What 60 years of political gerrymandering looks like

By Christopher Ingraham, WashPost
May 21 at 8:07 am

Last week I wrote about the most gerrymandered congressional districts in the United States, as measured by how geometrically compact they are. I found that districts in some states are a bit of a hot mess, particularly in North Carolina and Maryland. The natural follow-up question: have they always been that way?

To answer that, I grabbed historic district "shapefiles" and did the same geometric analysis for a handful of states, going back to the 83rd Congress, which convened in 1953. In nearly every state, the average gerrymander index value -- that is, the average of the gerrymander scores for all districts in a given state -- has risen substantially since then.

Here's a look at a handful of key states:

(More here.)