<story><title>Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts</title><url>http://autoredistrict.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pessimizer</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think that political parties or race should be included in redistricting plans, especially since I think that this could often accidentally result in &lt;i&gt;optimally&lt;/i&gt; &amp;quot;cracking&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;packing&amp;quot; minority districts. Neither political parties nor races should be intentionally institutionalized.&lt;p&gt;The defining characteristic of a district is that it is geographically contiguous. A defining specification for districts is that they have a roughly even population. With those constraints, what you would want to do is find physical commonalities (not abstract loyalties.) For example: water sources, proximity to commercial areas, types of housing stock, local weather patterns, local roads&amp;#x2F;accessibility, proximity to major land features&amp;#x2F;employers (like quarries, factories, lakes.) That&amp;#x27;s harder than doing this.&lt;p&gt;A problem I have with with doing this by political parties is that the two parties aren&amp;#x27;t themselves part of government and shouldn&amp;#x27;t be. A real problem I have with making racial guarantees (other than the possibility of packing and cracking) is that it seems to be calculated through averaging &amp;quot;diversity&amp;quot; - meaning that a group with 6% representation would be guaranteed 6% voting power on the district level (assuming people vote purely based on racial allegiance.) &amp;quot;Diversity&amp;quot; is a red herring; it&amp;#x27;s remedy that is important. 6% can be ignored at the district level nearly as easily as it can be ignored at the individual level. You&amp;#x27;re not going to get remedy from redistricting, but districts that grow from material features of the places where people live will end up shaped by race anyway (due to the history of those places.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts</title><url>http://autoredistrict.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spankalee</author><text>Districts themselves are the problem. They can be more &amp;quot;fair&amp;quot; than they are currently, but they can&amp;#x27;t overcome the fact that common interests and voting alignment are not exclusively geographic.&lt;p&gt;Removing districts, or enlarging them so the borders barely matter, and implementing ranked choice voting and proportional representation is a far, far better solution.</text></comment>