Sam Wang has this article about gerrymandering in the New York Times. He says there are several statistical methods that should allow anyone to measure when partisan gerrymandering is excessive. He hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court will outlaw extreme partisan gerrymandering some day.
ANNOUNCEMENT UNITED COALITION
Monterey California USA
Palmer Cain (Republican) for California State Senate District 17 elected as 22nd Candidate in 2016 United Coalition.
District 17 covers San Louis Obispo, Monterey, Santa Cruz and Santa Clara Counties.
Please stand by for updates and forthcoming annpuncements.
http://www.usparliament.org/pdc.php
Wang confuses skew with intentional gerrymandering.
In essence he assumes that the population is normally distributed with a peak in the center and then trailing off into areas that are more Democratic or Republican in an even fashion. This is an erroneous assumption.
Democrats tend to be extremely concentrated. In any major city, you will find areas that are 90%+ Democratic. You won’t find the equivalent Republican areas in the suburbs, in rural areas, even Idaho.
This distribution results in the median being more Republican than the mean.
If districts perform relative to the mean, that suggests the possibility og deliberate gerrymandering, particularly when there is corroborating evidence such as there is in Arizona.