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491 points anigbrowl | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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parpfish ◴[] No.43981035[source]
Tangent:

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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1. viraptor ◴[] No.43981389[source]
> 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.