Comment on YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States

mr_account@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• sp6@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I love that video. One awesome solution he brings up is letting math draw the district lines, specifically the shortest-split line method. There’s also an updated version of the method called Impartial Automatic Redistricting, that uses an approach similar to SSLM, but will only make cuts along the boundaries of census blocks (the smallest geographic unit used by the Census Bureau) to avoid cutting towns/neighborhoods in half, although it can create some odd results sometimes.

  However, I think both of these would currently be illegal under the voting rights act for not taking minority representation into account. That is one downside to these methods, even though they’re probably still an upgrade compared to the heavily-gerrymandered system in the US. So in our current system, the algorithms would have to be updated to somehow take that into account.

  There are also a few other neat district drawing rules on Wikipedia that he didn’t cover which are worth a read.

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• perviouslyiner@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  And Alpha Phoenix demonstrating how to produce rigged boundaries that look natural and not suspicious:

  m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq-Y7crQo44

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