Surely few here will be surprised at this report from the Orlando Sentinel
Jonathan Katz, a social science and statistics professor at the California Institute of Technology, testified in the lawsuit Tuesday that Florida's congressional map was heavily biased toward electing Republicans despite the state's Democratic-edge in voters. ...
...Katz is part of a group of political scientists considered among the nation's foremost experts on redistricting -- developing a standard for evaluating the partisan bias of maps known as "partisan symmetry" which has been used for years by scientists and the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether states were intentionally tilting electoral playing fields to help political parties or incumbents.
Katz concluded the bias in the maps was the worst he had ever seen,
twice as bad as Texas'. He was able to identify skewed results in both the 2010 and '12 elections.
While Katz did not consider the intent of the people who drew the new districts, another scientist did.
Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden also testified Tuesday about research he had done along with Jowei Chen of the University of Michigan which found it "virtually impossible" that the Legislature had drawn the current map without some intentional level of partisan bias.
“The plan introduced by the Legislature is an extreme statistical outlier," Rodden told the court.
Yes, we are very aware of how far out the Repubs are by now, especially the Floriduh ones. I am afraid the main thing to speculate about is whether this gets any significant exposure beyond the Orlando Sentinel.
Then there is the question of whether further exposure will register with voters. Sometimes I wonder if the younger voters, who have had American Government classes more recently, could be more susceptible than the older, more cynical non voters.
Anybody aware if another state has a court case (in process, filed...) on gerrymandering?