Recently redrawn Ind. legislative districts pass four key compactness tests

Indiana’s new legislative and congressional districts passed a key test in determining whether they are gerrymandered or not, according to an article from the journal “InContext.”

Legislative districts can be a convenient way for politicians to sway the political make up of a legislature by including as many areas that are as politically-friendly as possible to one party or another in legislative districts. Gerrymandering is the process of giving a certain political party an advantage over the other in an area by changing the political district boundaries.

District boundaries must be redrawn to reflect population changes after every census.

A way to avoid gerrymandering is to make the districts more compact. This reduces the chances the districts were drawn with purely political intentions. It also helps by keeping people who live in the same area in one district and excluding those who live far away and might not have the same political needs and concerns.

There are four different mathematical scoring methods of determining whether a legislative district isn’t stretched too thin. On average, Indiana’s new congressional and state legislative districts improved dramatically on all of the different methods’ scores, the article in “InContext” found.

Indiana’s former 4th Congressional District was a particularly good example of gerrymandering.

It included areas stretching from north of Lafayette in north-central Indiana and then stretched via a very thin strip of land all the way down to a large area south of Bloomington in southern Indiana, both rather Republican-leaning areas.

This example of gerrymandering was heavily criticized as one of the most gerrymandered districts in the country.

The 4th District showed the most improvement and is now a compact area in the north-central part of the state.

— Zach Ammerman