[Ed_in_LA]

Neither side has "clean hands" when it comes to redistricting. Democrats screw Republicans in the states where they control the process, and Republicans screw Democrats in the states they control. Historically, the Democrats have done most of the screwing, e.g., California 1981 & Texas 1991, because they have been the dominant party at the state level until the 90's. Now that the GOP has at least an equal voice voice at the state level as the Dems, and complete control of many large states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida, they are doing some screwing of their own. Interestingly, in the state where the Dems had the biggest opportunity to screw the GOP this time around -- California, which the Dems control top to bottom and which has 55 districts, i.e., gerrymandering opportunities -- they acted fairly, giving themselves only a 1 seat gain, and did not seek to gerrymander a larger advantage than the state's demographics dictate.

A good way to judge how fair a state's congressional map is, is to look at the popular congressional statewide vote totals per party, e.g., 52% GOP, 48% Dem, and compare that ratio to the party composition of the state's congresiional delegation, e.g., 6 GOP/5 Dem. The closer the two ratios are to each other, the fairer, and less partisan the map, and converserly, the greater the disparity between the two ratios, the more partisan the map. The Texas map of the last ten years is an example of the latter -- the GOP gets more congressional votes statewide, but the Texas congressional delegation is currently split 17/13 in favor of the Dems. This was accomplished by packing Republican voters into a limited number of GOP supermajority districts, while spreading Dem voters across a greater number of modestly Dem districts. Arizona is another example of a partisanly gerrymandered state, only in the GOP's favor, with a 5/1 delegation split in favor of the GOP, in contrast to a popular statewide 60%/40% vote split in the GOP's favor. Texas was controlled by the Dems 10 years ago, and Arizona was controlled by the GOP, hence the partisan maps.

[supercat]

Democrats screw Republicans in the states where they control the process, and Republicans screw Democrats in the states they control.

I wonder if it would be possible to do some variation of the 'one cuts; the other chooses' strategy here? Obviously that strategy won't work in its normal form (since once the districts are cut out, it's the distribution of voters which 'chooses' who gets each district) but I wonder if something like it might. I'll have to think about that.

A good way to judge how fair a state's congressional map is, is to look at the popular congressional statewide vote totals per party, e.g., 52% GOP, 48% Dem, and compare that ratio to the party composition of the state's congresiional delegation, e.g., 6 GOP/5 Dem. The closer the two ratios are to each other, the fairer, and less partisan the map, and converserly, the greater the disparity between the two ratios, the more partisan the map.

While it might be 'fairest' for the ratio of party representation to be proportional to the ratio of party votes, a disparity between the two hardly indicates a 'partisan' map. Indeed, imagine that in a state with ten districts, voters were placed into the districts on the basis of the last digit of their SSN. Such a 'mapping' could hardly be regarded as 'partisan', but if either party holds more than 51-52% of the vote it's likely that such a 'mapping' would give that party 100% of the representation.