How about leaving the US-elections to mathematicians?

[DetlefK]

Why can the redistricting not be done by a computer?
- preference to align district-borders along natural land-marks
- preference to center districts around population-centers
- preference to give the district a compact shape

Coding that would be a matter of months and would cost a few million dollars tops. And in return one would get a non-partisan redistricting-method that can be used anywhere in the US.




Or how about the neverending fight over voter-IDs? Statisticians have two nice values that could be put to use: Purity and Efficiency.
High Purity means that you set high standards for which data (vote) you regard as true. The rest is disregarded as fake.
High Efficiency means that you try to incorporate as much data as possible in your evaluation, to make it closer reflect reality.

Obviously, one needs to make a compromise between Statistical Purity and Statistical Efficiency.
Guess what?
SURPRISE!!! Statisticians have formulas how to calculate the perfect compromise between those two.

Put some statisticians to the task and they will come up with a mathematical solution on what kind of discriminator (e.g. what kind of ID you use) one would need for a perfect compromise between getting the vote-total as high as possible and disregarding as many possibly fraudulent votes as possible.




It's there. We have the knowledge. We can make him better, stronger, faster... I mean... Elections. Elections are statistics and stochastics. We have the knowledge how to make elections better and fairer. But it's more important to only whine about bad election-rules during election-season and then forget about it for another 3 years.

[Gman]

1. GOP gerrymandering is computerized

There is software out there that does all of what you say. They know without seeing your ballot how you are most likely to vote and gerrymandering is done with the software.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. If you can list 3 different things to give preference to, you can see it's still a human decision

You can't say there is one solution that fits all 3 preferences that you yourself would like (and other people might want to add more preferences). Yes, you could use computers to give districts as compact a shape as possible; and people have done so. In the example I saw, I looked at what it would do for SW Pennsylvania (since that was where I had lived in the USA); it divided Pittsburgh into 3, making each district a slice of the urban area, and some surrounding rural areas. It turns out 2 of the preferences you list can be in direct opposition to each other.

Even with the preferences you list, there is still room for interpretation. If you need to divide a city for 2 seats, do you do it by centre and suburbs, east and west, north and south? Do you use rivers as dividing lines, or as the centres of a valley?

Another 'preference' that current law demands is racial representation.

And, no, you'll never be able to use mathematics to define what is a 'perfect compromise'. We can never say what gets "the vote-total as high as possible", because that's a matter of opinion and imperfect models that varies between elections and regions, and over time. Psychohistory is not a real thing.

[SCantiGOP]

3. DetlefK:

On the mark. I have advocated this for years as the single best reform we could have. Districts that were competitive would be likely to elect people who wanted to govern. And, I think a computer program to draw districts without taking past voting patterns in effect would be the best approach.

[goldent]

4. This has been proposed in many states

and is really an interesting idea. However, it is all about what factors you want to optimize. In one proposal, one of the factors was "competitive" districts, which I though was bad as it is just another form of gerrymandering. Some reasonable proposals will result in racially divided districts which can be viewed as bad or good depending on how you look at it.

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

5. Have you read "Franchise" by Isaac Asimov?

http://www.rednovels.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27325.html

Each election one person is chosen to vote. He goes into a room alone and is interviewed by a disembodied voice (super computer AI). He doesn't "vote", per se, but his answers are used to decide hundreds of elections.

excerpt:

Linda said excitedly, "You voted, Grandpa? You really did?"

Sarah leaned forward quickly to quiet what might easily become an incongruous story drifting about the neighborhood, "It's nothing, Linda. Grandpa doesn't really mean voted. Everyone did that kind of voting, your grandpa, too, but it wasn't really voting."

Matthew roared, "It wasn't when I was a little boy. I was twenty-two and I voted for Langley and it was real voting. My vote didn't count for much, maybe, but it was as good as anyone else's. Anyone else's. And no Multivac to-"

Norman interposed, "All right, Linda, time for bed. And stop asking questions about voting. When you grow up, you'll understand all about it."