No. of Recommendations: 4
No computer program to draw districts will ever be free of human judgment and bias because human beings must input instructions for a computer program to follow.
Oh no question, there will some bias cooking into everything, but at least the bias will be somewhat consistent. At the moment there is nothing preventing raw political animus from carving up one district one way and another district by a completely different set of rules. I think most of us think that “rules” are a good feature of a democratic society.
That said, there are also some situations where a consistent set of rules might disadvantage (perhaps permanently) some groups. I can see how minority populations might be “smoothed” into the larger subset, rather than clustered as they are now, which produces at least some minority representatives. I’m sure you could find other deleterious effects as well, but at the moment we’re not even trying.
And my idea of “algorithm” is simpler, like “draw each district with substantially equal populations, using the least number of sides of the district boundary as possible”. (Not sure if that’s clear, but the idea would be to have the computer run multiple scenarios to find equal size districts with as little of the snake-like Gerry found in gerrymandering.)
