A little thought on drawing district borders that I've had kicking around for a while.

Putting aside all thoughts of gerymandering, let's start with: What is the point of dividing a state up into congressional districts?

And the answer, of course, is supposed to be to make sure that there is someone in Congress who is looking out for the interests of people in your community.

But what is your "community?"

Sure, it's the town, or the part of town you live in. But giving each individual town or neighborhood a representative isn't remotely feasible,

And odds are you probably don't spend all of your time within that tight little bubble around your home. You probably work, go shopping, and/or spend at least some of your leisure time in places outside of that bubble.

I know in addition to the town I live in, I work in another town about 10 miles away, I shop at stores in about 3 other towns at least once a week, I regularly visit my parents and sister who live in a town about 20 miles away, I go hiking, biking, and kayaking in a few different parks around the area, I have a membership to an independent movie theater in another town I regularly go to, I go to bars and restaurants in a few different towns, and to get to all these places, there's probably a half dozen or so towns I drive through but rarely have any reason to stop in.

All-told, it's maybe about 20 towns where I spend probably 90+ percent of my time, those are the areas that are important to me, and ideally if the world revolved around me, that would be one congressional district to make sure that my interests were being represented.

In my case, that's a pretty neat, compact little district, it more-or-less encompasses the towns along 3 major roads that run roughly parallel to each other, and it also happens to be roughly ⅓ of the county I live in.

And for a lot of people who live here, their home range is probably pretty similar. Like I said, it's along some major roads, and basically everything you could need or want can be found within those 20 or so towns.

That's not really enough people to make a congressional district out of (since the number of seats is capped at 435 currently, although when the nation was founded each district only represented about 30,000 people, and if we'd stuck with that ratio it would probably be enough to make about 3 or 4 districts)

I don't hate how my current district. It probably makes a lot of sense on paper, it's basically my county with about a third of a neighboring county tacked on.

That other county is somewhat rural and divided up into thirds. One third is with our county, one third is with another neighboring county, and those are probably the most urban/suburban parts of that county, and it kind of makes sense that they'd be lumped in with our largely suburban counties, the last third is the most rural, and it's lumped in with a few other very rural counties, so that makes sense.

However, I rarely go to that county, if the maps were being drawn specifically for me, it would probably include parts of 2 or 3 other counties before that one. I'd probably even be willing to cede parts of my county to another district in exchange for those parts.

And I think a lot of people here would agree with that. Those other areas I'd include are along major roads and easily reachable from our area, so a lot of people probably shop, work, etc. along those major arteries.

So my ideal district would kind of end up looking like a weird blob with some squiggly branches and nodes along major roads.

And I suspect it would be similar for a lot of people around the country.

So I kind of feel like the ideal way to draw these maps is to just ask people what they feel like their district should be.

Maybe present them with a map of their general area on a computer screen, and have them select towns they visit and drive through regularly until they've selected a big enough population to be a district

Then take all of those maps and sort of average them together and see what most people consider to be their community

Do it maybe every 5 or 10 years when people go to vote.