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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

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iglou@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

You are conflating complexity with difficulty. But I’ll argue it’s both more complex and more difficult. It’s more complex because rather than choosing your candidate, you have to express your opinions. You have a bunch of choices to make instead of one. That’s complexity. But jt js also more difficult, because it rewuires you to have a grasp of all the issues that are brought up. Not everyone is able to give their opinion on how to best fight a job crisis, for instance. And picking what “feels” best makes the choice pointless and dangerous. It also doesn’t prevent lies, marketing and false promises at all, as a candidate could still be lying about their intentions just to get more votes.
It is very hard to find the closest match. I tell you that as a software engineer. Because what rules do you use to determine the “closest”? Do you consider every opinion as important? Do you minimise the average distance? Do you minimise the amount of extreme differences? Do you prioritise some “more important” issues? Who even decides what is important? There are so many ways to bias and twitch a system like this.
Then you’re probably better off advocating for a direct democracy, which is another topic and can be done in a mich easier way than trying to adapt a representative democracy for it!

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Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I disagree that answering the questions have to be harder. They don’t have to be so specific that they require a solid grasp. They should be more like do you agree with doing X. Not “choose the best way to solve the homeless crisis”.

You’re overthinking it. You take each question and determine what % of the population answered each way. Then you choose multiple cadadites such that together roughly the same % of the cadadites answered the same way as the people. So yes you should end up with representatives on opposite sides of the issue if people voted that way. The idea is that the representatives as a whole accurately represent the people. And like I said, in a small population state that may be a challenge. But there are ways to work around that.

I don’t think a direct democracy is better. In a dd, money determines what gets voted on. And there are less things voted on in general, so money can sway the people a lot. When the number of questions is higher and all at once, money has a hard time focusing a message on them all. And even after that, the answering of the questions chooses a rep who is able to learn enough aboutvit to be less likely to be swayed by money. A large part of that is that they need no campaign, so they don’t have to serve the money to get reelected.

I’m not saying it perfect, but the general idea is to get people who represent the opinions of the people, not popularity contest winners. And to reduce the money connection to poloticians votes. Also, you don’t need a “party” at all.
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- iglou@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Then we’ll have to agree to disagree on this.
  
  I’m not overthinking it. Doing stuff like this is my job. I receive a problem, I ask the questions to get precise requirements. What I am telling you is that depending on who answers these questions, the outcome of the elections can be completely different. In a very oversimplificated way, it’s a new, even sneakier way to gerrymander.
  
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  - Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    I’m a devops engineer. I personally haven’t written code to do this, but it isn’t something that hasn’t been done before. Just take all possible combinations of candidates and use thier answers to compute the percentage that answered a given way for each question foreach combination. Do the same with the voting results. Then compare the % of the population to the % of each combination to get a set of differences for each combination. For small states you probably need to increase the number of seats to some minimum like 20 or more. For big states you will probably get a match with a tolerance of +/- 1%. For others you will have to iterate the tolerance up until you get a match.
    
    If you want to get a better match, you could make the number of cadadites selected dynamic. And personally I support having a larger number as it reduces the power of anyone individual. Then the reps from the state can vote on any issue, and the states votes can be distributed to represnt the votes of the many representatives.
    
    The idea is a group that actually represents the views of the people they represent istead of special interests.
    
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