Scoundrel on Nostr: I have the solution to gerrymandering. Well, half of it. The goal of districts in a ...

I have the solution to gerrymandering. Well, half of it. The goal of districts in a political system is typically so that representation is more direct and closer to the population. Ideally, everyone in a population should have a representative that is close to what their preferences is. Or at the very least what nearby peoples' preferences are.

Gerrymandering is an obvious corruption of this ideal. Districts are drawn intentionally to contain disperate people in order to maximize the total number of people (of a particular political party) who AREN'T represented properly.

Currently there are ideas for making districting fairer on a party-vs-party basis, such as setting up bipartisan working groups in order to develop the districts. However, even if a districting system doesn't let either party get ahead, that doesn't mean that the districting system is actually GOOD. Districts don't exist for the sake of political parties, they exist for the sake of the voters!

We can imagine a system which is biased to group unlike people together, but in a way that doesn't favor either party. Sure, there are plenty of districts where Republicans don't have a voice because they are drowned out by the slightly more numerous Democrats in their district, but it's okay because there's another district where Democrats don't get any representation! Everyone suffers equally. The political parties benefit, but the people suffer.

The solution then is to do the exact opposite. You would use some sort of algorithm, perhaps using voter registration information, in order to draw districts which maximally groups people of similar political affiliation.

There are still issues with this idea, but the core of the idea is sound. For example, party affiliation is not the only measure of similarity between a group of people, or even the most important one. This technique still leaves room for more advanced forms of gerrymandering. Such as maximally grouping together people within a party who have different ideas of what their party's ideal candidate would look like. That way when the time comes, you can map out the districts where the most people of a particular party affiliation will simply choose to stay home out of disinterest in their own party's candidate.

Additionally, maximally grouping likeminded people together is not the only thing we care about when drawing districts. For example, we typically don't want districts that look like they were scribbled by a toddler with a crayon. The borders of districts should ideally be as smooth as reasonable, and should follow existing neighborhood lines and respect physical obstacles. ...which leads us to our next problem.

Every additional variable we add to our algorithm is just another lever people will pull in order to make their party come out ahead. Maybe there is a precise border smoothness weighting which causes one of the other party's biggest neighborhoods to finally be absorbed into one of the current party's districts, but doesn't yet do the same to a few of the current party's most important neighborhoods.

And there is one more aspect of this proposed system which may seem like an exploit at first, but which is actually beneficial for society. Guess what? If a political party can't reduce the other guys' representation by moving the borders, why not instead reduce their representation by moving the people instead? In my proposed system, if one is able to diffusely spread people of the other party thoughout the population of one of the party's strongest districts then they can systematically undermine the representation of all of those people.

Except... Isn't that good for society? When people have no choice but to meet and engage with people of different beliefs than themselves, they often resolve disagreements earlier and more peacefully than when those populations are kept separate. And both groups' ideologies end up benefitting as a result of their clashes. Really, the biggest reason to fear this kind of reverse gerrymandering is if you think that your party's ideas are not strong enough to survive contact with opposing viewpoints. For shame!

Also, the best way to implement this sytem is to make it an emergent property of some kind of game theoretical setup. Prisonor's dilemma style maybe? But I haven't worked out what this would look like.