The problem posed by gerrymandering is a social problem, not a math problem.
There are all kinds of geographical and legal boundaries in a country, with varying levels of affinity to them. Defining gerrymandering precisely isn't possible, it isn't even a know it when you see it thing, and in practice it's a Russell conjugation: they gerrymander, and we redistrict so that people get proper representation.
However, social problems can be solved with maths, law could require something like this to be performed after every census:
https://sites.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/uw_1034.pdf
I think this has considerable advantages, the biggest being that it's objective, the next being that just looking at a Voronoi diagram makes it clear what's going on.
This essentially removes human factors from redistricting, and says you get the Congressional district you get when the population heatmap is relaxed in the simplest way it can be into the appropriate number of partitions.
Remember there's nothing about this which is 'fair', except for the part where people could perhaps be persuaded to abide by the results.
There are all kinds of geographical and legal boundaries in a country, with varying levels of affinity to them. Defining gerrymandering precisely isn't possible, it isn't even a know it when you see it thing, and in practice it's a Russell conjugation: they gerrymander, and we redistrict so that people get proper representation.
However, social problems can be solved with maths, law could require something like this to be performed after every census:
https://sites.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/uw_1034.pdf
I think this has considerable advantages, the biggest being that it's objective, the next being that just looking at a Voronoi diagram makes it clear what's going on.
This essentially removes human factors from redistricting, and says you get the Congressional district you get when the population heatmap is relaxed in the simplest way it can be into the appropriate number of partitions.
Remember there's nothing about this which is 'fair', except for the part where people could perhaps be persuaded to abide by the results.