Redistricting

Redistricting is in the news again and the issue is complicated by the way districts are determined. In most cases the district boundaries are set by the state legislature and therein lies the problem. If the legislature is dominated by one party, then politics determines the rules. The number of congressional seats is set at 435 and the population is divided by that number to arrive at the number of people in each district. The population in the last census (2020) was 331 million so each district should have 760,000 people but that is not the case. Districts range in size from 550,000 to over one million. A fair and simple way to determine the boundaries would be to use a computer analysis. A population density map could be fed into the computer and then lines could be drawn targeting 765,000 per district. While this is the logical way, it would not suffice because this removes the politics and the politicians would not like that and they would be the ones who have to make the change. It is the same situation with term limits.