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vnprc

define convex shape in legalese

Vitor Pamplona 4mo ago

The Fair and Compact Districts Act

Section 1. Definitions

As used in this act:

(A) "Voting District" means any geographic area established for the purpose of electing a representative to a public office.

(B) "Convex Shape" means a two-dimensional shape for which every straight line segment connecting any two points within the shape lies entirely inside the shape. Conversely, a shape that is not convex is referred to as non-convex or concave and contains at least one pair of points for which the line segment connecting them passes outside the shape's boundary.

Section 4. Requirements for Voting Districts

(A) All voting districts established within this jurisdiction must be contiguous.

(B) All voting districts must have a convex shape as defined in Section 3(B).

(C) The body responsible for drawing district lines shall certify that each district created or redrawn under their authority conforms to the requirements of this act.

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Discussion

vnprc 4mo ago

ok do maryland

vnprc 4mo ago

districts have to be ~equal size in terms of population

Vitor Pamplona 4mo ago

Super easy, just straighten all these lines first then move then left and right to get the same population size.

vnprc 4mo ago

🤣

Vitor Pamplona 4mo ago

I used to code convex finding algorithms as part of my masters. This is definitely easily solvable with the population in mind. :)

But it is going to be really hard to gerrymander and do convex optimization at the same time.

Karadenizli 4mo ago

Make sure to allow exceptions for water and state borders. Your current draft would make districts impossible based on the shape of the state borders.

Also, just my opinion, but ignoring roads and streets is kinda against the point of districts. Any attempt to remove gerrymandering just turns local representation into a state level popular vote. It kinda becomes pointless when most issues are binary along party lines but the idea is that different populations have different interests that need to be represented. For example, districts of rural farmers usually curve around and avoid cities. In your example, it would need to expand evenly to include part of the city or its suburbs.

This would most likely hit rural populations harder as many of the rural districts will hit a population center before reaching the required size. There will probably be a rural district on each side of every small city that would be outweighed by their suburban votes. I'd like to see a map made this way to be sure, but I suspect this will be the case.

The current system is completely arbitrary but the districts still somewhat follow demographic voting blocks.

IMO it should at least follow streets or have an exclusion for highways to be treated like water and ignored in the convexity requirement. One thought is to have district "center points" and assign every address to the district center closest to it, measured by shortest driving distance along roads. This will at least keep neighborhoods more together and will prevent something like a single HOA neighborhood from being split into 2 or 3 different districts by a geographic straight line.