A student project on political redistricting by computer

On November 17, 1970, the editorial section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch featured an editorial which urged that the current spate of political redistricting problems (required by law after each census) be accomplished by computer, rather than by the usual partisan haggling and maneuvering. The author of this paper seized upon this editorial and suggested to the Washington University Student Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery that the problem of political redistricting by computer would make an excellent project for presentation in the Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science's annual Engineers Weekend activities. The Chapter then decided to undertake such a project, and the chapter president and this author prepared a response to the Post-Dispatch's editorial, in which it was pointed out that the use of computers in treating political redistricting problems involved far more than merely “feeding” the computer with the relevant population data;