bss03

You don't need "AI", at least not the kind of unpredictable over-hyped bullshit called "AI", whether it's an LLM or something stupider.

https://bdistricting.com/2020/ applies an predicable algorithm to produce geographically compact, equal-population districts.

Of course, those are not the only "fairness" constraints we want to impose. The VRA "required" packing to ensure representation for historically disenfranchised populations, e.g.

I think this is an important point that https://bdistricting.com/2020/ glosses over. Some of the representation "guarantees" that were part of the VRA are actually defeated by doing purely geographic districting. Oft-times there's enough BIPOC population that's widely distributed, but needs to be "packed" (to use the gerrymandering terminology) in order to given even a chance of proportional representation.

My state of Arkansas is a good example https://bdistricting.com/2020/AR_Congress/ BIPOC is >= 25% of the population, but to get a distract that was 50% BIPOC it would have to snake across the state in a way that would be very visually similar to a gerrymandered district.

Multi-member districts can help, but they cause a loss of representation locality.

It may be that it's impossible to produce an algorithm that satisfies all our (collective) fairness constraints.

I can choose to vote for my local politician [...] it gets counted to the person above them in the party

That doesn't sound like local representation to me. And, honestly, I'd like parties to have less influence on our elections, not more, but I guess that's a pipe dream.

What happens if you prefer a local politician that is an independent / has no permanent party affiliation? Bernie Sanders and Joseph Lieberman have held federal office without a party affiliation.

On the last bullet point, we probably need to federalize voter qualification and registration, first. Whether you can vote or not depends on what state you are in (felony disenfranchisement, e.g.). Some states let you register on voting day; others close registration weeks before voting day (and some incumbents try to purge voters as close to the deadline as possible). It's really quite a mess. :(

I think if we made it easier to vote, we wouldn't have to make it mandatory -- federal holiday on voting day, open/unrestricted early voting for a least a week before voting day. I'm against mandatory voting unless there's a "[X] Democracy is dead / a sham in $District" protest vote option or something similar. Incumbents already claim my support when I'm just trying harm-reduction and I actually support someone that never made it into the primary for wanting to tax the rich.

Thank you for the correction.

Local representation is valuable. In the Netherlands it is practically automatic since it is only 41,850 km^2. My state is 134,771 km^2 so you'd need to split it into about 4 pieces/districts to get as local representation. Oddly enough we get 4 congressional districts: https://bdistricting.com/2020/AR/ but we still have issues with Gerrymandering has the largely R government applies cracking approaches to any D voting localities.

Texas is much larger, with more population density variance, so the problems are magnified.

I do agree that instead of a lot of small, geographically compact districts, proportional representation in a larger, but still compact multi-member district is preferable, but that's not quite the problem we are having with districts.

Really what is needed is an open-source algorithm that we agree is fair and apolitical. But fat chance of that right now.

I had hopes for this at one point, but I think we might be in a Arrow-like situation, where there actually is no algorithm that satisfies all the fairness constraints we want to apply.

Gerrymandering can still be effective with ranked choice. It's harder, but you can still do both cracking and packing, you just have to model top-2 or top-3 preferences.

Popular vote is already the norm for gerrymandered areas.

I mean we should definitely implement Ranked Choice up and down the ticket, and implement Popular Vote for President, but neither actually solves Gerrymandering.

I'd like to say "independent" redistricting organizations are the solution, but the practical success of those is mixed. The incumbents just pack those with cronies, or ignore them, sometimes with the assistance of the judiciary.

The system has basically always been two-party. It's the only stable arrangement for FPtP voting anyway. So, yes, it has been status quo for 250 years.

ExpertsExchange.com?

Perhaps it is more trustworthy than Fox News? (I don't know; I just live in my Lemmy/Mastodon social media bubble.)

High, broad trust in trustworthy institutions is a good thing, it makes life in general easier which increases social engagement and, potentially, change.

I've never really liked this meme. I quite dislike AI, but just because your NN sucks doesn't mean NNs or AI in general is fundamentally poor.

I often write very poorly performing programs due to mistakes, lack of knowledge, or just general incompetence. That doesn't mean all my programs perform poorly. It certainly doesn't mean all your programs perform poorly.

"AI" sucks for a lot of reasons, but so does this image.