7 ms·

It's easy to gerrymander a surface. It's hard to gerrymander a line, or a circle, where the connectedness requirement has teeth. One solution to gerrymandering

It's easy to gerrymander a surface. It's hard to gerrymander a line, or a circle, where the connectedness requirement has teeth. One solution to gerrymandering is to determine congressional districts by birthday, or last name, rather than by geographic location.

LaughingGoat 9y ago
Interesting concept! I wonder if this is hackable based on demographic popularity of last names, by race. According to Wolfram Alpha, the most common last names are: Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, which don't share a common 1st letter. But maybe some ethnic names might: Rodriguez, Ramirez, Chan, Chen, Chang... But ultimately, what political needs would a community of last-name-starts-with-C need?
- slyfocks 9y ago
  > But ultimately, what political needs would a community of last-name-starts-with-C need? None, which is why that grouping would only make sense in a society of extremely generic robots.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
slyfocks 9y ago
The U.S. is not a monolith–registered Democrats in West Virginia have very different priorities from those in Massachusetts–so geographical boundaries actually serve a purpose in electing a representative who is (ideally) aware of local needs and committed to fighting for them. In contrast, those with a common birthday or name have no distinguishable political desires in aggregate, so the likely result would be 538 generic congress members. Furthermore, if we assume people exhibit a bias toward candidates from their home state (they do, on average), grouping by birthday or last name is actually a net negative choice since it would likely result in overrepresenation of Californians in congress (assuming first-past-the-post).
BearGoesChirp 9y ago
The problem is that there are far far more policies that impact people based on area than based on name. This could effectively destroy any representation of rural areas which would achieve the opposite (every single politician would answer to 65% city voters and only 35% rural voters if the districts were based on something fully independent of location).

LaughingGoat 9y ago

Interesting concept! I wonder if this is hackable based on demographic popularity of last names, by race. According to Wolfram Alpha, the most common last names are: Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, which don't share a common 1st letter. But maybe some ethnic names might: Rodriguez, Ramirez, Chan, Chen, Chang... But ultimately, what political needs would a community of last-name-starts-with-C need?

slyfocks 9y ago
> But ultimately, what political needs would a community of last-name-starts-with-C need? None, which is why that grouping would only make sense in a society of extremely generic robots.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

slyfocks 9y ago

The U.S. is not a monolith–registered Democrats in West Virginia have very different priorities from those in Massachusetts–so geographical boundaries actually serve a purpose in electing a representative who is (ideally) aware of local needs and committed to fighting for them. In contrast, those with a common birthday or name have no distinguishable political desires in aggregate, so the likely result would be 538 generic congress members. Furthermore, if we assume people exhibit a bias toward candidates from their home state (they do, on average), grouping by birthday or last name is actually a net negative choice since it would likely result in overrepresenation of Californians in congress (assuming first-past-the-post).

BearGoesChirp 9y ago

The problem is that there are far far more policies that impact people based on area than based on name. This could effectively destroy any representation of rural areas which would achieve the opposite (every single politician would answer to 65% city voters and only 35% rural voters if the districts were based on something fully independent of location).