Is there a correlation between irregularly-shaped political districts and gerrymandering?
A district’s compactness (or lack of compactness) is often used as a proxy for gerrymandering. Academics, state legislatures and Supreme Court Justices have all cited compactness, along with contiguity, as a “traditional” districting principle. Unfortunately, the legal standard for compactness has been similar to Justice Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity: I know it when I see it. Some proponents of redistricting reform, most prominently Daniel D. Polsby and Robert D. Popper, have advocated strongly for the use of quantitative compactness standards as an evaluative tool in the redistricting process. A low quantitative compactness score can serve as a useful indicator that a particular district shape is irregular, and this may point to a gerrymander at work. But a non-compact district might not have been gerrymandered at all. No mathematical technique–such as the generation of a compactness score–is likely to adequately correct for all of the geographical and social variability
