http://drmaltman.wordpress.com/2014/10/28/redistricting-and-technology/
Dr Altman mentions my software, and points out a couple limitations:
"Ad-hoc definition of compactness"It's true. I saw a bunch of measures of compactness out there, and no consensus on what the best one was, so I made up my own. It has advantages and tradeoffs compared with other measures. If comparing many plans crossed with many measures became a key feature in driving adoption, I'd do it. At some point we're probably going to have a big discussion about what the right measure is.
"Does not permit inclusion of districting criteria other than compactness, population, contiguity."Yup. I'll call that a version-1.0 limitation. It's on my to-do list to consider political-unit contiguity, measuring how many towns and cities and counties get broken by district lines. It may also be a necessary compromise to implement Voting Rights Act 'gerrymandering for good' majority-minory disitricts.
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Dr. Altman's talk spends most of its second half recapping and advocating the Public Mapping Project's progress so far and future in making Free/OpenSource web based GIS software for crowd-sourced redistricting. The Open Source world has a long standing maxim that 'many eyes make all bugs shallow', and perhaps that will apply also to the bug of gerrymandering.
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Hi Brian,
ReplyDeleteJust a note, I included your software in the talk because it is impressive in the scale of data it can handle -- redistricting California at the block level is hard. The limitations I referred to are important for understanding the problem automation can solve, and for practical use in a policy setting (in which many criteria may be in plan) -- but not at all unique to your software's approach.
best,
Micah
Thanks for the note!
DeleteI still want to find ways to work on the practical and realpolitk aspects where my system comes up short; or maybe find niches in the process where my data can be most useful as is.