Algorithm for district boundaries

[Jonathan Buhacoff]

Proposal:

The algorithm for drawing voting district boundaries shall be public.

A voting district for a local government such as a city shall be contained entirely within the town or city incorporated area.

A voting district for a regional government such as a county or province shall be contained entirely within the county or province and outside the boundary of any city.

In urban areas, draw concentric circles around the population centers to form bands, or concentric discs around a central circle. Divide the outer bands into sectors with approximately similar population count as the central circle.

In rural areas, draw concentric circles around the population centers to form bands, or concentric discs around a central circle. Draw approximately equally-sized rectangular boundaries around clusters of circles. Assign smaller rectangles that are formed by the gaps to adjacent rectangles that contain a population center.

If there is a major geographical feature such as a mountain or river which crosses a district boundary, and which divides the district boundary such that only one side of the geographical feature contains a population center, the boundary lines shall be drawn along the geographical feature such that they form separate voting districts on either side of the geographical feature.

Intent:

Part of ensuring that elections are fair is to ensure that the district boundaries are drawn fairly.

Discussion:

Drawing the district boundaries on a map should not be done on a whim, especially not by partisans because they might try to draw boundaries in a way that would give them an unfair advantage in future elections.

It doesn’t need to be exact because voting districts don’t determine the constituency.

The geographical size of the districts and the population count of each district do not need to be exactly the same. It is more important that people within each district have at least one reasonable location to use as a voting station and equal ability to travel from their registered home address to the voting station to cast their vote.

The algorithm described in this proposal is not complete but is intended to give an idea of what it could be like and that when multiple people use it to define voting district boundaries, the results will be similar (and ideally always the same), and that any deviation from the algorithm for a nefarious purpose can be detected and challenged.

Notably absent from the algorithm is any consideration of the religion, skin color, or party affiliation of people within the resulting voting districts.

The possibility of gerrymandering can be eliminated with voting districts and representation in the legislature, as described in Gerrymandering.

However, it is still useful to have a reasonable algorithm for selecting voting district boundaries.

Anyone should be able to take a map and one or more public datasets with all the information that will be used by the algorithm to draw boundaries, apply the algorithm and arrive at the same or very similar result.

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