Translator: Lisa Thompson Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
If you've ever had the suspicion that your vote doesn't really count
and the deck might be stacked against you, you might be right.
In many places in this country, we don't have a functioning democracy.
People might go to the polls,
but they might not have a real choice when they get there.
In 2010, the people of Florida were trying to do something about this.
They passed a ballot initiative with almost two-thirds of the vote:
a new state constitutional amendment
requiring that districts be fair and not biased based on race or party.
It didn't work.
The state legislature sued to try and get out of these new requirements,
and in subsequent court battles,
the maps they made were found to be racially and partisan biased.
Florida is just one example
of our national problem with gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is when you take a few people from one place
and a few people from another place and draw a line around them on the map
to create a district with some specific demographic goal.
Here's an example world with 25 people:
60% green people and 40% purple people.
If you split that up into five simple districts of five people each,
you can preserve that ratio in the outcome
and have three districts won by green people
and two districts won by purple people.
But if you pack enough green people into just two districts,
then you can flip that outcome
and wind up with three districts where there's a purple majority.
Or you can crack the purple people and split them up just right
so that they don't have a majority anywhere.
These strategies of packing and cracking
are being used in dozens of districts throughout the country.
That bright blue district in northeast Florida
was found to be racially biased
because it packs too many black people into one district,
diminishing their influence elsewhere.
That was Florida in 2012,
but gerrymandering has been going on for a long time,
since at least 1812,
when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry signed into law a map
that was drawn into a political cartoon as a monstrous, dragonesque salamander,
and thus was born the gerrymander.
But it's gotten a lot worse lately.
The joke is that instead of voters picking their politicians,
politicians are picking their voters.
Why is this a problem?
When you have too many seats
that are gerrymandered to be safe for one party or another,
the political process breaks down in some ways.
I have one personal example.
In 2006, I was a webmaster
for a congressional campaign in California.
We were in a district
that was gerrymandered, say, for the other party.
And the incumbent in that party
didn't feel the need to take part in the campaign
and wouldn't agree to show up for any debates.
He just felt he didn't have to.
And our party wouldn't send any help; they figured we were a lost cause.
Come election day, the incumbent got the expected 60/40 result.
In other places, it's even worse.
In 2014, there were 32 congressional districts that went unopposed -
no one else on the ballot.
That's over 20 million Americans
with no effective choice over who their representative in Congress is.
In some places,
the incumbent faces a more extreme challenger from within their own party.
And whether you have an extremist upstart or a long incumbent safe seat,
that politician might not feel the need to reach out across the aisle
and compromise on anything because they're safe,
and the legislative process grinds to a halt,
and voters get more cynical.
What if we could have impartial districts?
What if we defined what a good district was mathematically
and didn't let anyone else's agenda interfere?
Florida's map might look something like this.
About 10 years ago,
computers got powerful enough to solve for this kind of map
that follows the legal requirements of having equal population per district,
contiguous districts that are each all one piece,
and in this case, solving for compact districts
that try to tightly represent one location or region.
But I didn't know it would work when I started.
Previous work in this area
had been on tiny toy maps like the one I showed you earlier,
and they didn't think it would scale up to a full state worth of data.
But I figured I was a pretty good engineer and I'd give it a shot,
and I think it worked out pretty well.
So, when the 2010 census data starting coming out,
I set my home computer to work,
and over the next six months, it came up with 137 maps
for state legislature and congressional districts
all over the country.
And I think the results are pretty good.
Let's see another one.
First, the old way.
North Carolina has also been in almost constant legal battles
since their maps came out a little over four years ago.
Most recently,
they were thrown out for racial bias just as primary season was spinning up.
New maps were hastily drawn up,
and the primary had to be pushed back from March until June.
Voters and candidates were left in disarray.
That red district in the northeast
reaches into and around three other districts.
That pink district in the middle pinches down as narrow as possible
while reaching out to grab other areas.
This is nuts.
These are the visual telltales
of districts that have been distorted toward some political end.
The opposite of a sprawling, non-local gerrymandered map
is a compact map, like this.
I hope you can see the difference.
You can also measure it.
I measure compactness
as the average distance per person to the center of their district.
In the old North Carolina map, that distance was 38 miles;
in my map, it's 25 miles.
You can measure how sprawling and non-local a gerrymandered map is
and how compact a compact map is.
So, it's technically possible.
How's the political situation?
You might expect that there would be some resistance to this kind of change,
and there is, but there is also some demand for it.
The republican governor of Maryland has recently called out for national help
in overturning his state's democratic gerrymander.
That is one of the more contorted messes
of tentacled horrors of districts I have seen in any map.
(Laughter)
I don't know if this is the best map,
but I submit that it is a legally viable map,
without some of the obvious runaround and drawbacks of the old map.
There are a lot of states with divided government,
with the two parties fighting over redistricting.
But this shouldn't be something to fight about.
Redistricting should be a bureaucratic, boring process,
where you get in new census data, you turn the crank,
and you get out new maps for the next 10 years.
In the last few years,
California, Arizona, Ohio, and Florida have passed reform of one kind or another.
That shows that it's possible.
Those reforms might not be perfect, and they might still need some tinkering,
but we can do it.
This is technically possible.
Open-source software, free and verifiable,
running on home computers that anyone can use
can solve for these kinds of impartial maps,
and the results are pretty good.
This is politically possible.
People want reform - even some elected officials want it.
And the legal mechanisms are achievable.
If we could have a change now,
we could have a big effect on the future of our political process.
If reform comes to enough places,
enough states,
we might even be able to get a national standard.
And a national standard might let us really hold up our core value
of equal protection under the law for all.
(Applause)