/r/gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is a known problem, that everyone wants to address but no one knows how. For those of you that don’t quite understand what gerrymandering is here is a simple infographic that I found on reddit, which was from The Washington Post, which they found from reddit (yes seriously).

The problem became a problem after it became a solution for another problem. There was no minority representation in government, so they started grouping minorities in districts together, so they could get some representation. But just like every other not-so-well thought out solution the government has, politicians found a loop whole. Now every 10 years after the census most state governments (and some courts) will decide their new voting districts.
In 2010 some dude created REDMAPS. Basically, it looked at all the elections discovered which ones could easily be swung for republican’s majority, did it then they had a majority after the census to draw the new maps, making 2010-2020 much easier for republicans. This is legal, so either we have a war between computers and data against each other deciding who gets to office, or we find a solution where elected officials don’t get to choose their constituents.

Last year Reddit held an experimental collaborative project and social experiment that used an online canvas of pixels where registered users could change a single pixel from a 16-colour palette. It has over 1,000,000 registered users and when it was ended after three days it had 90,000 active users.
At first the image was chaos but over time trends formed and eventually communities were forming to coordinate their efforts.
When I look at this I see opportunity. /r/place was created as an April Fools project and was short lived. What if something like this were leveraged to have voters determine their own districts. Realistically you could have users registered during the census and when the time comes you could hold a ‘vote’ where users determine their own maps. Take an average of all the maps and those will become the final boundaries.
Of course, there are a ton of issues, but right now is the time to figure that out. The entire place project was well documented by the reddit team. It was created so that people could take advantage of it, but that can always be changed.
Just imagine how effective representation of politics could become where we had a way to manage massive amounts of data generated by the people.