As I write this on Thursday morning, the Census Bureau is preparing a press conference about local data from the Census that will be used for drawing political boundaries. This has always been a political process with parties pushing to gain election advantages, but the current Republican Party has kicked things up a notch by saying openly that they’ll gerrymander as much as they can get away with to ensure their success.

That, in turn, has led to an increased push for mathematical and algorithmic support when drawing boundaries, as MIT Technology Review reports (here).

I’ve been writing about this idea since 2017, when Tufts Prof. Moon Duchin, a mathematician whose specialty is metric geometry, started a course in the math of political divisions. She’s become quite well known since then; you can read my interview with her about how it came about here.

There have been a couple efforts to de-politicize the process of boundary drawing in New Hampshire but they have been killed by the legislature. The state GOP has been uniformly opposed and Democrats only half-heartedly behind them.