Technology, not Politicians

Recently I was listening to a political talk show on the radio and the speaker was talking about the evils of gerrymandering congressional districts. I had to laugh a bit because he was attempting to assert that only the GOP does this, and that the DNC was completely innocent of such shenanigans. Lets forget who is at fault for a moment, and focus on the solutions. It should not surprise you that some very elegant solutions exist, technical solutions. Upon investigating this issue one discovers that technology is not the problem, but politicians are.

The root problem is that neither side wants to play fair. This is a war, so all is fair, right? Wrong. This is not a war. In a war it's perfectly acceptable to kill your opponents. In American politics it is illegal, and more importantly, a social taboo, to kill your opponents. Ours is a great debate. And with this in mind the only thing stopping us from using a technological solution is ourselves.

Let me explain what I mean by technological solution. The basic problem is one of geographically mapping population to physical districts. There are a great deal of very potent mathematical algorithms that could be applied. The data exists. Every 10 years the United States Census Bureau counts all the people, and where they live. It is almost a trivial thing to go from this data to congressional districts by use of any number of systems.

This would remove the politician from the process, and thus the catch.

They want their hands in the pie. They see the districts as their personal pie. They pretend to be offended at gerrymandering, but in truth they embrace it at every turn and only complain when it seems to work against them.

But math does not care about any political ideology. Math is without bias. The algorithm chosen would be made public. The census data fed into it would be made public. Then anyone who ever wanted too could validate the output and verify that the districts rendered are proper. This removes all the hanky panky.

While it is true that, likely, the average person does not immediately grasp the finer details of any such mechanical approach, it is ultimately unimportant for enough people exist that do understand the minutia that all sides can verify to their satisfaction that the process has been executed fairly. And in the end this is what our goal should be, unbiased and fairly distributed districts that represent a cross section of geography and population.

This will still render some districts as leaning in one direction or another, but it will not be done with politicians intention, rather it will happen by the natural groupings that people form when they exercise their right of free association.

More importantly, this will require politicians to hone their skills when it comes time to participate in the great debate. The concept of a safe district will be less sure, and will require incumbents and challengers to better understand and appeal to those people they wish to represent.

There is technical no reason why the same processes cannot be used at all levels, precinct, city, county, state an national. The only thing standing between fair districts and you, are your representatives. Why not do something about it?