Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts
autoredistrict.org
Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts
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Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts
#2Districts themselves are the problem. They can be more "fair" than they are currently, but they can't overcome the fact that common interests and voting alignment are not exclusively geographic.
Removing districts, or enlarging them so the borders barely matter, and implementing ranked choice voting and proportional representation is a far, far better solution.
Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts
#3Districts themselves are the problem. They can be more "fair" than they are currently, but they can't overcome the fact that common interests and voting alignment are not exclusively geographic. Removing districts, or enlarging them so the borders barely matter, and implementing ranked choice voting and proportional representation is a far, far better solution.
How is that working out for the Senate?
Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts
#4These things are all just opinion - there is no such thing as a "fair" district.
Or do you not really agree with this concept? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
Voting blocks are how they are... and these kinds of changes will have sweeping, unpredictable consequences. I find it humorous that people have a big enough ego to think that they could get it "right".
More generally, what people consider "fair" voting policies are what benefit their political party.
Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts
#5Districts themselves are the problem. They can be more "fair" than they are currently, but they can't overcome the fact that common interests and voting alignment are not exclusively geographic. Removing districts, or enlarging them so the borders barely matter, and implementing ranked choice voting and proportional representation is a far, far better solution.
How is that working out for the Senate?
Horribly. States borders are one of the worst districting systems imaginable, and the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Senate makes it a huge, and basically insurmountable, problem.
Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts
#6These things are all just opinion - there is no such thing as a "fair" district. Or do you not really agree with this concept? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority Voting blocks are how they are... and these kinds of changes will have sweeping, unpredictable consequences. I find it humorous that people have a big enough ego to think that they could get it "right". More generally, what people consider…
You seem to be suggesting that tyranny of the minority would be no less preferable to tyranny of the majority, while it seems strictly worse: it still isn't properly representing everyone, but now the unrepresented population is larger...
Don't let an improvement not being perfect prevent any improvements from happening.
Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts
#7The website is down, so I don't have much to say. But I will be very interested in how the authors define 'fairness' for this sort of problem.
Algorithms are fair right guys? It can't be biased if it's just math. \s
Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts
#8Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts
#9These things are all just opinion - there is no such thing as a "fair" district. Or do you not really agree with this concept? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority Voting blocks are how they are... and these kinds of changes will have sweeping, unpredictable consequences. I find it humorous that people have a big enough ego to think that they could get it "right". More generally, what people consider…
Exactly.
Suppose you have a state with five districts and the state is 60% Brown Party and 40% Black Party.
If you draw five districts that are each 60% Brown, you get five Brown representatives even though 40% of the state is Black.
If you draw districts along party lines then you get three Brown representatives and two Black representatives, but the districts are totally uncompetitive and the representatives from both parties can steamroll everybody because none of them ever have any chance of losing their district no matter what they do.
There are also several other options, and most of those are even worse.
Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts
#10This is a mostly great idea.
The only thing I can't get behind is their mechanism for competitiveness. While it sounds like a feature that is desirable, I suspect that in reality, it serves to provide the minority candidates with disproportionately high influence.
I feel like it introduces the same problem that the electorial college does, where a swing of 10,000 votes in one region can be used to negate 100,000 votes in another.
I think a better target would be to optimize for for minimal difference in demographic between neighboring districts. That way districts act as kind of a gradient, where neighboring districts influence each other slightly, keeping each district closer to the overall political affiliation of the region.