Alabama Voting Rights Ruling
WASHINGTON D.C. (June 8,2023) – John Banzhaf, a professor of public interest law, says that more sophisticated mathematics and possibly artificial intelligence [AI] programs could help achieve truly impartial and less unfair voting maps than the current SupremeCourt decision, which appears to be based on the dubious mathematical assumption that the minority group won fewer seats in the legislature than its population share.
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The professor is the creator of the "Banzhaf Index of Voting Power" (or "Banzhaf Power Index"), a widely adopted method that employs mathematics and complex computer calculations to determine to what extent voters in different districts have unequal voting power, and which has been adopted as a constitutionally mandated standard by the highest court in New York.
Although it is commonly believed that if a state has X percent of voters with a distinct voting preference (e.g., Black voters or Republican voters), a fair election with impartially drawn districts will result in approximately X percent of such legislators being elected, this is not always the case.
For instance, if the state of Columbia has 100 voting districts and 55% of the electorate are Republicans who almost always vote for Republican candidates, the HouseOfRepresentatives will consist of approximately 55% Republicans and 45% Democrats.
Almost any mathematician, however, can assure you that if voters from the two parties are distributed uniformly among the 100 voting districts, the result will be that each of the 100 districts will contain 55% Republican voters, and 100% of Democrats will be elected to the House.
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Since there are members of the other party elected to the House even in the most red or blue states, the distribution of Republican legislators (or Black legislators in the case of Allen v. Milligan) will be determined by a variety of factors, such as the non-uniform distribution of the minority among the general population.
Acceptance Of Gingles
Fortunately, the majority opinion acknowledges this simple mathematical fact and has therefore adopted a complex and largely subjective test ("Gingles") that includes factors such as whether the "minority group must be sufficiently large and [geographically] compact to constitute a majority in a reasonably configured district."
Banzhaf notes that there are a variety of mathematical techniques that can be used to map out districts that are not only roughly equal in population, but also reasonably configured and not gerrymandered. Such computer programs have been used to generate maps that are frequently viewed as less unfair than those devised by lawmakers.
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With recent exponential advances in using computers to solve a variety of problems – including, most recently, extremely "intelligent" AI programs – it may soon be possible to delegate the entire task of redrawing voting maps to computers, with the resulting maps serving as the starting point ("initial condition") for voting maps presented to the legislature for adoption.
Banzhaf suggests that under today's decision, those representing Black votes and arguing illegal diminution of their voting power under 2 may be able to use computer-generated maps to help prove their case by providing an alternative map that is arguably impartial and thus less unfair.
