To: The United States House of Representatives and The United States Senate
Give Justice Kennedy a way to distinguish gerrymandering
Justice Kennedy recently wrote that he would like a way to identify gerrymandered districts. We, the undersigned would like to provide him with just such a principle: if the border of an electoral district contains more than 12 edges, or if the square of the perimeter exceeds 25 times its area, the district has been gerrymandered. This is not to say that such mathematics should override the obligations of electoral maps to conform with the Voting Rights Act, but that it will quickly and reliably identify districts which are unnecessarily complex in shape, and which are measurably non-compact.
Why is this important?
I write this petition so that we can build a coalition against districts of unusual shape, which often characterize gerrymandered electoral maps. Care will have to be taken to identify what constitutes an edge in the border of a district, to distinguish between borders which coincide with bodies of water, or external political boundaries, which may include sharp changes of direction, but which should be considered as part of a single edge -- as opposed to artificially legislated edges, whose complexity is engineered without regard to geographical barriers.