Here is a solution for re-districting shenanigans: pass a law where every district in the nation must have a convex shape.
Discussion
define convex shape in legalese
prior art for inspiration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
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.
ok do maryland
districts have to be ~equal size in terms of population
Super easy, just straighten all these lines first then move then left and right to get the same population size.
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.
Coastal and other natural borders are fractal in nature making it impossible for them to enclose a convex shape.
the length and width of the district shall not differ by more than a 2:1 ratio and shall have no concavities or extrusions greater than 1 mile from the base polygonal shape except where constrained by geography and state lines.
This illustrates one of the problems with representative democracy. Who is going to vote himself out of a district in which an incumbent has 98% chance of re-election?
āHave aā instead of ābe a.ā Composition vs inheritance problem.
we did some zap tests on this noteā¦ we made six attempts toā”zap this note, at tron@theblackstack.net, over a period of 3 minutes. Six of the zaps were successfully paid... please check for 6 satoshis received. problem: we found that your lightning address server **did not* properly produce zap receipts, and/or didn't send the zap receipts to the relays specified in the zap. (the zap spec requires that the zap receipts be sent to the relays specified in the zap.) this means a nostr user who zaps you might not see a number appearing next to the ā” icon after zapping.... if you wanted to fix this... you could try getting a free rizful lightning address -- https://rizful.com ... if u get it set up, pls reply here so we can do this ā”zap test again.
I will look into the configuration as to why you did not receive receipts. My thanks for your tips, my apologies for the errād receipts, I will make adjustments.