Gerrymanders and Gerrygons: Microcomputer-Assisted Spatial Analytic Approaches to Vote Dilution Detection

Abstract

When the Supreme Court made one person, one vote, the law of the land, the art of gerrymandering enjoyed a renaissance. The simultaneous advent of computers turned an old art into a new technology; yet the same technology, guided by an understanding of the complicated legal, historical, statistical, technical, methodological, and normative issues, may be employed to detect gerrymanders. Here we discuss the capabilities and limitations of common software and hardware in gerrymander construction and detection, and present the framework of a general strategy for using computers in the field of apportionment. Keywords: artificial intelligence, BASIC, gerrymander, malapportionment, mapping, PROLOG vote dilution, microcomputers.

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