Republicans are requesting a liberal Wisconsin judge recuse herself from potentially considering reviewing the Badger State’s congressional maps.
Earlier this month, Democrats asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to reconsider the state’s congressional maps, using the high court’s opinion in a separate elections maps lawsuit as reason to consider a redo over Wisconsin’s congressional maps.
But five members of Wisconsin’s GOP congressional delegation filed a motion Tuesday asking Justice Janet Protasiewicz to recuse herself from hearing the case, pointing to comments she made when she was a candidate running for a spot on the court last year as reason to not weigh in.
Among some of the comments Republicans pointed to included her calling the state’s maps “rigged” and saying she “would certainly welcome the opportunity to have a fresh look at our maps.” However, neither she, nor her Republican opponent, detailed how they would vote on a potential case while on the campaign trail.
No, I’m not. Again, the video I referenced if you want to know what most influenced my thinking on the subject.
The problem is, the algorithms only factor into consideration the things they’re programmed to consider. They have to also be told how to weight and consider these properties.
By relying on algorithmic approaches, all you have done is change gerrymandering from the art of line-drawing into the art of algorithm design. It’s not really any different in terms of outputs. All a bad actor needs to do it figure out the initial weights to specify – which can easily be made to look innocuous – to get the election results they want. And with any remotely competent approach, they can work backwards from their result to discover initial weights that will achieve that goal. So long as the process is allowed to be partisan, this will be what will happen. Right now they’re fucking overt about it because they have been able to get away with it. In the near future, they’ll be WAY more cagey and subtle about it and lawsuits like this Wisconsin one will become harder and harder to win.
And merely deciding what weights you do and don’t consider and how they compare to each other is an inherently partisan process. There’s SO MANY criteria for deciding which groups should not be split or can be split by these algorithm lines. This is just cracking and packing in a different form.
On the flip-side, a transparent and non/multi-partisan process resists these kinds of machinations in the first place. A more manual line-drawing process is much harder to do partisan cartography stenography with.
The data scientists should stick to evaluating the maps. They should stay WELL clear of designing them.
Let’s say that you have the best possible group of humans making the map. How do they do it? If you can explain it, that is an algorithm. If it’s an algorithm, it can be run by a computer. If you can’t explain it, then how can it really be the best?
Speaking of transparency, there is nothing more transparent than an open source algorithm.
And as for the weights, that is an optimization that can be specified without human intervention.
Technophobia isn’t a sufficient reason to double down on a system that we’ve seen over and over to be completely broken.
It is absolutely not. That is not true. The optimization is a political question because what is “optimal” is a political question.
If you have a theoretically-perfect algorithm, you don’t even need to have the elections. That’s an unnecessary abstraction; it can just pick the winners directly.
Leave the personal attacks off. There’s no technophobia here – I just have a different (and I believe much better) understanding of the technology’s inputs and outputs.
With a nonpartisan or multipartisan approach, there is no need for a “best” group of humans. You have innate checks and balances on the political process. Without a nonpartisan or multipartisan process, you plainly don’t.
The way optimization works is that you have a desired outcome, and you adjust inputs until you reach an optimal outcome. This is a specific area where algorithms are known to be effective. The desired outcome can be anything that is measurable. Whatever a person who looks at the result could possibly use to criticize it, for example.
You cannot simply dismiss an algorithmic solution. In fact, given enough time, it’s guaranteed that an algorithmic solution will be the best available solution. I don’t know how to refer to a person who denies this obvious fact, so I use the term technophobic. It could be simple ignorance or it could be some sort of irrational state of mind, but I think that’s all encompassed by the term technophobic.
There is still no objective measure of what is optimal for this problem. But I can tell you aren’t listening.
Yes that is why you have to run an optimization algorithm. To find the best known solution based on measurable results. I suggest you read up on numerical analysis.
And I am listening. I simply know a great deal more about this subject than you do, so your perception of this conversation is quite different from mine.
You run an optimization algorithm to figure out how to identify an optimal algorithm? That’s begging the question. It’s circular reasoning.
You said it yourself, you need to have a “desired outcome” in order to optimize. And the decision about the desired outcome is a political one, end of story. A political agent will optimize for the political result they want. Using an algorithm is of no advantage if you don’t change the external factors first.
That’s not at all what I said. Despite the fact that you seem to know very little about technology, up to this point you’ve at least been discussing the subject ethically. I would have thought straw man arguments were beneath you.
You’ve already listed several desired outcomes yourself, or at least suggested that you believe there are some. That voters are represented. Not only by population, but by modern and historic communities. Balancing many different factors to find what are called local extremum, or best known solutions, are problems that we’ve been using algorithms to solve for many decades. We can even use algorithms to prove that human solutions are suboptimal by looking at the algorithm’s results and comparing them to human results.
Maybe I am confused, did someone else say this?
Your entire belief here is predicated on the belief that there is an objective, optimal outcome. And there isn’t. If there were, you don’t need to run the elections in the first place.
You’re confusing two different things. You understand, correctly, that a well-designed bit of machine learning can get you efficiently and reliably to a certain result. What you don’t understand is that whether that result is good/optimal or not is a subjective question the computer cannot answer. The computer can only get better and better at tuning its various coefficients and neurons in order to get it closer to the result it has been TOLD is optimal.
The only decision that really matters is the decision about what optimal is. Which is a political question, in the case of redistricting.
Correct. There are lots of outcomes I think of as desirable. Some of those outcomes are in direct opposition to each other, too. Conditions where increasing the voice of some group reduces the voice of another. Which ones I care about most is a question of my personal politics.
Over and over again I repeat, the decisions about how to weigh these metrics against each other is a political one. One where political actors allowed to take on the problem in a political process will chose the inputs that get them to the results they want.
If you can flip a seat by saying that having proportional racial representation is twice as important as having proportional religious representation, a political actor that wants to flip that seat will tell you that proportional racial representation IS twice as important as proportional religious representation. No computer will know that isn’t true. If you can make an election non-competitive by saying that the people in neighborhood K are a historical diaspora and must be kept together, an incumbent will do so. You can manipulate the inputs to manipulate the outputs.