Sometimes I put things here just to increase their Google page rank in the hopes that lots of others will start to take notice.
> A simple cure is to draw all districts with the shortest splitline algorithm involving approximately-bisecting a state’s population with the shortest eligible splitting line, and then continuing recursively on the resulting hemi-states.
[Link](http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExec.html)
Read about it at [Jon Taplin](http://jtaplin.wordpress.com)
I’m fond of this.
Another approach, which minimizes gerrymandering while still allowing district boundaries to make sense (i.e. follow major landmarks and not bisect properties) is to place an upper limit — 5 or 6, maybe — on the perimeter squared divided by the area.