Re:North Carolina Is Ordered to Redraw Its Congressional Map
by dragonwriter on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @02:28PM
(#16118084)
> As a software engineer, isn't there some way to draw maps which balance out demographics programmatically?
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.
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.