Comment by mrcactu5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrcactu5 | Hacker News Reader

Here is a map of the US according the distance to major cities. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2626281/The-m...

Electoral college reform (fifty states with equal population) http://fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/

This type of gerrymandering or repartition is a rich part of US voting history. The legal term might be "apportionment" or the math term could be "equipartition".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...

    Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States 
    which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers
    which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, 
    including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, & excluding Indians not 
    taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
    
    The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, 
    but each State shall have at least one Representative;…

These touch questions about geographical fairness have always existed. In the 21st century, these might be solved with computational geometry.

This type of gerrymandering or repartition is a rich part of US voting history... In the 21st century, these might be solved with computational geometry.

Or by getting rid of the notion of apportionment altogether.

There's no reason, in an always-connected society in which people can telecommute to work, that people's votes should be aggregated (counted up and applied) based on their geographic proximity.

Instead, votes should be aggregated exactly at the level of governance to which they apply. For example, representatives to city government should be elected by city-wide ballot, not ward-by-ward. State reps should be elected by state-wide ballot, not district-by-district. National reps should be elected by national ballot, not state-by-state.

Forcing geographical aggregation on people just strips geographically-distributed minorities of their power. If, say, 5% of the country's population consists of radical vegetarian pacifists (RVPs) who would vote for a RVP slate, then why shouldn't 5% of the nation's representatives (give or take) come from an RVP party? Yet if those 5% are distributed evenly throughout the country, they can have no party, and no dedicated direct voice, because the current system dilutes their votes among those of people who happen to live near them.

"Let the people gerrymander themselves!"

Of course, this would require changing the system, and would reduce the power of those who control the current system. Therefore it is extremely unlikely ever to happen.

(By the way, some might object that such a change would make small states lose their voice at the national level. But everybody who thinks their state's interests are threatened by some national policy, can form a party and vote its representatives into office. I'm not saying geography shouldn't be considered at all-- I'm just saying it shouldn't be the only means of aggregating votes.)

There actually is a way to get both: representatives for each geographical area, and a fair representation.

With mixed-member proportional voting, you have two votes, one for the local representative, one for the perceptual representation.

Pedantic, but should be "capital cities", instead of "major cities".

I don't think it's pedantic. It changes the meaning of the map drastically. Most major cities in the US are not capital cities. In the top 10 states by population, only one is a capital city (using 2014 numbers).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

This is an article on using kmeans clustering to partition congressional districts ... https://dsparks.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/k-means-redistricti...

Was that first map calculated on a GPU?

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