Because roads and other infrastructure affect everyone living in an area. Dividing representation within a geographical area would be confusing and would lead to more problems than I think it would solve.
Honestly, I think you should start counting in the upper right corner of a state and move out until you meet the population goal. Make a line, and then start counting again.
Gerrymandering is scary when you look at how they do this stuff. You will always end up, somewhere, where the people on one side of a street are in one district and the other side is in another. I don’t think that is avoidable.
“I think you should start counting in the upper right corner of a state and move out until you meet the population goal. Make a line, and then start counting again.”
In post 21, I suggested calculating from each possible corner to get the most compact outlying districts:
[Outlying] District creation calculations would be made from each corner of the state. The corner that results in minimal total (latitude + longitude) outlying district width would get chosen.
Another possibility is to allocate the major population centers first (say metro Pittsburgh and metro Philadelphia).
A major population center might be an area thought by the state legislature to have at least 100 100-seat or more airline flights per Monday. The criterion of having at least eight FCC licensed TV stations might be used instead.
Then if say the state has three other districts left, allocate out from the three largest metro TV station areas (say Scranton, Harrisburg and Erie).
Districts could then be minimized on the basis of minimizing the total latitudinal & longitudinal spread of districts not totally within 50 miles of a city center.
And as in post 21:
Finally, jurisdictions to get shifted between two districts at a time (without changing the districts’ latitude and longitude ratio by more than 10% each (or out to a county boundary if allowed by state law)) to minimize the number of jurisdictions contained in more than one district.
Why is TV so important? Because media buying and vote buying to get reelected are the primary concerns of members of Congress. However, TV time buying is no longer as important as it was in years past.
No system that makes it impossible for reelection campaigns to target voters will get accepted.
“Dividing representation within a geographical area would be confusing and would lead to more problems than I think it would solve.”
The Founding Fathers wanted the House of Representatives to be highly responsive to the voters.
At the time, Congress didn’t have the effective power to tax incomes and run up debt in the tens of trillions of dollars.
At the time, Congress wasn’t elected by people on the dole.