"The Supreme Court’s attacks on voting rights are about rigging elections for Republicans," said Rep. Greg Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Do you not realize that there are still multiple ways to slice that pie?
The whole point of gerrymandering is to split up opposition strongholds (typically blue areas in red states, i.e. cities) and attach them piecemeal to larger-by-area districts with lower population densities in order to water down their votes in redder districts.
That way instead of a city having one or two reps who are blue and can actually represent their constituencies, you have a bunch of tiny slivers of that city that are represented by the reps for the rural districts they’re attached to. It’s how republicans have disenfranchised urban voters for a long time. And yes, there’s a heavily racial subtext to this, since urban areas tend to be more non-white than rural areas. It’s how republicans disenfranchise non-white voters.
A computer program can still do the same thing. That doesn’t solve gerrymandering.
No, a computer program whose purpose is to gerrymander can be designed to gerrymander. An input to the program would be the party affiliation of various locations. A computer program which isn’t designed to gerrymander would not be given that information. All it needs to know are the boundaries of the state, the population, the various locations of the population, and the required number of districts.
There are a multitude of proxies for political affiliation that can be used instead to stealthily gerrymander. And you have no way of ensuring that an unconstitutionally mandated computer program wouldn’t include those.
No, since political affiliation would not be an input to the computer program. Peer-review by university computer science professors would catch any attempt to sneak it in. Do you think a company would risk being caught and punished? It is not unconstitutional to force a state to adopt something which does not disenfranchise a part of the population no more than it’s unconstitutional to force a state to adopt a voting method which is not prone to fraud.
Political awareness is unnecessary, only knowledge of computer programming. It is improbable that all the professors would have bad intentions and are in one specific party.
It is not unconstitutional to force states to adopt something that ensures districting is impartial.
“Political awareness isn’t necessary to design a system that all states will be forced to implement for their elections.” Holy shit, a statement like this demonstrates exactly why political awareness is necessary, and makes abundantly clear that you have none of it. Thankfully I don’t have to worry about your ideas seeing any daylight.
It is not unconstitutional to force states to adopt something that ensures districting is impartial.
I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this, but the federal government meddling in how states run their elections literally violates the constitution. If that’s not “unconstitutional” then I don’t even know what that word means to you…
A computer program that is nonbiased need computer programmers that have no interest in politics. States do not have unlimited powers in running elections. For example, they cannot gerrymander based on race. They can gerrymander based on party affiliation because there is no means of determining what is too much partisanship, but with a computer program there will be none.
Writing an unbiased program to redraw political district maps requires political awareness. Having “no interest in politics” won’t help with that. And you’re continuing to demonstrate why that’s dangerous.
And for the last fucking time, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CANNOT DICTATE HOW STATES RUN THEIR ELECTIONS. Now stop trying to claim otherwise.
Do you not realize that there are still multiple ways to slice that pie?
The whole point of gerrymandering is to split up opposition strongholds (typically blue areas in red states, i.e. cities) and attach them piecemeal to larger-by-area districts with lower population densities in order to water down their votes in redder districts.
That way instead of a city having one or two reps who are blue and can actually represent their constituencies, you have a bunch of tiny slivers of that city that are represented by the reps for the rural districts they’re attached to. It’s how republicans have disenfranchised urban voters for a long time. And yes, there’s a heavily racial subtext to this, since urban areas tend to be more non-white than rural areas. It’s how republicans disenfranchise non-white voters.
A computer program can still do the same thing. That doesn’t solve gerrymandering.
No, a computer program whose purpose is to gerrymander can be designed to gerrymander. An input to the program would be the party affiliation of various locations. A computer program which isn’t designed to gerrymander would not be given that information. All it needs to know are the boundaries of the state, the population, the various locations of the population, and the required number of districts.
There are a multitude of proxies for political affiliation that can be used instead to stealthily gerrymander. And you have no way of ensuring that an unconstitutionally mandated computer program wouldn’t include those.
No, since political affiliation would not be an input to the computer program. Peer-review by university computer science professors would catch any attempt to sneak it in. Do you think a company would risk being caught and punished? It is not unconstitutional to force a state to adopt something which does not disenfranchise a part of the population no more than it’s unconstitutional to force a state to adopt a voting method which is not prone to fraud.
You’re putting a lot of faith in the political awareness and good intentions of these computer science professors.
Yes it is. It literally is, when you’re talking about electoral processes such as redistricting.
You’re only continuing to reveal how little you know about the topic.
Political awareness is unnecessary, only knowledge of computer programming. It is improbable that all the professors would have bad intentions and are in one specific party.
It is not unconstitutional to force states to adopt something that ensures districting is impartial.
“Political awareness isn’t necessary to design a system that all states will be forced to implement for their elections.” Holy shit, a statement like this demonstrates exactly why political awareness is necessary, and makes abundantly clear that you have none of it. Thankfully I don’t have to worry about your ideas seeing any daylight.
I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this, but the federal government meddling in how states run their elections literally violates the constitution. If that’s not “unconstitutional” then I don’t even know what that word means to you…
A computer program that is nonbiased need computer programmers that have no interest in politics. States do not have unlimited powers in running elections. For example, they cannot gerrymander based on race. They can gerrymander based on party affiliation because there is no means of determining what is too much partisanship, but with a computer program there will be none.
Writing an unbiased program to redraw political district maps requires political awareness. Having “no interest in politics” won’t help with that. And you’re continuing to demonstrate why that’s dangerous.
And for the last fucking time, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CANNOT DICTATE HOW STATES RUN THEIR ELECTIONS. Now stop trying to claim otherwise.