Partisan gerrymandering — the practice of drawing voting districts to give one political party an unfair edge — is one of the few political issues that voters of all stripes find common cause in condemning. Voters should choose their elected officials, the thinking goes, rather than elected officials choosing their voters. The Supreme Court agrees, at least in theory: that partisan gerrymandering, if extreme enough, is unconstitutional. Yet in that same ruling, the court declined to strike down two Indiana maps under consideration, even though both “used every trick in the book,” according to a. And in the decades since then, the court has failed to throw out a single map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. “If you’re never going to declare a partisan gerrymander, what is it that’s unconstitutional?” said, a political scientist and statistician at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The problem is that there is no such thing as a perfect map — every map will have some partisan effect. Zapreschennie modi na world of warplanes download. So how much is too much? In 2004, in that rejected nearly every available test for partisan gerrymandering, the Supreme Court called this an “unanswerable question.” Meanwhile, as the court wrestles with this issue, maps are growing increasingly biased, many experts say. Download inazuma eleven 3 sekai e no chousen the ogre english.

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Even so, the current moment is perhaps the most auspicious one in decades for reining in partisan gerrymandering. New quantitative approaches — measures of how biased a map is, and algorithms that can create millions of alternative maps — could help set a concrete standard for how much gerrymandering is too much. Last November, some of these new approaches helped convince a United States district court to — the first time in more than 30 years that any federal court has struck down a map for being unconstitutionally partisan. That case is now bound for the Supreme Court.

“Will the Supreme Court say, ‘Here is a fairness standard that we’re willing to stand by?’” Cho said. “If it does, that’s a big statement by the court.” So far, political and social scientists and lawyers have been leading the charge to bring quantitative measures of gerrymandering into the legal realm. But mathematicians may soon enter the fray. A workshop being held this summer at Tufts University on the “” will, among other things, train mathematicians to serve as expert witnesses in gerrymandering cases. The workshop has drawn more than 1,000 applicants. “We have just been floored at the response that we’ve gotten,” said, a mathematician at Tufts who is one of the workshop’s organizers.

Quantifying Bizarreness Gerrymanderers rig maps by “packing” and “cracking” their opponents. In packing, you cram many of the opposing party’s supporters into a handful of districts, where they’ll win by a much larger margin than they need. In cracking, you spread your opponent’s remaining supporters across many districts, where they won’t muster enough votes to win. For instance, suppose you’re drawing a 10-district map for a state with 1,000 residents, who are divided evenly between Party A and Party B. You could create one district that Party A will win, 95 to 5, and nine districts that it will lose, 45 to 55.

Even though the parties have equal support, Party B will win 90 percent of the seats. Such gerrymanders are sometimes easy to spot: To pick up the right combination of voters, cartographers may design districts that meander bizarrely. This was the case with the “salamander”-shaped district signed into law in 1812 by Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry — the incident that gave the practice its name. In an assortment of racial gerrymandering cases, the Supreme Court has “stated repeatedly that crazy-looking shapes are an indicator of bad intent,” Duchin said. Yet it’s one thing to say bizarre-looking districts are suspect, and another thing to say precisely what bizarre-looking means. Many states require that districts should be reasonably “compact” wherever possible, but there’s no one mathematical measure of compactness that fully captures what these shapes should look like.