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Redistricting 2.0: Cloud Lets Voters Take Part
CWmike writes "As the 2010 U.S. census results arrived, Los Angeles County's politicians started ramping up for redistricting — the once-a-decade, computing-intensive, often contentious process of geographically carving up the populace into discrete parcels of voters. In the past, such decisions were made by politicians using expensive computer systems and software. Participation in the process was limited to an elite few who could afford experts who understood redistricting's arcane rules and GIS technology well enough to game them. This year, however, it won't just be the politicians and special interest groups poring over the data and tweaking boundary lines. All 4.5 million registered voters in LA County have access to a cloud-based redistricting application called the Public Access Plan that lets voters view and modify existing maps and boundaries, submit comments, and even create and submit their own plans from scratch. LA County is among the first government entities to consider providing Web-based tools that allow for direct public participation. 'This notion of public access has changed quite dramatically,' says Tim Storey, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures. 'Throwing that wide open is a big step.' The big question now is whether the public will use it."
Redistricting 2.0: Cloud Lets Voters Take Part
The "cloud" is not a mechanism, it doesn't enable the voters to do anything. The term you're looking for is called Crowdsourcing.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
The correct term is gerrymandering.
Crowdmandering or gerrysourcing?
I can't believe I'm praising Iowa politics, but here goes: Iowa uses a simple grid and a computer to determine the maps. It's not perfect (the legislature can vote up/down on changes), but it's more fair than any other state. Also, we should get rid of the two-party system and use preference voting...
This could be automated and cheaply. Split the state into as many blocks as there are seats each starting at the north east. Make them square and only big enough to contain population/seats amount of people.
In reality this is really about gerrymandering not actually doing this in a fair way.
This seems ripe for misuse to me. Not that I'm against it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If you're not familiar with the US system of districting, how it works is that an area, like the state of New York gets a number of representatives (29 in NY's case) based on its population. The geography of the state is then split up into 29 regions and each region gets to choose its own representative. After the once-a-decade census, like we just had in 2010, states often will redistrict, which means that they pick the boundaries of those 29 regions. For the political parties involved, they want to draw the district boundaries such that they end up with a majority of citizens who will vote for their party in each district. They use voter registration records and census records to do so. The census records, while they don't include political party preference, do include race, age, family size, and income, all of which are good indicators of how someone will vote. As a result, redistricting is usually contentious, and often abused process.
I know that this probably isn't a complete or 100% accurate description of the process; feel free to correct me if I made any mistakes.
Boondoogle.
Some of the public will use it, it will be mostly contradictory, and the politicians will completely ignore it (this is the real big question). I can see no end to the contradictions in opinions, district lines, local (as in town-sized) political motivations, financial motivations (if I'm over there, the taxes are lower), and what have you.
It's a nice idea, but flawed from the get-go.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Dave Bradlee has an app that lets anyone experiment with redistricting plans, at http://gardow.com/davebradlee/redistricting/launchapp.html Sadly, it's Silverlight :-)
Tech buzzwords are my personal kryptonite. Is this anything other than a web application running on top of one or more virtual machine web servers?
I always decline to list a party affiliation on the voter registration form to avoid being a pawn in the gerrymandering process. It's pretty bad in Colorado this year.
In Illinois, Speaker Madigan (the most powerful politician in the state) sits down with a marker, a map, and the census data to draw the districts. That's why he's the longest running Speaker in the history of the state, and why we have a one-party rule, and districts that look like snakes crawling around a map.
I for one welcome our cloud overlords.
I tried to look up the Democrats version of this site, but all I could find was a list of hotels in neighboring states, and a link to the song "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to".
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Oh wait.... but not in the "traditional" sence. That would be the day where a citizen's political activness could have much improved results.
WHEREAS: Gerrymandering has become an overt indication of politics at its most revolting it is herein resolved to limit the the fractal dimension of any established voting district to not exceed the ratio of the logarithm of the number of House Representatives to the logarithm of the population of the Senate - sine-die
Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, is using an open source mapping application to obtain similar redistricting information from the public - see http://fuzzytolerance.info/code/redistricting-with-openlayers-%E2%80%93-part-iii/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FuzzyTolerance+%28Fuzzy+Tolerance%29
The process of letting those who are elected determine the boundaries for the electorates is so unbelievably corrupt that were it anywhere other than the US I would be surprised. But your entire system of government is corrupted beyond recognition, so we just shrug and say "Fucking Yanks!" Here in New Zealand, appointed officials with statutory independence from the elected government handle the issue of electorate boundaries. It just makes sense. There's no benefit to them in gaming the boundaries, so they do an objective job instead of making decisions based on keeping their noses in the trough.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
Here's something novel: how about letting a (gasp!) computer do it - as in divide the geopolitical space into the appropriate number of areas, each of which has a minimum outline or area. The idea is to eliminate gerrymandering, biases (political, ethnic, social, etc), and so on.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
So in the midst of a budget crisis where we're laying off teachers, firefighters and police, we can somehow cough up the money to build a set of web based tools to let the public do their own fiddling about with districting. Only problem is, practically nobody will know about it, few will use it, and nobody in the political end of things will have any interest whatsoever in what the public has to say about it because it wont change enough votes whether they do or dont pay attention.
Good job LA County! When you find yourself with extra millions kicking around to do stuff like this and cant find a worthwhile usage for it, send some of it up here to my county so we can hire back a few hundred teachers.
"The big question now is whether the public will use it.""
Doubtful. I don't see myself using this. Yeah right. What am I going to do, sit around and worry about exactly where some voting boundary should because ....
Should the boundary be 3 miles from my house, or 4 miles from my house, 2 degrees west or 2.1 degrees west?
Most people will come to the same conclusion as myself ... who cares.
...from 2003 gives some good background, and is well worth a read:
The Great Election Grab: When does gerrymandering become a threat to democracy?