>Some interesting patterns emerge, such as how with you can have compact and republican-biased but not compact and democrat-biased maps for some numbers of cities. This is a direct result of one party being forced into a small geographic area (cities).
That's quite an interesting finding. I always understood that gerrymandeting is bad because the artificially winning parties get congressmen that are not representative of their districts. This guy uses "competitiveness" as a property worth optimizing for, achieving exactly that.
This is really well done! Do you have analysis of what this would do nationwide or across multiple states? Optimizing for competitiveness is a metric I hadn’t considered but seems particularly valuable especially towards increasing voter turnout.
On Android and Chrome, I can't read the page. The graphic takes up half the screen and the text underneath is barely visible.
Gerrymandering is a danger to democracy and it is great that researchers shine light on the different trade-offs of districting criteria.
This website seems like a great demonstration of the fairness and competitiveness trade-offs.
Interesting. GA's have some interesting use cases. We used a GA to optimize assignment of work crews to areas as part of a scheduling optimization, and achieved significant benefits
Steve
As Congressional elections become more and more a national affair, why do we still have districts? Say a state gets 24 reps. Give me a ballot with all the candidates and let me mark the 24 I want. Yes the ballot will be more complicated, but this way we entirely avoid districting and the process is entirely fair (well until you consider states not being fairly drawn, but that’s one level up).
Along the same thread, genetic algorithms have been used to evaluate fair land allocation in Brazil [1], which have also historically been done by hand. I agree with another user that pointed out the very same tools can be used to gerrymander even more effectively than those districts are currently, perhaps in less obvious ways, without the oddly shaped borders that stretch wildy from place to place. It would be important not to have this occur behind closed doors but left open to scrutiny where the fitness function and biases are in full view.
[1] https://www.lume.ufrgs.br/bitstream/handle/10183/174950/0010...
How hard would it be to change the congressional election system to proportional voting by party?
In California you would vote for 53 representatives, each representative would be part of a party. First the seats are divided among all parties based on some system. Then within each party the seats are given to the representatives that have the most votes within the party.
This would introduce new parties to the system, no party would be able to govern alone.
I've always like this article's thoughtful approach to what we should value when districting: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/could-gerrym...
Interesting to note that the very same tool can be used to optimize the 'worst' maps as well.
Now do Maryland.
"I cut, you choose" is really the only politically viable alternative to the current state of affairs.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/02/how-the-i-cut-yo...