Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to I imagine there would be huge battles over it's creation

That's the problem
Robert — (archived)

It would be easy to have a computer program draw boundaries that contain equal numbers of people, but in essence that's already how it works; voting districts are already supposed to contain the same number of people.

The problem is that there's a huge number of different solutions to the problem, involving where those districts end up. Each solution is mathematically equal, but very different politically in the way that the proposed boundaries cut across groups. The current practice of gerrymandering addresses the problem by allowing equal-population districts to be shifted around to accommodate political and social goals.

What if the program was designed to take into account the current voter registration statistics of the electorate? That is, it could have as its goal assuring nearly 50/50 representation between the two major parties in each district. Wouldn't that destabilize the system further by creating more close elections that dramatically change the composition of the House based on very tiny shifts in per-district vote counts? How could it work in regions where one party has a noticeable advantage over the other, so that 50/50 is impossible to achieve? And what happens over time, as voter registration demographics change? The districts would have to be redrawn just before every election, an expensive and chaotic process. Seems to me the resulting system would be more complicated and retain all the disadvantages of the current system.

The problem is inherent in the concept of geographical voting districts, and just having a computer program draw the map doesn't change that.

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