Every 10 years after the Census, states redraw
the borders of their legislative districts.
In most states, politicians get to control
that process,
And if they’re clever about how the districts
are drawn... they can make it easier for their
own party to win more of them.
It’s called “partisan gerrymandering”
and it’s bad for democracy, but the Supreme
Court hasn’t intervened in decades.
the Supreme Court has yet to settle on a standard
or definition of political fairness.
They just simply don't want to declare a partisan
gerrymander without some way to measure them.
That’s what Cho’s research team is trying
to fix...with a supercomputer.
[Vox]
So we're trying to build a measurement tool
to help the court measure whether political
parties have manipulated a map to gain an
unfair advantage.
In other words, they’re making a gerrymandering
ruler.
So when you re-district there's a phenomenal
degree of possible manipulation.
Almost any shape you want to make is possible.
That’s led to a bunch of oddly shaped districts.
The court wants to be able to determine the
intent behind the district maps.
Basically they want to read the mind of the
map drawer.
It doesn't have any way to do this.
The team started developing their tool by
identifying what criteria are important to
the court.
Some criteria are required by law
for instance we have to have about the same
number people in every district,
and all districts have to be contiguous.
Contiguous means they can’t be broken up
into a bunch of pieces, with some exceptions.
The court wants districts to preserve political
subdivisions like cities, counties, municipal
boundaries...
Whenever you find an identifiable community
of like minded individuals, the court likes
it when those people are kept together in
the same district.
Wendy’s team is using a supercomputer to
generate district maps based on those criteria.
so we can create a million or billion maps
using only the criteria required by law, and
the traditional districting principles.
And we don't use any political information.
... So these are by definition non partisan
maps because they don't use political information.
If the current map doesn’t look like any
of the possibilities generated by the algorithm...
That’s a good indication a partisan gerrymander
has occurred.
If a billion of these different possible nonpartisan
maps are really different from the map the
court is evaluating then the Supreme Court
has some evidence that partisanship was part
of the motivation behind the alleged partisan
gerrymander.
If we then have a computer draw another billion
maps where we we actually code in partisan
information in addition to these other criteria
that the court likes and those maps actually
appear similar to the map in question then
the Supreme Court can rightly infer partisan
motivation.
Right now, there’s no guarantee that this
particular algorithm will ever be used as
evidence in a court argument.
But a handful of cases could be heard by the
Court this year.
