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I’ve often thought that it would be great to let people design their own political districts to reduce gerrymandering
At the polling place you’d get a map with your census tract and then be asked “which two or three adjacent tracts are most similar to your community”. Eventually you’d end up with some sort of gram matrix for tract-to-tract affinity, and then you could apply some algorithmic segmentation.
Two problems:
- this is far too complex for most voters to understand, much less trust, what’s happening
- the fact it’s “algorithmic” would give a sheen of pseudo objectivity, but the selection of the actual algorithm would still allow political infouence over boundaries
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Comment 2: I have actually had the same idea as you in a slightly different context. My country is in urgent need of creating new smaller provinces by dividing the existing ones. But there is wide disagreement on what the boundaries should be.
One method would be to decide the capitals of the new provinces, and then ask people in each district which province they would most like to join. If there is contiguous land to the winning provincial capital for every district, then the solution just pops out.
Simply not having dynamic districts and having as many representatives for that area as there is population is a far better solution.
And its also makes more sense, specially in historical places. In Switzerland, the idea to move around political and voting districts dynamically would be deeply a-historical.
Its simply the case that if more people move to an area, that area gets more people that represent it in parliament.
But the US for various reasons, focused on single representative districts. Those are good for some things, but also cause many, many problems. The positives are that it makes it easier to campaign, because you ahve to convinced fewer people. And its proven to generate a diverse set of candidates (assuming no gerrymandering). But its also easier to gerrymander, and it doesn't necessarily give the best overall set of candidates for a large groups of people.
Modern research suggest that using a propitiation based multi representative district is a far better solution.
For a well researched system for that, I would suggest: https://www.starvoting.org/star-pr
So create a few big districts, then use a good voting system.
The problem is that constituency is about answering the question "who are my people?". Like, why don't we have an MP for tech workers and an MP for grandmothers? Why do constituencies need to be geographical?
> which two or three adjacent tracts are most similar to your community
From gerrymandering to gentrifying in one easy step ;)
There are good reasons to force some mixing or suddenly your area only caters to the rich people while the non-similar area is known for making all the hard decisions for all the problems.
I also wonder if it would be stable enough over time
surely then the census tracts would just become the new thing to gerrymander
Gerrymandering is much more favorable in a FPTP system of elections than other types of elections. Winner takes all really incentives doing whatever it takes to keep winning.
Instead of your quite complex idea of segmentation, entities should simply move to a slightly more complex election system than FPTP, but which has reduced incentive for gerrymandering. For example, systems that give parties some seats based on the percentage of votes they get in the whole country/province etc.