A prime example of gerrymandering is FL Congressional district 8. At it's widest it's 20 miles wide, but on average more like 5-7 miles wide, but it stretches on for 120 miles, through 4 different counties, and completely avoids the one "major" city in the area, Orlando.
Texas just did a redistricting which apparently is a horrendous example of gerrymandering. Districts can be seen to exactly follow lines between wealthy and poor neighborhoods, blue collar and white collar, etc.
I sometimes wonder if it's possible to make hard and fast rules to prevent this; something like "districts must be polygons with a maximum of 8 angles, except where they follow physical boundaries such as rivers, or political boundaries such as township borders."
There are things that can be done, but as Bruce observes, getting them past the parties (literally) involved is the problem.
(Just for the record, Texas was gerrymandered by the Democrats before the redistricting and gerrymandered by the Republicans after the redistricting. Neither is particularly desirable...)
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Re: gerrymandering
Re: gerrymandering
I sometimes wonder if it's possible to make hard and fast rules to prevent this; something like "districts must be polygons with a maximum of 8 angles, except where they follow physical boundaries such as rivers, or political boundaries such as township borders."
Re: gerrymandering
(Just for the record, Texas was gerrymandered by the Democrats before the redistricting and gerrymandered by the Republicans after the redistricting. Neither is particularly desirable...)