• wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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    3 days ago

    This Supreme Court?!? Of course they ruled to allow gerrymandering. Most gerrymandered states are controlled by republican legislatures. It’s no surprise the Scotus would let thise legislatures keep drawing their own congressional maps.

    Typically it’s up to the state courts to declare those maps to be illegally gerrymandered. That happened in Ohio, but the legislature ignored the ruling and somehow held elections with those illegal maps. But it’s up to the state to sort that out.

    a computer program is definitely not partisan

    A computer program absolutely can be partisan, if it’s designed by someone who’s partisan.

    and consequently, can be imposed on states

    No it can’t. That’s not how the constitution works, you thick-skulled looby.

    The only inputs a computer program need is the boundaries of the state, the population size, where people live, and the number of districts desired. How can such a program be biased?

    Clearly you don’t know how gerrymandering works if you don’t realize there’s still room within those constraints for partisan fuckery.

    How can it be assured that the commissions are nonpartisan?

    This question is moot because a majority of states have already successfully implemented it. You wanna know how they did about it, go read about it instead of armchair politicking.

    • panthera_@lemmy.today
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      3 days ago

      What inputs would you manipulate to make the program partisan? Once the state is entered, the program will know the state’s boundaries and number of districts. Population size and locations could probably be extracted from the US census data base.

      • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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        3 days ago

        Do you not realize that there are still multiple ways to slice that pie?

        The whole point of gerrymandering is to split up opposition strongholds (typically blue areas in red states, i.e. cities) and attach them piecemeal to larger-by-area districts with lower population densities in order to water down their votes in redder districts.

        That way instead of a city having one or two reps who are blue and can actually represent their constituencies, you have a bunch of tiny slivers of that city that are represented by the reps for the rural districts they’re attached to. It’s how republicans have disenfranchised urban voters for a long time. And yes, there’s a heavily racial subtext to this, since urban areas tend to be more non-white than rural areas. It’s how republicans disenfranchise non-white voters.

        A computer program can still do the same thing. That doesn’t solve gerrymandering.

        • panthera_@lemmy.today
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          2 days ago

          No, a computer program whose purpose is to gerrymander can be designed to gerrymander. An input to the program would be the party affiliation of various locations. A computer program which isn’t designed to gerrymander would not be given that information. All it needs to know are the boundaries of the state, the population, the various locations of the population, and the required number of districts.

          • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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            2 days ago

            There are a multitude of proxies for political affiliation that can be used instead to stealthily gerrymander. And you have no way of ensuring that an unconstitutionally mandated computer program wouldn’t include those.

            • panthera_@lemmy.today
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              1 day ago

              No, since political affiliation would not be an input to the computer program. Peer-review by university computer science professors would catch any attempt to sneak it in. Do you think a company would risk being caught and punished? It is not unconstitutional to force a state to adopt something which does not disenfranchise a part of the population no more than it’s unconstitutional to force a state to adopt a voting method which is not prone to fraud.

              • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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                1 day ago

                Peer-review by university computer science professors would catch any attempt to sneak it in

                You’re putting a lot of faith in the political awareness and good intentions of these computer science professors.

                It is not unconstitutional to force a state to adopt something…

                Yes it is. It literally is, when you’re talking about electoral processes such as redistricting.

                You’re only continuing to reveal how little you know about the topic.

                • panthera_@lemmy.today
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                  1 day ago

                  Political awareness is unnecessary, only knowledge of computer programming. It is improbable that all the professors would have bad intentions and are in one specific party.

                  It is not unconstitutional to force states to adopt something that ensures districting is impartial.

                  • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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                    1 day ago

                    “Political awareness isn’t necessary to design a system that all states will be forced to implement for their elections.” Holy shit, a statement like this demonstrates exactly why political awareness is necessary, and makes abundantly clear that you have none of it. Thankfully I don’t have to worry about your ideas seeing any daylight.

                    It is not unconstitutional to force states to adopt something that ensures districting is impartial.

                    I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this, but the federal government meddling in how states run their elections literally violates the constitution. If that’s not “unconstitutional” then I don’t even know what that word means to you…