3 ms·
Let's have what I'd like to call double blind Gerrymandering: - States package demographic maps WITHOUT party affiliation and send to an "independent commissio
by torpfactory 10y ago
Let's have what I'd like to call double blind Gerrymandering:
- States package demographic maps WITHOUT party affiliation and send to an "independent commission" (whatever that means...) who does NOT open the maps (preferably is not able to for technical reasons). These maps only include only location of voters geographically. All geographic names have been stripped from this record. Maybe we even have a method to obfuscate the geometry of the maps but maintain the relationship between location and vote. Idea is: anyone who is not very familiar with the maps and American politics would not be able to tell what map they are looking at.
- Send this package of information to some independent contractors chosen by the commission. It would work best if these are people found living under a rock who had no knowledge of American politics but were magically also well educated in mathematics. These contractors would draw up the maps in some 'locality' based system and return them to the commission, who would forward them on to the states.
- The states have no way of knowing which state's information went to which contractor as this information is 'lost' at the 'independent commission'. The independent commission doesn't know which contract worked with which map so they have no way of influencing the process.
- We could also do plenty of more sensible things like Mixed Member proportional or any number of other reasonable ideas. I like this one because of how crazy it sounds...
- barneygumble742 10y agoThe fastest and laziest way of gerrymandering is by strictly using party affiliation. One can correlate party affiliation with race/gender/household income/county tax rates. At the state level, all this information is available online to anyone so you may not get an exact number on party affiliation, you can make a very accurate estimate and use that data to draw district lines. For a true non-gerrymandered district lines, you only need the population and make sure there's not a single gap between the districts.