Chester County Includes Nation's Most Gerrymandered Districts

By JUSTIN HEINZE and BROOKLYN LOWERY

Montgomery County may include some of the nation’s most gerrymandered Congressional districts.

Specifically, Pennsylvania’s 1st, 2nd, 6th, 7th, and 13th Congressional districts received very gerrymandering high scores in a recent ranking of districts across the nation.

All of those districts scored above 85, and many above 90, on the 1-100 scale, with 1 representing the least gerrymandered district.

Taken together, those districts represent nearly all of Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties. Of the greater region, only Bucks County’s 8th district received a low 64.53 score.

The 7th District, covering most of Delaware County but then winding in an incongruous way to reach into Chester, Montgomery, Berks, and Lebanon counties, led the way with a 96.05 score. That makes it the third most gerrymandered district nationally, trailing only the likes of Florida’s 5th District (96.15) and Maryland’s 3rd (96.79).

This information is sourced from a 2014 Washington Post article in which Christopher Ingraham looked at the compactness -- “a measure of how irregular [a district’s] shape is, as determined by the ratio of the area of the district to the area of a circle with the same perimeter” -- of districts across the country to determine which of the country’s Congressional districts were likely the “most-gerrymandered” for the 113th Congress.

Several other districts in southeastern Pennsylvania scored above an 85, a distinction reserved for only a few other small regions around the country: a bulk of North Carolina, a spot in southern Texas, part of West Virginia and Appalachia, and very small sections of Louisiana and Arizona.

According to Ingraham, “Districts that follow a generally regular shape tend to be compact, while those that have a lot of squiggles and offshoots and tentacle-looking protuberances tend to score poorly on this measure.”

Confused? Here’s the deal:

Take 24 inches of yarn and make a circle with it. Now tightly pack as many Gummi Bears as possible inside that circle to represent the area inside the circle.

Next, take that same 24-inch piece of yarn and make a funky shape with it -- go crazy with the tiny offshoots and weird divots and bump-outs. Try to fit all your circle Gummi Bears inside your new shape.

There are some mathematical calculations that would then follow, but the bottom line is that you generally can’t fit as many Gummi Bears inside an irregular shape because its area is usually less than the area of a regular shape.

Overall, North Carolina and Maryland were “essentially tied for the honor of most-gerrymandered state.”

Editor’s note: Jonathan Lowery contributed to this article.

Image of “Pennsylvania Congressional Districts, 113th Congress” by Department of the Interior - National Atlas of the United States (http://nationalatlas.gov/printable/congress.html). Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.