Is this technically feasible? Is it a good idea?

[nels96]

Congressional redistricting should be done by a computer program
designed to randomly aggregate geographically contiguous voters,
mechanically stripped of political affiliation, race, gender, ethnicity,
age, and any other class distinction, to form appropriate and politically unpartisan congressional districts.

This should be adopted by one or two states, and tested and
debugged, then adopted nationally by a constitutional amendment,
so as to be uniformally used thruout the country.

nels96
www.tenurecorrupts.com

[scrap]

Who's gonna write the program for the computer??? ;D

[nels96]

scrap said:

Who's gonna write the program for the computer??? ;D

Hey Scrap,
That is not the question. First, is it a good idea? Second, is it technically feasible? If both answers are Yes, then we just have to gather the people who believe in the idea to put their money where their mouths are. If the idea is feasible, I'm sure there is a software design outfit who will write the program for a fee.

nels96

[scrap]

Hey nels
I don't believe I read a question anywhere in that post.

I see a couple in this post though.

I believe we need to get the term limit debate settled first, and that's never gonna happen because if I'm not mistaken it has to get passed by the Congressmen themselves.

Talk about shooting themselves in the foot Never gonna do it.

It's probably technically feasible but anytime the human element is tossed into the equasion the end result will be questioned. And rightly so.

How far can a congressional district be moved past it's current position to matter that much?

Maybe I shouldn't have posted on this subject without some more knowledge.

[nels96]

scrap said:

Hey nels
I don't believe I read a question anywhere in that post.

I see a couple in this post though.

I believe we need to get the term limit debate settled first, and that's never gonna happen because if I'm not mistaken it has to get passed by the Congressmen themselves.

Talk about shooting themselves in the foot Never gonna do it.

It's probably technically feasible but anytime the human element is tossed into the equasion the end result will be questioned. And rightly so.

How far can a congressional district be moved past it's current position to matter that much?

Maybe I shouldn't have posted on this subject without some more knowledge.

Hi Scrap,

I was surprised that altho I was addressing computerized redistricting in my post, you chose to introduce my pet project 'Term Limits' into the discussion. Go to www.tenurecorrupts.com which i have brought up elsewhere in this forum.

Yes, term limits would help getting random redistricting. Term Limits would help all kinds of things, as I point out on my site.

But back to computerized redistricting. You express skepticism about two things: the human bias inside the software design, and the fact that the new districts would not be much differet than they are now.

On the second item, I ask: Have you ever seen examples of the distorted districts the pols have created to create 'safe' seats? After you have seen some, you will never again have any doubt about the need for a randomized computer neutral solution.

On the first item: Yes, it is possible to have bias in the software design, tho' extremely unlikely since the design would be limited to simple counts of registered voters, denuded of any info of party, race, gender, etc. For example, if you laid a grid over the map of a state, then increased or decreased the size of each cell of the grid, depending
on the count of voters in each cell.

Comment?
nels96
www.tenurecorrupts.com