[FRIAM] gerrymandering algorithm question

[Nick Thompson]

Hi, everybody.

 

FiveThirtyEight had a five part series on Gerrymandering over the summer which was fascinating.  The take-home for me was that the notion – implicit in the gerrymandering conversation – that it would be easy for reasonable people to design fair districts – is insane.   In fact, it’s always going to be a tortured and difficult process.  Does anybody remember the “metric meat” conversation of a few decades back?  The idea was that meat cuts were going to be redesigned so that they could be accomplished by machines without the aid of meat packing workers.  So, I guess we could have metric-meat districts, but anytime you cut “the meat” with reference to the anatomy, some people aren’t going to like the cuts they get.  And when you DON’T cut them that way, EVERYBODY is going to hate the cuts that they get.  Nobody wants metric meat. 

 

The present round of gerrymandering apparently began when “our side” decided that the representation in congress should display the racial diversity of the states that sent the delegates.  THAT meant that if a state had ten districts and  there were 20 percent African-Americans and ten percent  Latinos in a state, that  districts had to be drawn so that  there were two black reps and one Latino rep.  So, “we” concentrated races in districts, meaning that there WEREN’T blacks and Latinos in any of the other districts.  So, for instance, in a democratic “wave” year, all the republicans in the 7 “white” districts were completely safe because the demographics of their district insulated them from a blue tide.  Incumbent immunity is apparently partly “our” fault. 

 

I don’t mean to say that “fair districts” aren’t possible.  I just mean to say that I, as your philosopher-king, could not design them. 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2018 7:24 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] gerrymandering algorithm question

 

Don’t know if it is redundant with material somewhere in this post already, but someone I have met who works in this space (mathematics and quantitative social science of gerrymandering) is Wendy K. Tam Cho at UIUC.

http://cho.pol.illinois.edu/wendy/

 

I found a talk she gave at SFI sometime last summer thoroughly enjoyable, for its blend of enjoyment of math and appreciation of the specialist domain knowledge that the political practitioners have on the ground.  I believe she gave lectures at the summer school, though I was not there to see them.   If this material is on-line, perhaps some of it can be found.

 

Best,

 

Eric

 





On Nov 2, 2018, at 9:22 AM, cody dooderson <d00d3rs0n at gmail.com <mailto:d00d3rs0n at gmail.com> > wrote:

 

The other day a puzzle about gerrymandering was shown to me. It is on the web at https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/rig-the-election-with-math/ . The 5x5 puzzle is doable by hand but the 14x10 seems too complex, and ripe for some computer assistance. What kind of algorithm would people use for it? Is there an optimal way to gerrymander the entire country?

In order to qualify this question as complex or philosophical enough for FRIAM, maybe i should  speculate about how I think that ranked choice voting would be better in terms of gerrymandering than what we currently use. My gut instinct is that ranked-choice would be less predictable and could possibly deter the gerrymanderers. 

 




Cody Smith

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