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Data Scientist with a Master of Public Administration degree here (don't ask). My proposal for solving this has always been to frame it as an optimization probl
by dbatten 9y ago
Data Scientist with a Master of Public Administration degree here (don't ask). My proposal for solving this has always been to frame it as an optimization problem.
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.
- ttul 9y agoAs it is in most countries...
- dbatten 9y agoIs it? I'm admittedly fairly ignorant on how other countries run their election systems, but... geographic representation seems uncommon (lots of parliamentary systems) and sophisticated solutions to drawing districts within countries that have geographic representation would have to be even more rare.
- sangnoir 9y agoI am familiar with Parliamentary systems of 5 countries (Britain & former colonies) and they are mostly geographic, to my knowledge. Each Members of Parliament is voted in by voters residing within a geographic region/ward.
- dbatten 9y agoInteresting... looks like a lot of countries with parliamentary systems use proportional instead of geographic representation... but not the UK or Canada. Today I learned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#List_of_countries_using_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#Li...
- taejo 9y agoAnd some countries manage to achieve proportional representation while still giving each district their own choice of representative (e.g. Mixed-Member Proportional Representation in Germany and New Zealand).
- kbenson 9y agoThat actually sounds like it would balance the competing needs of wanting neighborhoods with an identity to have a voice and not stacking districts to unfairly affect the percentage of representative affiliation compared to the general population quite nicely. 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... :/