By David Wright

U.S. House of Representative districts are bounded by centuries-old state borders, and redrawn by state legislatures. This has led to constitutional problems, and overcoming the problem of gerrymandering has not gone away. I propose a distance-weighted voting algorithm where any citizen can vote for any candidate in the country, and the 435 candidates with the highest weighted aggregate votes will become congresspeople. A Voronoi diagram will be used to partition the country into districts. The weighting scheme will encourage people to vote for candidates who are geographically close to them, but gives the option of voting for someone far away, with a distance penalty of, say, 1/d. For example, if someone votes for a person who is 1 mile away, they contribute is 1/1 = 1 vote. If someone votes for a person who is 100 miles away, that is 1/100 = 0.01 votes. At the end, all votes are summed, and the top 435 candidates win.
This algorithm will reduce gerrymandering, weaken tribalism, and continuously update borders in a data-driven way.
Future work will involve methods to outright dissolve the Senate, as it is based on an irrelevant 226-year-old compromise based on lines drawn by European aristocrats.


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David Wright



Published: 26 May, 2017

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