I’ve talked from time to time about gerrymandering, most recently here. So, as I blear my way through this head cold, I was interested to see mention of a new approach to building a legislative map. From the Abstract of the academic paper:
We design and analyze a protocol for dividing a state into districts, where parties take turns proposing a division, and freezing a district from the other party’s proposed division. We show that our protocol has predictable and provable guarantees for both the number of districts in which each party has a majority of supporters, and the extent to which either party has the power to pack a specific population into a single district.
NewScientist (11 November 2017) amplifies:
With the approach, one political party draws an electoral map that divides the state into the agreed number of districts. The second party then chooses one district to freeze so that no more changes can be made to it by either side. It then redraws the rest of the map. Once the new map is complete, the first political party freezes one of the new districts, and redraws the rest of the map again. This continues until every district in the state is frozen.
I’m too sick – and no doubt inexperienced – to analyze this approach. But it does remind me of times past in which scientists were fooled – or fooled themselves – when analyzing psychic phenomenon. It didn’t take long for the skeptics’ movement to come up with the best way to analyze such phenomenon:
Send in a magician.
Scientists are not practiced in the art of fooling, so it becomes a game for the psychic shyster to fool the scientists, and they succeed. But a magician is basically the same as a psychic shyster, except they cheerfully shrug and admit that it’s all just trickery – just like the psychics. And that makes them optimal for revealing the tricks of the psychics.
Now, it’s a stretch – and maybe the authors of this paper did it, I haven’t taken the time to read it – but it’s my hope that they tossed this plan into the laps of a bunch of politicians, just to see if politicians react as they predict.
Or if they find loopholes in this scheme.
