Proposed Redistricting Procedure

This seems to me to be quite an interesting question, and I thank you for proposing it. Gerrymandering, as you suggested, is popularly reviled. It immediately strikes one as manipulation of the system to benefit your own positions, and deny others the same opportunity. This is because that is it's exact function. I take it that in your proposal, in which all districts are gerrymandered in such a way that they are highly partisan, you presume that the benefit to particular positions is negated overall, in that setting up districts in such a partisan manner allows for a fairly appropriate number of each given party get elected to the legislature. For example in the gerrymandering setup that you gave instead of having the Democrats completely outnumber the republicans (despite their equal numbers) you would rather have it set up without having those "competitive" districts, such that each party is more accurately represented, such that the republicans get two districts, and the democrats get two districts. I agree that this set-up is preferrable to the example you outlined, and perhaps better than the gerrymandering practices as they happen now, but such a system is still offensive in that it inherently favors certain political positions over others. Namely the ideologies of the two major parties. It would heighten the partisan nature of representation which the gerrymandering of today already encourages. For in such situations each party could be assured that their candidate would win the district, and so the real contest would take place in the primaries, and being that the party members could be assured that a moderate is not needed to win a more ideologically pure candidate would be favored to win the primary, and would assuredly win the actual seat. Not only does this type of gerrymandering encourage more partisanship as such, but it essentially disenfranchises many of the 30%(as of October 2009) of Americans who do not claim party affiliation, and have no right to vote in party primaries. And similarly it would make it all the harder for third parties, or any alternative politicians, to have any chance of getting elected. Now on to your specific contentions. 1. Packing districts with like-minded voters maximizes voter happiness. - No it doesn't. First off from my understanding of "packing" it doesn't actually mean that the politicians pick people up and move them to another community to "pack" that district. Instead it entails drawing the district such that it is "packed" with those of a given affiliation. Being that people's "happiness" usually has very little to do with the boundaries of their congressional borders, but rather the kind of community in which they live, and being that "packing" doesn't actually change their community at all, I cannot understand how "packing" districts in such a way could make someone happier. 2. Packing districts with like-minded voters maximizes representation. -Given only two political ideologies, I agree. However there are not only two given ideologies, but instead millions of people with their own opinions on politics, and many patterns of political thought. What packing districts with like-minded voters really does is dismiss all independant voters, and those of minor parties. Further I would imagine it should also disenfranchise a lot of moderate republicans and democrats, as they would have a lot less say in their own parties. As I outlined above. 3. Non-competitive districts produce legislators that are more attentive to their constituency than competitive districts. - I suppose by this you mean that such legislators are more in agreement with their constituency, and perhaps more likely to give them goodies on the credit of Uncle Sam. I would suggest that being one with your partisan constituency, is not a good thing for our country, being that heightened partisanship makes for a less fruitful government (with one party overturning the last party's decision), and in the end grossly underrepresenting the large number of moderates and independants. Instead of attempting to fix the terrible, and inherently unfair, gerrymandering system which we have adopted across our country, I suggest we do away with it. As gerrymandering is in and of itself a manipulation due to self interest, if not of just one of the parties, of the two of their interests at the expense of independants. Instead we ought to place the electoral borders upon natural community borders, and in cases where this practice is insufficient, we also use computer programs to generate sections within those communities which are not based upon ideological boundaries.