Sunday, November 17, 2019
Gerrymandering
This past week, we watched a documentary that covered gerrymandering, and it's effect on American politics. We learned that in the summer of 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that it was legal to gerrymander, as long as it wasn't racial gerrymandering. "Racial gerrymandering" refers to gerrymandering that is decided on in order to give some racial groups an advantage over another. However, it's hard to prove that someone's intent behind redistricting is "racial" because people can always come up with another reason behind why they drew their lines a certain way. Gerrymandering plays a large role in elections. Communities that have historically voted a certain way could be split up, making it so that their votes mean less than they had previously. I feel that gerrymandering is a big problem, because part of the reason why people don't come out to vote is because they feel their votes don't matter, and with gerrymandering, it's possible that they really don't matter as much as they should.
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I agree with this post. I do not think that Gerrymandering should be legal because it is interfering with the elections in a way that it should not. A republican or democratic state has a much less chance of voting the other way because of gerrymandering. Even if a state is mostly divided politically, if in the past they were either Republican or Democrats then the state officials can ensure that it stays that way. One example is North Carolina whose population is divided yet 9 out of the 13 districts votes Republican.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with your points that gerrymandering is a problem with American democracy and can cause many groups of people to be indirectly discriminated against. An interesting solution to gerrymandering is the use of computer-generated districts to equally divide a state's population into a certain number of districts, as described by the article https://phys.org/news/2017-11-algorithm-combat-gerrymandering.html. This would be able to get rid of the some of the human bias associated with humans creating districts (and the obvious problem of gerrymandering that comes with humans creating districts).
ReplyDeleteInteresting post! I feel that engineering algorithmic solution can greatly minimize the gerrymandering that currently takes place, removing the biases that inherently exist when people redistrict, as you have pointed out. This solution is elegant in that it is able to sustain an equal number of voters per district. It relies on a heuristic that determines the boundaries that would best serve those in each division, optimally at equal numbers, without the consideration of factors that make gerrymandering possible, creating convex-polygonal districts unbiased to any party, race, or other factor.
DeleteA potential problem is that this algorithm does not take into fact the geographical aspects of the district, especially when it comes to drawing the lines. Drawing straight lines that could have the potential of cutting houses, streets, and buildings in half, making it difficult to determine what the constituent living at the border of each district, making the restricting problem even more difficult to solve.
This is an important first step, capturing a majority of the voter; the question now is, about this algorithm, how can we take account of how the state is laid out (the shapes of cities and counties), as well as how we put such methods into practice, in use after each redistricting session? As the computer scientist acknowledges, it serves as a model as to what an un-gerrymandered district may look like, without the biases of those doing the redistricting.
Source
https://phys.org/news/2017-11-algorithm-combat-gerrymandering.html
An issue aside from racial factors in gerrymandering is that it affect students. I remember in the video from class it mentioned by drawing the line in the middle of the school campus made the votes of students count less since there was more elderly around them. Their vote basically didn't count and was benefiting another group. This makes it unfair for the students and is hard to prevent because as Jackie mentioned, the "people can always come up with another reason behind why they drew their lines a certain way".
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