Thread: Gerrymandering
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Old 02-26-2018, 10:26 AM   #44
Undertoad
Radical Centrist
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Cottage of Prussia
Posts: 31,423
Quote:
Originally Posted by Undertoad View Post
Gov. Wolf brought in a Tufts U. Expert to say that it was fair. Apparently the map "showed no partisan skew when compared to more than a billion randomly generated maps."
So now the Times is saying that the math is in, and by this method of determining whether a map is fair, the new map isn't:



But maybe it's tricky and we don't understand it:

Quote:
The strong Democratic showing compared with Mr. Chen’s simulations doesn’t necessarily indicate that the map is a Democratic gerrymander. For one, the simulations aren’t perfect. And they aren’t necessarily representative of realistic partisan-blind maps. To take a concrete example: The simulations often split the city of Pittsburgh, something few human map-drawers would choose to do given the requirement to avoid unnecessarily splitting municipalities.
...
Over all, the new court-ordered map comes very close to achieving partisan symmetry in an evenly divided state.

The seeming contradiction between the analysis based on partisan symmetry and one based on simulated nonpartisan congressional districts gets at the heart of what may be the next big debate in gerrymandering: whether nonpartisan maps should strive for partisan symmetry, or whether they should try to avoid political considerations altogether.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/u...ania-maps.html
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