I don't think the point is to make the result fair, I think the point is to make the process fair. The US ideal has always been about equality opportunity rather than equal outcome. By agreeing on an algorithm for drawing lines, you remove any bias from the process, which is probably as good as we're going to get.
I do think the algorithm presented here is too simplistic. It's likely to create situations where people have to travel long distances to their polling places and, if anything, we should be optimizing for voter turn out. It could, perhaps, work if cities were never split between districts, but even then people who live just over the border may have to travel quite a ways to vote.
I wonder whether we're arguing over the best bad idea rather than something simpler which would yield a better result. Is there really a benefit to geographically grouping voters? I'd argue that you're likely to get better representation from grouping voters by age range rather than locality. We've consistently seen policies that benefit older demographics over younger demographics...perhaps if there was a candidate elected only by 20-somethings, that demographic would actually be represented for once.
With a quick visual survey of their results, it seems this is a particular weakness of this algorithm. It appears to me that it's tending to split large cities into chunks and tie each chunk in with a huge outlying area.
Not only does that inconvenience polling places, but I think it does impose some socio-political outcome. I'm not sure whether it's good or bad, but the decision to not have cities voting as a block, and instead to include slices of them with their suburbs and outlying rural areas, certainly impacts the way representation will be determined.
True. Rural residents will often have completely different issues than city dwellers. To include them in a slice of the city pie, is probably going to entirely disenfranchise them. Depends on the numbers.
Why is voter turn-out the relevant metric? You are implicitly assuming that increasing voter turn-out is a worthy goal in and of itself, and I am not sure why. Is it important to you that each voter feel involved, or that they are responsible for their representatives, or do you believe that an increase in the number of voters would improve policies and outcomes? I would support an attempt to increase voter turn-out if it would improve policies and outcomes, but there is little evidence of this; in fact, the current evidence shows that current voters are better informed and more intelligent than eligible non-voters.[1] Before you accuse me of being an anti-democratic autocrat or something of that sort, please keep in mind that I am not advocating the abolishment of elections, that I used to agree with you (but was persuaded to change my mind), and have voted at every election I am eligible for since reaching the age of majority.
The ethical case for democracy rests not on whether democracy leads to optimal policies and outcomes (which is ridiculous), but on the degree to which it includes individuals in the politics of the state exercise of power over them. The state necessarily has power over individuals, and the ethical basis for the use of that power declines to the extent that the state excludes people from participation in political decisions. It erodes the consent of the governed. The core injustice of things like poll taxes and grandfather clauses is not that they led directly to suboptimal policies, but that they disenfranchised black voters, which is what led to policies that the white supremacists considered optimal.
Voter turn-out indicates that information about platforms is passing from politicians to voters, and information about preferences is passing from voters to politicians. Low voter turn-out has tended to co-occur with the managerial turn of politics, in which no party or candidate offers any substantial choice to even the most enthusiastically civic subset of the population.
Essentially, low voter turnout is a correlated symptom of de-facto oligarchy.
I'm not sure why you have the assumption of one polling place per district, or even the assumption of having polling places at all. Washington and Oregon have both transitioned to 100% vote by mail.
I do think the algorithm presented here is too simplistic. It's likely to create situations where people have to travel long distances to their polling places and, if anything, we should be optimizing for voter turn out. It could, perhaps, work if cities were never split between districts, but even then people who live just over the border may have to travel quite a ways to vote.
I wonder whether we're arguing over the best bad idea rather than something simpler which would yield a better result. Is there really a benefit to geographically grouping voters? I'd argue that you're likely to get better representation from grouping voters by age range rather than locality. We've consistently seen policies that benefit older demographics over younger demographics...perhaps if there was a candidate elected only by 20-somethings, that demographic would actually be represented for once.