{"id":1184,"date":"2017-05-30T09:02:29","date_gmt":"2017-05-30T14:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisa.rushworth.us\/?p=1184"},"modified":"2020-01-27T23:21:53","modified_gmt":"2020-01-28T04:21:53","slug":"redistricting-by-algorithm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/?p=1184","title":{"rendered":"Redistricting By Algorithm"},"content":{"rendered":"

American government representation is,\u00a0in many cases, proportional to population. This means that each\u00a0Rep from Ohio in the House\u00a0has a district with the same number of people as the other guys from Ohio. A Rep from Cleveland doesn’t represent\u00a0more<\/em> people than a Rep from Marion. There may be multiple districts across Cleveland whereas the district for Marion may include other nearby towns as well. It’s a reasonable idea – otherwise Ohio has 44,825 square miles and 16 HR members so every 2800 or so square miles would be a Rep. This means someone represents a whole lot of and and a couple people whereas someone else represents a LOT of people densely packed into a little land. Cuyahoga County covers 457 square miles and has 1.2 million people. Marion *County* covers 404 square miles and has about 66,000 people. Even if Cuyahoga had 2 reps to Marion’s 1 … the population of Cuyahoga is 18x larger.<\/p>\n

This means political boundaries are drawn around population numbers. A process which can be perfectly fair and reasonable, but a process which can be manipulated to a particular party’s advantage. The manipulation is called gerrymandering<\/a>. And it is how Democrats can win 51% of the popular vote in Pennsylvania HR races but only hold 5 of the 18 seats. Statistically they should have had 9 (or even 10 since they had a\u00a0slight<\/em> popular vote advantage and you cannot have a fraction of a representative).<\/p>\n

What does this look like on a map? See Pennsylvania’s District 7<\/a> — let’s take this group of left-leaning people from SE Philly, make a little isthmus, and now how many right-leaning people do we need from West Chester to make it a Republican district?\u00a0The only district boundaries that have any business\u00a0not<\/em> being a straight line are state borders!<\/p>\n

When I was in University in the mid-90’s, we were working on a process to analyze the gravitational disturbances caused by binary black hole\u00a0collisions. Now it’s not reasonable to calculate\u00a0anything<\/em> across the entire universe. No one has that kind of time or computing power (oh, and\u00a0there may be a basic tenet of computing and physics that precludes doing so) … but we want to know what the disturbances would look like across the entire universe.\u00a0There will be areas of greater impact and areas of lesser impact. The method we used for the analysis is called adaptive mesh refinement. It’s essentially taking a broad overview of the entire universe but\u00a0using a more detailed (‘refined’) view of\u00a0sections where something “interesting” is happening.<\/p>\n

I propose we use a similar system for algorithmic drawing of\u00a0Congressional districts. What would that look like? Imagine a state with six million people that has been allocated six\u00a0districts. Calculate the statistical people per rep — one million in this case — this is going to be our target population within a district. When we get within a percentage of that number, we’ll hold the district as it is.<\/p>\n

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Chop it in half and see what the population is like in the two\u00a0‘districts’ – and check the populations again. We’ve got one within the defined delta of the one million target (since this is a nice example, we have one\u00a0at<\/em> our target).<\/p>\n

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Take the oversized district and chop it in half again. Get population counts and hold any district within the delta of target.<\/p>\n

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Keep chopping …<\/p>\n

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Eventually you’ll arrive at districts that are all within the predefined delta of the target. Since a real-world scenario wouldn’t involve nice round numbers and equally spaced populations, we’ll need to have the algorithm shift the district boundaries E<=>W and N<=>S until the proper number of people are contained within each district. Algorithms are quite good at this sort of thing.<\/p>\n

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But this doesn’t take into account geographical obstacles\u00a0— what if there’s a river that bisects the district and the nearest bridge is thirty miles up stream? Well, these are not\u00a0polling centers – put a polling center on each side of the river.<\/p>\n

The point of this approach is that a computer algorithm that doesn’t know a thing about the individuals in each area can\u00a0easily define districts irrespective of political parties. Statistically, an individual voter may end up in a district that differs vastly from their personal beliefs. But there’s no\u00a0intentional<\/em> marginalizing of voters based on political parties. And when the next census numbers come in, load a new data set and re-run the program.<\/p>\n

What would adaptive mesh\u00a0districting look like? Essentially this – big squares and rectangles\u00a0in sparsely populated areas,\u00a0smaller and smaller squares and rectangles in population centers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American government representation is,\u00a0in many cases, proportional to population. This means that each\u00a0Rep from Ohio in the House\u00a0has a district with the same number of people as the other guys from Ohio. A Rep from Cleveland doesn’t represent\u00a0more people than a Rep from Marion. There may be multiple districts across Cleveland whereas the district for …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,42],"tags":[215,216],"class_list":["post-1184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-us-government","tag-gerrymandering","tag-redistricting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1184"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5924,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184\/revisions\/5924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}