OPINION:
I enjoyed Mr. Dinan’s recent article, “Art and absurdity of redrawing congressional lines — and then crossing them” (Web, Aug. 10) but like several other articles in the Washington Times and other news outlets in recent weeks, there is little discussion about how to end the corrupt gerrymandering done by both political parties.
The technology used to create apolitical legislative district boundaries is over a decade old. A software engineer named Brian Olson wrote an algorithm to do it in 2014 using the 2010 census. The algorithm creates “optimally compact” equal-population congressional districts in each state based on census data. It draws districts that respect the boundaries of census blocks, which are the smallest geographic units used by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Doing this makes the district boundaries reflect actual neighborhoods. Race, party affiliation, income levels, religion and ethnic backgrounds of the residents would not be considered. The only time something might be elongated would be due to the topography of the land, such as the presence of a peninsula or mountain range.
One thing that somewhat limits this idea is the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits not only election-related practices and procedures intended to be racially discriminatory, but also those shown to have a racially discriminatory result. It is possible the Supreme Court will revisit this in the coming year. If the race “result” requirement is dropped by the court as unconstitutional, the algorithm idea would be easier to use.
Hopefully the party that has the current majority in a state legislature will see the light and adopt the use of the of Mr. Olson’s “unbiased” algorithm to create its future district boundaries. Doing so will actually protect them when they become the minority party. The boundaries would of course have to be blessed by humans; I would recommend by a statewide referendum.
The end result would be that no political party would be happy. The voters, however, would be happier, since those in their district will more likely be their neighbors and thus have the same concerns and interests regardless of party affiliation.
Cmdr. WAYNE L. JOHNSON
Judge Advocate General’s Corps, U.S. Navy (retired)
Alexandria, Virginia
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