Gerrymandering Politics Out of the Redistricting Process: Toward a Planning Revolution in Redrawing Local Legislative Boundaries

Abstract

Jurisdictions in the United States are granted considerable discretion in choosing the method by which they redraw their political boundaries following a decennial census. Two common methods are allowing legislatures to redistrict or creating a citizen commission to perform the task. Yet each of these processes frequently results in gridlock and/or political gerrymandering. This paper proposes an alternative method for local jurisdictions: a "planning approach" to redistricting in which it is suggested that districts can be created through the amalgamation of neighborhoods in a process driven by professional planners. This approach lends no consideration to politics. Rather, the research presented here posits that empowering planners to lead legislative redistricting processes will aid in the reduction of politically anticompetitive behavior, thereby increasing the efficiency, effectiveness, and logic of the process. A local redistricting problem using data from Buffalo, NY, is modeled and then solved using the proposed planning framework.

Inter‐person Separation: A New Objective Standard for Evaluating the Spatial Fairness of Political Redistricting Plans

“…In region partitioning/delineation applications where no meaningful centers exist, sometimes hypothetical reference centers have been strategically used assuming that people within the same region are connected through these centers. Similar to the school districting problem, the regions that have the minimal overall distance connecting people to the hypothetical centers are then sought (Patrick ; Weaver ). In a variant of this approach, the squared distance between people to their district centers, also known as population moment of inertia, is considered (Weaver and Hess ; Hess et al ; Hojati ).…”