Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

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

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.