A settlement in a lawsuit against the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission means the panel is getting ready to end its operations for the time being.

A new slate of commissioners will be selected after the 2020 Census, to redraw the state’s legislative and congressional districts.

And, if the past is any guide, those maps will be the subject of a fair amount of litigation.

There are lots of complaints with the process, both here and elsewhere, but two of them relate directly to the practice of gerrymandering: packing, in which lots of members of one party are crammed into a single district — and cracking, in which a few of a party’s voters are drawn into a bunch of districts, diluting their votes.

But what if a simple math equation could end all that? Clive Thompson writes about it. He’s a columnist and a contributing writer for Wired Magazine.