Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson
literacy focuses less on these new modes of publishing. We’re working them out on our own for now and discovering just how powerful they can be.
How do you tackle a problem that affects the fabric of democracy but also happens to be, well, boring?
Ask Costas Panagopoulos. A professor of political science at Fordham University in New York, Panagopolous is an expert on gerrymandering, the tawdry two-hundred-year-old political phenomenon by which politicians redraw the boundaries of their districts in order to exclude anyone who won’t vote for them. In theory, redistricting isn’t harmful; indeed, laws require the regular rejiggering of maps to make sure that as the population shifts, it’s adequately represented. But in practice, politicians manipulate this process in order to cement their own power. In the United States, Democrats try to herd liberal urbanites and blacks into their districts’ boundaries while pushing out gun-loving rural folk. Republicans do the reverse.
Politicians worldwide love this trick, but in New York State they’ve made it an art form. In the last fifty years, they’ve redrawn their electoral districts in such nakedly self-serving ways it’s a statewide joke. (One district was redrawn so tortuously, a voting-rights advocate said that it looked like “Abraham Lincoln riding on a vacuum cleaner.”)1 The result is a rigid, unchanging political terrain: once someone’s in office, they almost can’t be voted out. From 2002 to 2010, a slender 4 percent of incumbent2 New York state politicians lost. In 2010, nearly one out of five politicians didn’t even have an opponent, because competitors realized there was no point. The game was thoroughly rigged.
“When things get this bad, democracy gets hijacked,” Panagopoulos tells me. Indeed, New York has one of the most gridlocked and dysfunctional legislatures in the country, because rival parties have no incentive to cooperate. “It’s a hidden issue that no one talks about how to fix.”
The reason no one talks about it is simple: gerrymandering is a monstrously complex subject. To fix it, you need to analyze what’s going on each city and suburb block, for hundreds of miles across an entire state, parsing an absolutely Olympian mountain of information (maps, databases, dense charts of voting data, and so on.) As a result, a professional class of map riggers has emerged, lushly compensated consultants hired by politicians to guarantee victory. The evils of this system are protected by the byzantine nature of the problem. Voters have little chance of figuring out why things are going so wrong, let alone of fixing it. “The average citizen throws up their arms and tunes out,” Panagopoulos says.
Unless, as he realized, clever software could level the playing field.
In 2010, Panagopoulos teamed up with a group of academics and coders who had created District Builder, a mapping tool designed to let anyone redraw electoral districts. District Builder uses a point-and-click interface so clever and intuitive it’s almost like a video game; the software actually makes gerrymandering fun. Panagopoulos and the team fed in all the maps and demographic information for New York State and put them online. Now any citizen could log in and redraw districts, making a particular constituency more or less competitive, stuffed with black voters or overflowing with Asian ones. The code would do the data crunching—performing, in effect, the behind-the-scenes work of those million-dollar experts. This would free up citizens to focus on the big ethical and moral questions: How can we make the district boundaries fair to everyone? What’s the best way to force politicians to face real competition?
Panagopoulos organized a competition for college political science students. Could amateurs, with no expertise, produce fairer electoral districts?
Indeed they could. Over a two-month period, dozens of teams of students whipped the maps into shape using District Builder. The crazy, Abe-Lincoln-shaped districts were gone. Normal, square-shaped districts emerged. “Competitiveness” shot upward: when Panagopoulos examined the results, he saw that the districts had a much more equal blend of Republican and Democratic voters.
“It actually wasn’t that difficult,” marvels Alyssa Barnard, one of Panagopoulos’s students. It’s a sunny winter afternoon, and I’ve traveled up to Fordham University so she and her classmates could show off their skills. Barnard tells me she had focused specifically on the votes of ethnic minorities.
“I’d read a lot of stories about Hispanics being purposefully disadvantaged,” she says, cracking open her laptop and pointing to the districts, each with simple shapes and clear boundaries. Teamed with a partner, she had needed only twenty hours to complete the process.
Another student, Tyrone Stevens, shows how easy it was to tweak things on-screen. “You can make things unfair pretty quickly,” he jokes. Stevens circles Republican households, drags them into another district, and presto—the district abruptly turns bright blue, indicating he’d created a safe seat where Democrats would be unbeatable.
But what was most interesting was how the students’ thinking changed. Playing with maps really was like experimenting with a video game: you poked around, doing experiments, gradually deducing how the system works. If I do this, what happens over there? The more they messed around, the more the students’ understanding of redistricting kicked in. While they’d read about gerrymandering and techniques to fix it, they’d had no intuitive grasp of the problem. But like carpenters who can sense when a piece of wood is too fragile by the vibrations of the nail, the students’ use of the software gave them an almost tactile sense of electoral dynamics. When I looked at the map I saw a map. But when they looked, they now had Matrix-like vision—they saw the streams of convoluted demography that determined whether New York would turn into a rigid, dysfunctional mess or a competitive, healthy democracy. They could see the system, how it lived and breathed. “You’re looking, and you realize, ‘This doesn’t have to be that way,’” as Stevens puts it.
For her part, Barnard says her hours of playing with the map led her to a surprising epiphany: It’s actually easier to make a gerrymandered map than a fair one. Unbalanced districts aren’t purely a result of greed and deceit. Even honest-minded attempts to alter a district can produce unexpectedly bad results, in a butterfly effect. You might try to make district A more fair by siphoning off households from district B, only to find it inadvertantly makes districts C and D and F more
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