• panthera_@lemmy.today
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    1 day 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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      1 day 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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        7 hours 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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          7 hours 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.