Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Tai9ch t1_iwrj89g wrote

Three problems:

  1. Nobody actually wants unbiased districts, because they're exactly the same as a random bias. Maybe people will support the idea until they see the resulting maps, and then it will immediately become a partisan issue based on whatever bias the maps have. The compromise is generally "representative" districts, which is just an intentional gerrymander for some characteristic that benefits the team pushing for it.
  2. When asking a computer to generate an unbiased answer, it's always easy for the programmers to cheat and generate an answer that appears unbiased by any arbitrary criteria and yet still has the bias they want. This turns out to be exactly the thing that programmers are trained to do. They can use population data? Population density is a proxy for party. They can use racial data to comply with VRA requirements? Race is a proxy for party. None of that? Well, they ran the numbers offline and determined that (coincidentally) whether zip code is divisible by 5 is a proxy for party and happened to use that as part of a random number generation formula.
  3. In the end the basic premise of having representatives for geographic districts is innately flawed in a two party system. It doesn't do the thing it's supposed to do, and instead provides a mechanism whereby the politicians get to pick their voters instead of the other way around.
1