How do you keep the “distinquished citizens” from playing politics with it.
The only way to truly remove the politics is to have a mathematical formula that divide the land and population into districts. And this formula gets followed no matter what.
The problem with that plan is that it could result in Congressional and legislative delegation completely out of whack for the state trend.
In Texas by the 1990’s, Republicans were winning statewide. By the early 2000’s they had every statewide seat, sometimes by extremely healthy margins. Yet until 2002 (if I rememebr correctly) the Congressional delegation was still majority Democrat, and the State House was still Democrat. Republicans then drew the seats, and after customary lawsuits, Republicans ran the state. Call it gerrymandering if you will, but the party that was winning elections took power. That is as it should be.
I agree. The formula should be something like: minimize the length of the edges of every district, so that the total length (of all district edges) is as small as possible.
Exceptions should be made for political boundaries: counties, cities, etc -- so that a city or county is not split between two districts unless there is simply no way to draw the districts equally without doing so.
However, I don't know how you require every state to do it, without trampling on state's rights.
As in zip codes? I could see that. District 1 consists of zip codes x, y and z. But wouldn’t that lead to interference with the zip code (or whatever) establishment process?