Distance is not enough: depending where you center those districts, they can still be biased. There have been a bunch of initiatives for algorithmic districting, with all kind of constraints - compact, competitive, … Somewhere along the way, electoral reform and campaign finance just fell off the public radar. Along with Medicare for all. I mean, I get that fascism is kind of a priority at the moment, but elections are fundamentally how you fix that.
It would need to deal with compactness, too, to avoid biased centers, of course. It would need some parametric tuning, but the tunable parameters should be rather restricted to avoid gerrymandering again. Although any working algorithm in that direction would be way better than those rather “artfully designed” ones the Republicans have drawn.
Yes it’s still possible to introduce bias, but it would make a big difference on the ability to gerrymander, because you don’t have he degrees of freedom to stack voters in the same way.
Distance is not enough: depending where you center those districts, they can still be biased. There have been a bunch of initiatives for algorithmic districting, with all kind of constraints - compact, competitive, … Somewhere along the way, electoral reform and campaign finance just fell off the public radar. Along with Medicare for all. I mean, I get that fascism is kind of a priority at the moment, but elections are fundamentally how you fix that.
It would need to deal with compactness, too, to avoid biased centers, of course. It would need some parametric tuning, but the tunable parameters should be rather restricted to avoid gerrymandering again. Although any working algorithm in that direction would be way better than those rather “artfully designed” ones the Republicans have drawn.
My favorite strategy for reducing the effect of this is large districts with multiple reps per district (ideally with a form of rcv)
Yes it’s still possible to introduce bias, but it would make a big difference on the ability to gerrymander, because you don’t have he degrees of freedom to stack voters in the same way.
If you’re into maths and want to know the theory behind it, it is based on the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension of the shapes used for distracting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vapnik–Chervonenkis_dimension . Not a fun read! But accurate