Bizarrely shaped voting districts are frequently lambasted as likely instances of gerrymandering. In order to systematically identify such instances, researchers have devised several tests for so-called geographic compactness (i.e., shape niceness). We demonstrate that under certain conditions, a party can gerrymander a competitive state into geographically compact districts to win an average of over 70% of the districts. Our results suggest that geometric features alone may fail to adequately combat partisan gerrymandering.
Boris Alexeev and Dustin G. Mixon
Partisan gerrymandering with geographically compact districts
![]() | Direct PDF link |
![]() | arXiv online preprint server version |