<story><title>What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?</title><url>https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/11/15949750/research-gerrymandering-wisconsin-supreme-court-partisanship</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bradleyjg</author><text>This is an interesting article, but the headline is deceptive. The article doesn&amp;#x27;t answer that question it poses. The reason the Supreme Court granted cert is because the court below, which in this case was a special 3 judge district court panel whose opinions skip the Court of Appeals, ruled in favor of the challengers.&lt;p&gt;If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this lower court opinion would have in effect (but not technically) stood as a nationwide precedent modifying existing Supreme Court decisions.</text></comment>
<story><title>What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?</title><url>https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/11/15949750/research-gerrymandering-wisconsin-supreme-court-partisanship</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>j_s</author><text>Re-posting my comment on &lt;i&gt;Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with Geometry&lt;/i&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=13713252&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=13713252&lt;/a&gt; 4 months ago:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;[...] a need for expert witnesses who understand the mathematical concepts applicable to gerrymandering. To meet that need, she’s spearheaded the creation of a five-day summer program at Tufts [the first in a series of regional trainings] that aims to train mathematicians to do just that&lt;p&gt;[...] over 900 people have indicated their interest by signing up for a mailing list&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tufts.us15.list-manage.com&amp;#x2F;subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7aa8ab22ea62&amp;amp;id=a979bdf71d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tufts.us15.list-manage.com&amp;#x2F;subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;Quoting from the end of that article, calling out the &amp;quot;efficiency gap&amp;quot; as the spark for work towards a mathematical definition of &amp;quot;compactness&amp;quot; satisfying districting requirements in a way that is convincingly explainable as fair:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Recently there was a big media sensation in Wisconsin around something called the &amp;quot;efficiency gap.&amp;quot; It was a new metric of partisan gerrymandering that, for the first time, a court said they liked. The way it was devised was that the people who created it, they went back and they read all of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s written decisions about measuring gerrymandering. By reading his words and by reading what he said he found convincing and less convincing, they designed a statistic to appeal to him.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>