A volunteer effort to map out geometrically compact Congressional districts with a simple algorithm reports that “Illinois has some of the weirdest districts I’ve seen.” While this particular guy defines compactness slightly differently from me (he minimizes distance to center of district, I’d minimize the perimeter to area ratio), it’s still a neat exercise.

Perhaps that weirdness accounts for the status-quo result reported by “Garance Franke-Ruta”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w061106&s=franke-ruta111006 in TNR:

bq. [besides Duckworth] “six other Democratic challengers also went down to defeat in Illinois, and the only new Democratic congressman elected in the state won his race in an open contest in a traditionally Democratic district.”