The latest and greatest reform effort heading into the 2020 post-census redistricting was the shift by a number of states towards an effort to take the politics out of redistricting through redistricting commissions. In some places this seems to be working, but in a number of instances the commissions are either deadlocked or fragmenting. Perhaps it’s worth considering an alternative approach that creates a fair playing field for the parties without need to try to find (and the perils of trying to identify and appoint) fair and non-partisan members of a commission. This is the cake cutting algorithm approach. A team of researches at CMU presented a paper a couple of years back that outlined the way this would work. Perhaps in one of the states where redistricting commissions have broken down, it might be worthwhile to give this protocol a try. Here are two links to popular press articles discussing their “I cut you freeze” application of the cake cutting idea. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/theres-another-way-to-solve-gerrymandering-its-as-simple-as-cake\/2018\/02\/15\/69e47508-0531-11e8-94e8-e8b8600ade23_story.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n https:\/\/slate.com\/news-and-politics\/2018\/02\/how-the-i-cut-you-choose-method-of-redistricting-could-fix-a-broken-system.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeff Ely seems to have independently identified a similar solution. https:\/\/www.jeffely.com\/post\/a-cake-cutting-solution-to-gerrymandering<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n A less iterative approach that is none the less in a similar spirit is proposed in this paper: https:\/\/maxwellpalmer.com\/research\/Palmer_Schneer_DeLuca_Define_Combine_Procedure.pdf<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The latest and greatest reform effort heading into the 2020 post-census redistricting was the shift by a number of states towards an effort to take the politics out of redistricting through redistricting commissions. In some places this seems to be… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":817,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","wds_primary_category":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fs.wp.odu.edu\/jrichman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fs.wp.odu.edu\/jrichman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fs.wp.odu.edu\/jrichman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fs.wp.odu.edu\/jrichman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/817"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fs.wp.odu.edu\/jrichman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fs.wp.odu.edu\/jrichman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":224,"href":"https:\/\/fs.wp.odu.edu\/jrichman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions\/224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fs.wp.odu.edu\/jrichman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fs.wp.odu.edu\/jrichman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fs.wp.odu.edu\/jrichman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}