The Wall Street Journal is reporting that even with all the concern around gerrymandering that in reality the upcoming redistricting probably won’t have much affect on upcoming elections. Gary King is mentioned as having written a paper “that helped demonstrate the relative impotence of partisan redistricting” yet “he favors the efforts to create a statistical method that would replace it.” I personally am always for using math and hard numbers to solve any problem whenever possible.
The article also mentioned a “conference last year in Washington, D.C., researchers proposed alternatives.” David Epstein presented a paper at that conference that Andy Gelman and I worked on.
While the article quoted one of Dr. Gelman’s papers it unfortunately did not mention him, or any of us by name. However, the accompanying blog post did mention both Dr.s Gelman and Epstein with specific quotes of them and their work.
Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.
A bit amazing that this is spruopted by a House majority. It is good government, and I support it. It does make me curious, however, that so many Republican incumbents are willing to join Democrats in support. Are they worried about a Democrat-controlled legislature emerging in 2020, and then it doing in reverse what the Republicans just did to jerrymander districts, only next time without US Dept. of Justice redistricting oversight, thereby exacting payback for the over-reaching of this Republican government by undoing its work?