In the following poll, answer it after reading the posts made by me and others, as this may influence your answers. You may change your answer if subsequent posts influence you.
How should districts be drawn up?
1. With Automandering.
2. With Gerrymandering.
3. With a prestigious panel of retired judges.
4. With some other method, and if so, specify that method.
With your selection, make a post justifying your selection.
Automandering is better than Gerrymandering
What is automandering? Automandering is a term I made up. It is a new way of dividing up congressional districts, voting districts in general, in a fair way that is not designed to thwart. Gerrymandering are schemes designed to thwart democracy, to allow a minority to have the most representatives. Gerrymandering is like Dictatorships, in that gerrymandering is a milder form of thwarting democracy whereas dictatorships is a more extreme form.
How does automandering work?
Let’s take a simple case. You have a squarish shape state like Colorado. Let’s say you need to divide it up into 100 districts, for, let’s say the state legislature. You first divide Colorado into 10 horizontal slices. The first slice starts at the northern border, then you move it down into 10 % of the population lives within that slice. That is your northernmost slice.
Then you start at this slice and start to move a line down, until the second slice contains 10 % of the population. This is your second slice.
You continue with this process until you have 10 equal slices.
Now, within each slice, you start breaking it up into ten equal slices. Starting with the fourth slice, you can start with a vertical line on the westernmost section and start moving eastward, until you have a section that contains 10 per cent of the population of the fourth slice, which is also 1 per cent of the population of Colorado. Continue the same process for the entire slice.
After this process is completed for all 10 sections within all 10 slices, you will have 100 districts of absolutely equal population, each containing 1 per cent of Colorado’s voters.
Problem 1:
What if a state does have a square or rectangular shape?
It doesn’t matter. One can take West Virginia and do the same process. You will end up with 100 districts with an equal number of voters.
Problem 2:
What if you need to divide a state up into a number of districts that are not a perfect square?
Not a problem. Below is a chart showing the number districts needed, followed by the number of horizontal slices needed:
Perfect-Squares Districts Slices
1 1 – 2 1
4 3 – 6 2
9 7 – 12 3
16 13 – 20 4
25 21 – 30 5
etc.
Basically, you come up with a list of perfect squares. You determine which perfect square is closest to the number of districts needed. And that determines the number of slices.
So, let’s say you have a requirement for 18 districts. The closes perfect square to 18 is 16, which is 4 squared. So, you need 4 slices.
The first and second horizontal slices needs to each contain 5/18 of the number of voters. They will later be divided up into 5 districts.
The third and fourth horizontal slices needs to each contain 4/18 of the number of voters. They will later be dived up into 4 districts.
And you will end up with 18 equal size districts.
Problem 3:
What if you have a state that is not square shape but elongated, like Illinois or Tennessee?
Well, you can ignore this and divide them up as usual. The resulting districts won’t be squarish shapes but thinner rectangle.
Or, alternatively, it is simple to come up with districts that are squarish in shape, where the height is comparable to the width in many resulting districts.
For instant, let’s say Tennessee needs to be divided into 47 districts.
Tennessee is about 5 times as wide as it is high. So, we can divide the state into 5 regions, working west to east.
The first region, moving a vertical line from the western edge toward the east, would keep moving, until it contained 9/47 of the population. The same would be true of the second and third region. The fourth and the fifth region would contain 10/47 of the population.
The first, second and third regions would be divided up into 9 areas, roughly 3 by 3 districts, divided up in the usual way. The fourth and the fifth would each be divided up into 10 regions, in the usual way, with four districts in the northernmost slice, and three each in the second and third slices.
Tennessee would end up with 47 districts of equal size. Most districts would end up being squarish in shape, and not elongated horizontally like the state of Tennessee.
All this could be accomplished with a fairly simple computer program. The data would just consist of the GPS coordinates of each voter’s residence. The computer would draw up the boundary lines, which would determine which district each voter belongs to. There would be no consideration as to which party the voter belonged to or any scheme to give one party or the other an unfair advantage.
I think this approach would be better than using blue ribbon panels of prestigious retired judges, who are still human and might decide to do a little gerrymandering. With automandering in place, the people can be certain that the districts are being drawn up fairly and without bias.
