Redistricting by itself isn’t bad, gerrymandering is. In California, we don’t do gerrymandering, there’s a committee of four Democrats, four Republicans, and two independents that all have to work together to redistrict the maps.
Eh...having an "algorithm" figure it out isn't a panacea. After all, someone writes the algorithm. All that does is shift the responsibility to a black box that only a few people know how it actually works, and give the illusion of impartiality when algorithms often operate on the biases we give them.
The problem is not the transparency, it’s about the process of choosing who write the algorithm, what factors are prioritized, and how it gets updated. Stating that it will be “open-source” does nothing to address those questions.
The current process of explicitly partisan redistributing is also 100% transparent. Every Congressional hearing is public. Anyone can get the transcripts, staff notes, and review every version of a bill as it goes from introduction to floor vote. All the litigation around maps is similarly public record. But just because you know who, what, when, where, and why a problem exists does not mean you can fix it.
It does though because you can have experts brought in by both parties as well as independent experts brought in to validate the algorithm does what it does.
The current process is transparent but at the end of the day it's five or six people with different biases for each state. An algorithm implements uniformity across the entire country. You can have a non-partisan committee set the initial inputs and revamp them every X number of years.
This is a zero sum problem. All the possible inputs are a known state so you can mathematically create an optimal distribution.
I agree with the intention, but then who gets to write that code/create the algorithm? And of those written/created, who gets to decide which one is the "fairest?" What are the emergency valves when the algorithm does something unintentional? What if the code written is sabotaged, and can we depend on our usual tech illiterate electorate to know when something is wrong, and how to solve it?
Not to say its a bad idea in itself, but the buck has to stop somewhere in having someone make a decision, a human decision on how these districts are drawn. A human using a digital code to draw it is still a product of human decision making.
the idea that computers and algorithms are immune to bias is dangerous. algorithms are just as fallible to human bias as we are. algorithms are, after all, created by people and trained on data created by people..
however, unlike us, algorithms don't have the ability to address nuanced context unless specifically programmed to do so.
there are certain districts that are gerrymandered in order to preserve specific minority voices in Congress, specifically to keep predominantly black communities to be grouped in their own district instead of spreading them between other districts.(this process, while allowed under the Voters Right Act, has been abused before in order to further dilute black communities' representation. most southern states with large black populations tend to abuse it)
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u/h0tfr1es May 27 '23
Redistricting by itself isn’t bad, gerrymandering is. In California, we don’t do gerrymandering, there’s a committee of four Democrats, four Republicans, and two independents that all have to work together to redistrict the maps.