Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics.
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I've got to say, having been involved in campaigns to end gerrymandering, there is a subset of people who can be bothered to learn/care about how it works, and many others who don't. Your process sounds even more complex and time consuming, and I don't see it being effective because the general public won't be invested in it. Like voting for traffic court judges but even more confusing.
More importantly I also think you're underestimating the complexity of reconciling hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods per state, each a ranked choice list of different variants. One person will pick a boundary, and then some other person will pick a boundary that conflicts with it, multiply that by a dozen million and then what, some algorithm will decide which lines are correct? And then the resulting districts still won't have an equal number of constituents? That violates the one person one vote principle, which is part of the issue with gerrymandering and the electoral college.
My goal here was to make that irrelevant. Districts emerge naturally rather than being researched and drawn. Yes there's complexity, but not in the surface. On surface it's just a paint-by-numbers of the area around your house.
Pretty much. Optimization algorithms are powerful. By ranking addresses like a topographical map rather than just drawing homogenous districts, you automatically have the data needed to refine the resulting districts. The whole system basically amounts to a matrix of weighted preferences, which is the one main thing current "AI" is actually good at resolving.
They already aren't. Like I said, some neighborhoods will be bigger than others, so some boroughs will have more neighborhoods than others, by the time you get to the county level every district should be almost exactly the same. At the neighborhood level, equal sizes is less important than geographic relevance. By the scale that equal representation matters, you have it.
I can't claim the system is perfect, but it's hard to imagine a better one. Every model has limitations.