Spatial Data Science of the University of Chicago.
The posts below describe some of that work in lay terms. You can explore this interactive map to compare the various automated solutions.
My work had two main findings:
- Automated districting is totally doable. Historically and traditionally, the three basic criteria for a districting plan are equipopulation, contiguity, and compactness. Among these conditions, the first two are unambiguous but there are competing mathematical definitions for the “compactness” of a shape (in this case, of legislative districts). These definitions all yield equivalent seat shares to the political parties, but they do have somewhat different characteristics, and some are easier to implement than others. The definition that I believe performs best – requiring that the constituents in each district be as close to each other as possible – is easy to understand and implement.
- Reform should come from Congress. The Constitution grants Congress authority over the “Times, Places, and Manners” of elections (Article 1, Section 4), in order to ensure unifority of representation. Congress exercised that authority from 1842 to 1929, ultimately requiring equipopulous, single-member districts that were contiguous and compact (as mentioned above). So while most other districting scholars aimed to assist the Supreme Court in adjudicating harms, I came to believe that reform by Congress – however politically improbable it might seem – is the most practical and constitutionally-valid path. When the Supreme Court formally retreated from adjudicating political districts with Rucho v Common Cause in 2019, this really became the only path for reform at the Federal level.
I published one paper on the subject:
- James Saxon, Reviving Legislative Avenues for Gerrymandering Reform with a Flexible, Automated Tool. Political Analysis, 2020. (Published version.)
A second paper, triggered by a short exchange with Eric Holder, described how to incorporate “communities of interest” in automated procedures. However, I left academia before it was published.