Lab 14: Gerrymandering

In this week's lab we had an assignment on Gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is when voting districts are drawn in a way that favours one party over another. In this lab we had to look at compactness and community as factors for determining if a district is gerrymandered or not.

Most heavily gerrymandered districts have huge perimeter to area ratio. They will end up long and snakey. This can be detected by looking at the district's compactness. I used the Polsby-Popper method to evaluate compactness. This compares the area to perimeter as if the district was a circle the higher the score the more compact the district. I have included a screenshot of what I found to be the least compact district below. It is Congressional District 12 of North Carolina.

A lot of heavily gerrymandered districts also chop up counties that should be contiguous and will end up being made up of a lot of counties. Congressional District 1 also of North Carolina (shown below) is a district made up of bits of counties that don't even neighbor each other. It is necessary for some districts to contain multiple counties due to population sizes or even portion of counties. LA county for example is very densely populated. It needs to be split up because a single district couldn't contain it. District 1 of NC on the other hand contains little bits of many counties and few counties in their entirety.