It wouldn’t be too hard to come up with fairly simple algorithm for elimanting gerrymandering by insisting an minimizing the ratio of the border of a voting district to the area of a voting dictrict, but it just has no chance of actually being enacted.

The problem with the algorithm approach is that it would violate the Voting Rights Act in the Southern states. Under the act, redistricting must not dilute minority voting power. Those states are so heavily gerrymandered to create black majority voting districts that any rational redistricting would be a violation of the law.

I take on Stephen Bainbridge's idea for creating a national redistricting commission to create competitive districts and explain "The Circle of Reform."

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Hat Tip: Outside the Beltway...

The resulting districts will be relatively geometrically compact, but are not likely to correspond to any established media or population groupings.

Now make this the default redistricting plan. If the state legislature can't reach consensus or the plan they adopt is found to be unconstitutional, this becomes the default plan the state falls back on.

An arbitrary plan that only looks at geography is likely to be the only true "non-partisan" plan possible.

Professor Bainbridge has an idea: The national disgrace of gerrymandering has created a system in which the vast majority of House seats are safe for one of the two parties. As a result, the real action is in the primaries,......