The algorithm that could help end partisan gerrymandering

We are living in the age of the algorithm. So why not apply data science to a decades old issue?

A full copy of Professor Cho's paper is available here:

The Supreme Court has long recognized the potential for abuse in the redistricting system. But the Justices have had trouble establishing an objective measure to rule on the fairness of a political map.

Professor Wendy Tam Cho of the University of Illinois set out to fix this problem. Her goal? To create a “Computational Method for Identifying Extreme Redistricting Plans,” as she put it in the subtitle of one research paper. The video above gives an overview of the process Cho proposed.

If you would like to know more about your state’s redistricting law, I recommend checking out this website from Justin Levitt, a professor of constitutional law at Loyola University Law School.

[Vox]

re: Last Week Tonight. No, we aren't owned by HBO. We're just as surprised as you are.

[MrCellercarbon]

why don't we just let the supercomputer draw the district lines and be done with it?

[alexismenantaud]

But then wouldn't it be interesting to use one of the nonpartisan maps generated by the algorithm directly to designate the new legislative districts?

[mullac]

Oooor... just change the voting system to something actually proportional? Like MMP or STV? The US system of voting is outdated and needs to be made more democratic.

How about instead of trying to fix the flaws of their majority voting system, the US just switched to a proportional vote?

[Valdoy]

Well-timed video, just coming from Last Week Tonight :)

[fredericusra]

In Germany we have a simple and fair solution for this. We just scale the amount of seats given to a party up to match the popular vote. In the example given at 2:44 this would mean that the directly elected 61% of the Republicans keep their seat, but the Democrats gain additional seats so that the total distribution of Republican seats matches the 48.6% of the popular vote.

[Derekivery]

How to fix gerrymandering isn't hard. Require that district lines be drawn by non-partian organizations. I would go so far as to say organizations who draw the lines should not be based in the states they are drawing the lines for.

The problem is, the people who could make this change, are the ones most benefiting from the current system.

[jedkoh]

I just finished Last Week Tonight and this video came out. Well timed

[chrishenk]

This is awesome! I'm a computer engineer and I've occasionally tried explain this idea to people. i.e., we can use math to draw fair districts. It's really exciting to see that smart people have been actively working on it.

It's always been a neat idea to me I just didn't realize it was as far along as it apparently is. If we could just do this and and switch to a "Single Transferable Vote" (STV) system we would finally be able to mostly achieve our goal of having a democracy whose representatives makeup actually represents the people's makeup.

[KylePiira]

The problem is that there are so many possible combinations of districts that the computer would need to generate trillions of maps in order to even work on a basic level. There has to be a more computationally efficient algorithm to use.

[tomtom]

Changing the voting system to something a lot more democratic (like proportional representation) would be a lot simpler and a lot fairer...

[darracos]

didn't last week tonight just cover this?

[cameron]

A great example of really intelligent work put in to solve the wrong problem. Just make states multi-winner districts instead of a series of single-winner districts. If it's multi winner, you include all voters in a state and give each party an equivalent amount of representatives.

[karney]

don't think for one second that only republicans do it. this is something that happens with every party.

[dionemoolman]

I like the CGP grey approach. Dram a line that splits the population in half with the shortest length. Repeat until there’s enough Districts.

[swinde]

Florida passed a constitutional amendment that got straight to the point.  The rule is that districts should follow as much as possible county lines and natural borders such as rivers.  They fought over the redistricting in 2010 but the new districts were stilled gerrymandered along voting patterns favoring the party in power.   If you want to see a seriously gerrymandered state, look at the US congressional district map for Tennessee.  Memphis and Shelby county are large enough to have two representatives.   The Ninth district sits in the core of Shelby county and fingers from two other districts are brought in from the north and east.  This dilutes the representation of urban and suburban to favor the more rural districts.

[charlietian]

Literally learning algorithms on graphs right now

[locust]

Any redistricting maps prepared by politicians should be immediately compared in the public arena to maps prepared by algorithms such as the Shortest-Splitline Algorithm.

[Ksullivan]

wow so early and just finished watching john oliver