A bipartisan solution to gerrymandering

It's been well-known for a long time that the fairest way for two people who don't trust each other to share a cake is "I cut, you choose": the first person cuts the cake and the second chooses which part they want.

We have a two-party system in the United States (as much as we might prefer otherwise), so why not apply it to political districts?

A Partisan Solution to Partisan Gerrymandering by Maxwell Palmer, Benjamin Schneer and Kevin DeLuca, proposes exactly that.

we propose a new method for drawing district maps, the Define–Combine Procedure, that substantially reduces partisan gerrymandering without requiring a neutral third party or bipartisan agreement. One party defines a map of 2𝑁 equal-population contiguous districts. Then the second party combines pairs of contiguous districts to create the final map of N districts. Using real-world geographic and electoral data, we employ simulations and map-drawing algorithms to show that this procedure dramatically reduces the advantage conferred to the party controlling the redistricting process and leads to less-biased maps without requiring cooperation or non-partisan actors.

via Bruce Schneier via Bill Morris