You have a certain number of census tracts (essentially, neighborhoods) with known populations and geographic areas. You know you need to divide the state into X congressional districts.
You should simply assign census tracts to districts such that 1) you end up with X districts, 2) each district's total population is within a Y% tolerance of state population / X, 3) you minimize the average of the lengths of the district borders (to force maximum geographic compactness).
Given available data from the Census, some mucking around in PostGIS or ESRI, and a state-of-the-art commercial solver like Gurobi, there's absolutely no reason this couldn't be done.
It'd also be trivial to add on requirements for balancing demographics or political affiliation within certain tolerances as well.
Who would have thought someone that has spent a large chunk of their life studying and working in the areas that are required to solve this problem would come up with a useful solution? Not our representatives, apparently... :/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#Li...
There are mathematicians who study gerrymandering and election maps [1,2].
[1] https://sites.tufts.edu/gerrymandr/ [2] https://phys.org/news/2017-08-math-experts-brainpower-gerrym...
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/courts...
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland's_3rd_congressional_d... for an example...
> isn't there some way to draw maps which balance out demographics programmatically
We can't even agree on what "balance" means. In particular, people want both majority-minority districts and party-balanced districts, which is a pretty tough constraint in practice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/0...
Fivethirtyeight.com people have written a lot about it (including why you can't simply write a program and go home, just like you can't for most political questions). They also have an ongoing podcast series that talks about the issue in great detail 'The Gerrymandering Project'.
Plus, before skyscrapers and other sorts high density developments geography had an okay correlation with population density, but that is no longer the case anymore. There are often far more people in a single block in a city than on an entire knob out in the knobs, or an entire mountain in mountainous areas, etc. You can't easily "circle" just a floor or three of a single building on a 2D map with any accuracy, but to balance population density fairly you may have to consider problems like that.
With TV, radio, the internet, skyscrapers, and urban density, maybe we need a whole new solution for representative democracy than where physically you collect your snail mail?
I don't have any good theories on what should replace geography, but I do think geography is a problem we could eliminate by ignoring that variable.
The latter makes us establish physical security around election polling sites, and the former requires that we spent money to move people, machines, and consumables into and out of those sites.
As such, those costs require that political districts consider geography as a practical, money-saving measure, especially roads and buildings. You have to print N blank ballots and send them to the polling stations, and then send back any unused blanks, and the local issues on ballots for adjacent districts might be different.
In order to eliminate geography, you would need a system that has good data security without requiring physical security for the whole network. And an integral part of that would be a foolproof and uncheatable online identification system.
Good luck with that.
You could simply let anyone vote for anyone and elect the top N contenders where there is N seats.
Logically the choices would resemble the choices of the population.
You can also use the slow but difficult to default distributed network we have had the longest. The US mail.
I get what you're saying about geography.
But the alternatives have a lot of pitfalls. An at-large candidate from Texas or California is not likely to be particularly close to any minority demographic that might desire a champion for their concerns. You end up with every candidate from Chicago, campaigning in Chicago and its collar counties, and no one ever visits or gets elected from Carbondale or Bloomington-Normal or the Illinois part of the Quad Cities.
It might be appropriate to segment the population by profession, such as to have all the bus drivers, car drivers, train operators, and pilots in the state nominally represented by the same person, while all the farmers, loggers, and ranchers have their own person. That faces the same problems as geographical gerrymandering, and more.
If you segmented the population alphabetically, the representative for surnames starting with the letters A through C does not have a particularly clear mandate. But at least it would likely be a fair distribution.
I think the simplest segmentation would be between urban and rural. Line up voters by the population density of their census tract. Slice the population into a reasonable number of buckets, 2 or 3, and the voters in those buckets elect a number of at-large representatives. You probably end up with liberal representatives for every urban core, moderate representatives for every suburb and commuter artery, and conservative representatives for every hamlet and unincorporated township that can still see the stars at night.
Democracy means representing the majority view tempered by personal judgement.
You could, but that would actually be worse the FPTP in single member districts.
> Logically the choices would resemble the choices of the population.
No, they wouldn't, except by chance. Say you have six candidates, A-F, for three seats. 75% of the electorate prefers an ideology generally espoused by A, B, and C; 25% prefers an ideology generally espoused by D and E, and 10% prefers an ideology espoused by F.
In the first group, A is by far the most effective campaigner and gets 70% of the total vote, with the remainder split evenly between B and C; in the second group, support is split equally between D and E. The last, of course, all goes to F.
So, in your top 3 vote, A and F win seats in the clear, and the third vote goes to a tiebreaker between D and E; this does not at all reflect the distribution of views in the population.
That's why methods like Single Transferrable Vote and it's relatives, using preference rather than bullet ballots, exist.
It's not an interesting solution to the real-time results obsessed crowd, but it is a solution proven to mostly work.
Yes, there will always be direct local interests like fire, police, emergency service, sewage, utility, etc districts, but those services all have natural boundaries themselves, and the political boundaries can and often do match there at city/county/township/x-district levels.
But the state and federal levels, at least in the US, seem increasingly divorced from geography (outside of the Cold Civil War between rural and urban economies/beliefs/interests). The weird shapes of current gerrymandered districts is only possible because the geography is so divorced from the governing. If the shape of most US congressional districts was the shape of fire or sewage districts there would be riots in the streets.
I used to agree (also a software engineer) that this is a puzzle that ought to be solveable with weighted voronoi diagrams or somesuch but then I read: https://peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/10/17/the-problem-of-d...
Once you define which of the many competing priorities for districting (aside from naked partisan advantage and disenfranchising particular races, which we can assume are agreed not to be acceptable priorities) to optimize and how to weight them against each other this becomes easy.
Of course, the people with illegitimate goals can easily game out which combination of the notionally legitimate goals maximizes their actual illegitimate ones, and advocate for that as the standard.
Even having bipartisan commisions doesn't solve the problem. Parties will work together to secure incumbents.
It basically comes down to a who watches the watchers issue.
The California process may produce better results on average by some measure (and is emphatically more transparent) compared to legislative redistricting, but it emphatically vastly increased the drama associated with redistricting.
But, yes, I think people are mostly satisfied with the results, which is a separate issue from drama in the process.
California is listed as "Non-partisan; super-majority (majority of each group) needed", you can argue that Wiki is wrong about this, but thats the source I'm using.
Wiki further clarifies its use of "non partisan":
Non-partisan means that either, a) the partisan makeup of the commission is not specified beforehand, or b) a substantial portion (i.e. more than one) of the membership of the commission is reserved for political independents or members of so-called Third Parties.
But, yes, by that odd definition, the California system is non-partisan under (b).
Voter parties?
The interest voters express preferences for by voting?
The interests voters idealize (they may vote pragmatically within existing rules)?
Etc., etc.
A purely algorithmic solution needs to encode preferences and how to balance them, so they need to be defined quite precisely.
[1] https://sites.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/uw_1034.pdf
But it's unprecedented which makes it hard to enact without a lot of momentum.
Not saying that isn't happening now, it is. But software doesn't solve that issue.
So we created this great problem: congressional lines. Then we try and fix it. Representation is hard. Why not do away with the problem entirely? Remove this type of representation.
Radical, yes, but what does congress do anyway? ;)
why does this matter? congresspeople vote on national issues, not local issues.
As a software engineer, isn't there some way to draw maps which balance out demographics programmatically? While taking into consideration population, rural, suburban, urban areas, etc. Shouldn't there be a national policy/process that is followed?
It would make some sense to abolish recording what party people affiliate with. It really serves no purpose. Let people vote in both parties primaries.