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I'd love to see a law that distributes voters among electoral districts on a strict mathematical base, eg. Based on minimum distance algorithms. No input except home address location straight from census data.
This, combined with some form of ranked choice with a minimum of 3 winning representatives seems to pretty much guarantee equitable representation
Dem Pols: "Nah, We already have a system that works, we just need to make it work in our favor."
None of them care about "equitable representation" for us, they care about winning, and retaining power.
Never said otherwise.
Distance is not enough: depending where you center those districts, they can still be biased. There have been a bunch of initiatives for algorithmic districting, with all kind of constraints - compact, competitive, .... Somewhere along the way, electoral reform and campaign finance just fell off the public radar. Along with Medicare for all. I mean, I get that fascism is kind of a priority at the moment, but elections are fundamentally how you fix that.
It would need to deal with compactness, too, to avoid biased centers, of course. It would need some parametric tuning, but the tunable parameters should be rather restricted to avoid gerrymandering again. Although any working algorithm in that direction would be way better than those rather "artfully designed" ones the Republicans have drawn.
My favorite strategy for reducing the effect of this is large districts with multiple reps per district (ideally with a form of rcv)
Yes it's still possible to introduce bias, but it would make a big difference on the ability to gerrymander, because you don't have he degrees of freedom to stack voters in the same way.
If you're into maths and want to know the theory behind it, it is based on the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension of the shapes used for distracting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vapnik%E2%80%93Chervonenkis_dimension . Not a fun read! But accurate
Shortest straight line districting. It divides the districts according to their population using the shortest straight lines possible. It's purely a GIS algorithm and can be run in seconds.
You'd potentially end up with some slightly nonsense results, like having districts that are divided by a river. Doesn't make sense to allocate public services that way - are you going to maintain the roads that aren't connected to the rest of your district by road?
I think that this is seeking a technical solution to a human problem. Life doesn't really work that way. Still leaves the potential for shenanigans that could no longer be argued with, because it's "fair". Having the election districts be drawn up by a truly independent body would be better, no?
Tell me how to perform the miracle of finding a human neutral party. I think the only solution that is truly neutral can only be a technical one here.
But the technical solution cannot be simple which leaves it open to interpretation and interference.
Get back to me when you've found one.