There was an interesting new post on the subject of gerrymandering at the Hill by Staff Writer Marty Johnson. Take a look at this excerpt:

Now voting rights groups are sounding the alarm about future gerrymandering — the redrawing of congressional districts to heavily favor one party over the other.

“A great way to suppress voters is redistricting,” China Dickerson, Forward Majority’s national political director, told The Hill. “Drawing the lines in ways that aren’t truly representative or not truly equitable … You draw these crazy lines so that all Republicans are in one place. Or you bring Republicans into districts that are [predominantly] Black and brown — essentially blue.”

Researchers at the University of Vermont have recently designed a new mathematical approach to judge when gerrymandering political districts go beyond fairness and into the manipulation of voting. A team led by UVM mathematician Gregory S. Warrington published the new tool in the Election Law Journal under the title, “Quantifying Gerrymandering Using the Vote Distribution”.

Warrington is a star researcher with an expertise in algebra at the University of Vermont’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics, a branch of UVM with a “long and proud tradition of excellence in teaching undergraduate students as well as an international reputation for world-class research and mentoring graduate students to a Master’s degree or a Ph.D. degree”.

According to Warrington, “It’s called the declination. Because there is no single standard of what exactly gerrymandering is, there is no one way to test for it. But our measure is better in a lot of ways than the other approaches now being used.” According to a summary of this valuable work by Science Daily:

A mathematician has developed a new tool to identify gerrymandered voting districts. The research shows Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina strongly gerrymandered for Republicans, while Maryland’s and California’s voting districts have been strongly tipped in favor of Democrats. The new tool could be important in the wake of two Supreme Court cases now being considered that might outlaw certain partisan gerrymanders.

Other influential research on American gerrymandering by Warrington includes studies titled “Gerrymandering and the net number of US House seats won due to vote-distribution asymmetries” and “Introduction to the declination function for gerrymanders“. Also see related Democracy Chronicles articles like those on Redistricting, Election History, or even seen our section on American Democracy.