2 ms·
This is what (for example) congress and congressional districts are supposed to help with, but gerrymandering prevents it from working as intended. I’m kinda gu
by dahart 2y ago
This is what (for example) congress and congressional districts are supposed to help with, but gerrymandering prevents it from working as intended. I’m kinda guessing that adding a dithering algorithm might only change the gerrymandering without fixing the problem, but I’m certainly curious as to what that might look like and whether there are ways to prevent gerrymandering, with or without vote dithering. I’m guessing it would be extremely difficult to get anything with randomness in it passed as law.
First we need to get “one person, one vote” to be the actual goal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote). In the US, the electoral college was specifically designed to not have one person, one vote as the primary goal, and we haven’t been able to change it yet. For presidential elections, we don’t really need dithering so much as simple majority winner, plus run-off vote counting.
Maybe run-off voting already is a type of vote dithering?
- londons_explore 2y ago> difficult to get anything with randomness in it passed as law. You don't need randomness. Dithering looks random, but is fully deterministic. It does suffer from the 'butterfly effect' - a few extra votes in one place can change the assignment of a lot of nearby seats.
- dahart 2y agoSome dithering algorithms are deterministic, not all of them. The simplest & most basic dithering you can do is random, and that works quite well when targeting 8 bits per channel. The reason I bought it up is because deterministic dithering can definitely be gamed by gerrymandering, so if you want to avoid that you might need to introduce randomness, but then you will have an even harder time getting people to buy in than with a deterministic algorithm.