America’s most gerrymandered congressional districts

[hue]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/15/americas-most-gerrymandered-congressional-districts/

This election year we can expect to hear a lot about Congressional district gerrymandering, which is when political parties redraw district boundaries to give themselves an electoral advantage.

Gerrymandering is at least partly to blame for the lopsided Republican representation in the House. According to an analysis I did last year, the Democrats are under-represented by about 18 seats in the House, relative to their vote share in the 2012 election. The way Republicans pulled that off was to draw some really, really funky-looking Congressional districts.

Contrary to one popular misconception about the practice, the point of gerrymandering isn't to draw yourself a collection of overwhelmingly safe seats. Rather, it's to give your opponents a small number of safe seats, while drawing yourself a larger number of seats that are not quite as safe, but that you can expect to win comfortably. Considering this dynamic, John Sides of The Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog has argued convincingly that gerrymandering is not what's behind the rising polarization in Congress.

The compactness of a district -- a measure of how irregular its shape is, as determined by the ratio of the area of the district to the area of a circle with the same perimeter -- can serve as a useful proxy for how gerrymandered the district is. Districts that follow a generally regular shape tend to be compact, while those that have a lot of squiggles and offshoots and tentacle-looking protuberances tend to score poorly on this measure.

Using district boundary files from the Census, I calculated compactness scores for each of the districts of the 113th Congress and mapped them so you can see where the least compact -- and likely most-gerrymandered --districts are. Click through for an interactive map, along with detailed methodological notes for the brave.

[loudsue]

1. I hope Anonymous understands that the republicans are going to steal the next election by THIS

method next time. They're (the Koch brothers & their corporatist cronies) going to use the smaller rural counties to mess with the vote totals. They are buying the races for county election chair positions.

I don't know if Anonymous can do anything about it at this point.

[cantbeserious]

2. The Oligarchs, Corporations And Banks Own And Control The Politicians That Own And Control Us

eom

[former9thward]

3. The OP totally ignores the Voting Rights Act.

Almost all of the "gerrymandered" districts featured in the OP are represented by minorities. The VRA requires certain districts be majority-minority. This means people drawing districts have to make weird looking districts in order to capture at least 70% minority voters in urban areas. By putting a bunch of Democrats in one district allows Republicans to be spread out into other districts. I would challenge the Washington Post blogger to draw these districts in a different way but still comply with the law. I doubt they can do it.