I wonder about the agenda of this kind of partitioning scheme, though.
It seems to be that before partitioning scholars suggest partitioning strategies, they must agree on their objective.
Here in the US, a commonly held belief is that a fair district partioning must reflect the makeup of the region's voters. In other words, if a state is split 55-45, then the districts must be formed in such a way so that the representatives are split about 55-45 as well.
But, if the 55-45 were instead evenly distributed amongst all districts, you'd get all districts with a 55-45 majority, or, unanimous representation from the 55 group. This would be less representative than the most extreme gerrymanders.
I would bet that date-based partitioning would be extremely susceptible to that problem.
Curt
On May 13, 2005, at 11:25 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The Institut des Statistiques du Quebec provided me with the repartition of people according to their date of birth.
Using this information to build non-geographical districts based on date of birth, month and some modulo of the year provided the following results:
for 125 seats (as in the current Assemblee Nationale), one can obtained 125 consecutive districts with a +/- 10% variation. Consecutive means that persons are regrouped using successive birthdays (like january 1st, 2nd and 3rd). Using non-consecutive birthdays to minimize the variations, one can obtain districts with the same population size within a +/- 0.1% margin.
Of course in both case a special treatment for people born a february 29th puts them with christmas born persons which are less common.
Birth dates are only one example of how to build non-geography based districts, "astrological" districts in this case.
Stéphane Rouillon.
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