Moon Duchin in her very informative article “Geometry v. Gerrymandering” in the November issue of Scientific American, talks about how mathematicians are developing forensics to identify political maps that disenfranchise voters. This is a must-read for the Utah Independent Commission on Redistricting.
It is assumed by a lot of people, including the experts, that if you have concise regular boundaries for political districts, you eliminate gerrymandering. This is far from the case. There are so many ways to district a state that evaluation has become a massive data challenge for even the fastest computers, according to the article.