Tech
Mathematicians are deploying algorithms to stop gerrymandering
For decades, one of those users was Thomas Hofeller, “the Michelangelo of the modern gerrymander,” long the Republican National Committee’s official redistricting director, who died in 2018.
Gerrymandering schemes include “cracking” and “packing”—scattering votes for one party across districts, thus diluting their power, and stuffing like-minded voters into a single district, wasting the power they would have elsewhere. The city of Austin, Texas, is cracked, split among six districts (it is the largest US city that does not anchor a district).
In 2010, the full force of the threat materialized with the Republicans’ Redistricting Majority Project, or REDMAP. It spent $30 million on down-ballot state legislative races, with winning results in Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio. “The wins in 2010 gave them the power to draw the maps in 2011,” says David Daley, author of, Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy.
“What used to be a dark art is now a dark science.”
MICHAEL LI
That the technology had advanced by leaps and bounds since the previous redistricting cycle only supercharged the outcome. “It made the gerrymanders drawn that year so much more lasting and enduring than any other gerrymanders in our nation’s history,” he says. “It’s the sophistication of the computer software, the speed of the computers, the amount of data available, that makes it possible for partisan mapmakers to put their maps through 60 or 70 different iterations and to really refine and optimize the partisan performance of those maps.”
As Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University’s law school, puts it: “What used to be a dark art is now a dark science.” And when manipulated maps are implemented in an election, he says, they are nearly impossible to overcome.
A mathematical microscope
Mattingly and his Duke team have been staying up late writing code that they expect will produce a “huge win, algorithmically”—preparing for real-life application of their latest tool, which debuted in a paper (currently under review) with the technically heady title “Multi-Scale Merge-Split Markov Chain Monte Carlo for Redistricting.”
Advancing the technical discourse, however, is not the top priority. Mattingly and his colleagues hope to educate the politicians and the public alike, as well as lawyers, judges, fellow mathematicians, scientists—anyone interested in the cause of democracy. In July, Mattingly gave a public lecture with a more accessible title that cut to the quick: “Can you hear the will of the people in the vote?”
Misshapen districts are often thought to be the mark of a gerrymander. With the 2012 map in North Carolina, the congressional districts were “very strange-looking beasts,” says Mattingly, who (with his key collaborator, Greg Herschlag) provided expert testimony in some of the ensuing lawsuits. Over the last decade, there have been legal challenges across the country—in Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.
But while such disfigured districts “make really nice posters and coffee cups and T-shirts, ” Mattingly says, “ the truth is that stopping strange geometries will not stop gerrymandering.” And in fact, with all the technologically sophisticated sleights of hand, a gerrymandered map can prove tricky to detect.
JONATHAN MATTINGLY
The tools developed simultaneously by a number of mathematical scientists provide what’s called an “extreme-outlier test.” Each researcher’s approach is slightly different, but the upshot is as follows: a map suspected of being gerrymandered is compared with a large collection, or “ensemble,” of unbiased, neutral maps. The mathematical method at work—based on what are called Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms—generates a random sample of maps from a universe of possible maps, and reflects the likelihood that any given map drawn will satisfy various policy considerations.
The ensemble maps are encoded to capture various principles used to draw districts, factoring in the way these principles interact with a state’s geopolitical geometry. The principles (which vary from state to state) include such criteria as keeping districts relatively compact and connected, making them roughly equal in population, and preserving counties, municipalities, and communities with common interests. And district maps must comply with the US Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
With the Census Bureau’s release of the 2020 data, Mattingly and his team will load up the data set, run their algorithm, and generate a collection of typical, nonpartisan district plans for North Carolina. From this vast distribution of maps, and factoring in historical voting patterns, they’ll discern benchmarks that should serve as guardrails. For instance, they’ll assess the relative likelihood that those maps would produce various election outcome —say, the number of seats won by Democrats and Republicans—and by what margin: with a 50-50 split in the vote, and given plausible voting patterns, it’s unlikely that a neutral map would give Republicans 10 seats and the Democrats only three (as was the case with that 2012 map).
“We’re using computational mathematics to figure out what we’d expect as outcomes for unbiased maps, and then we can compare with a particular map,” says Mattingly.
By mid-September they’ll announce their findings, and then hope state legislators will heed the guardrails. Once new district maps are proposed later in the fall, they’ll analyze the results and engage with the public and political conversations that ensue—and if the maps are again suspected to be gerrymandered, there will be more lawsuits, in which mathematicians will again play a central role.
“I don’t want to just convince someone that something is wrong,” Mattingly says. “I want to give them a microscope so they can look at a map and understand its properties and then draw their own conclusions.”
COURTESY PHOTO
When Mattingly testified in 2017 and 2019, analyzing two subsequent iterations of North Carolina’s district maps, the court agreed that the maps in question were excessively partisan gerrymanders, discriminating against Democrats. Wes Pegden, a mathematician at Carnegie Mellon University, testified using a similar method in a Pennsylvania case; the court agreed that the map in question discriminated against Republicans.
“Courts have long struggled with how to measure partisan gerrymandering,” says Li. “But then there seemed to be a breakthrough, when court after court struck down maps using some of these new tools.”
When the North Carolina case reached the US Supreme Court in 2019 (together with a Maryland case), the mathematician and geneticist Eric Lander, a professor at Harvard and MIT who is now President Biden’s top science advisor, observed in a brief that “computer technology has caught up with the problem that it spawned.” He deemed the extreme-outlier standard—a test that simply asks, “What fraction of redistricting plans are less extreme than the proposed plan?”—a “straightforward, quantitative mathematical question to which there is a right answer.”
The majority of the justices concluded otherwise.
“The five justices on the Supreme Court are the only ones who seemed to have trouble seeing how the math and models worked,” says Li. “State and other federal courts managed to apply it—this was not beyond the intellectual ability of the courts to handle, any more than a complex sex discrimination case is, or a complex securities fraud case. But five justices of the Supreme Court said, ‘This is too hard for us.’”
“They also said, ‘This is not for us to fix—this is for the states to fix; this is for Congress to fix; it’s not for us to fix,’” says Li.
Will it matter?
As Daley sees it, the Supreme Court decision gives state lawmakers “a green light and no speed limit when it comes to the kind of partisan gerrymanders that they can enact when map-making later this month.” At the same time, he says, “the technology has improved to such a place that we can now use [it] to see through the technology-driven gerrymanders that are created by lawmakers.”
My senior spring in high school, I decided to defer my MIT enrollment by a year. I had always planned to take a gap year, but after receiving the silver tube in the mail and seeing all my college-bound friends plan out their classes and dorm decor, I got cold feet. Every time I mentioned my plans, I was met with questions like “But what about school?” and “MIT is cool with this?”
Yeah. MIT totally is. Postponing your MIT start date is as simple as clicking a checkbox.
COURTESY PHOTO
Now, having finished my first year of classes, I’m really grateful that I stuck with my decision to delay MIT, as I realized that having a full year of unstructured time is a gift. I could let my creative juices run. Pick up hobbies for fun. Do cool things like work at an AI startup and teach myself how to create latte art. My favorite part of the year, however, was backpacking across Europe. I traveled through Austria, Slovakia, Russia, Spain, France, the UK, Greece, Italy, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary.
Moreover, despite my fear that I’d be losing a valuable year, traveling turned out to be the most productive thing I could have done with my time. I got to explore different cultures, meet new people from all over the world, and gain unique perspectives that I couldn’t have gotten otherwise. My travels throughout Europe allowed me to leave my comfort zone and expand my understanding of the greater human experience.
“In Iceland there’s less focus on hustle culture, and this relaxed approach to work-life balance ends up fostering creativity. This was a wild revelation to a bunch of MIT students.”
When I became a full-time student last fall, I realized that StartLabs, the premier undergraduate entrepreneurship club on campus, gives MIT undergrads a similar opportunity to expand their horizons and experience new things. I immediately signed up. At StartLabs, we host fireside chats and ideathons throughout the year. But our flagship event is our annual TechTrek over spring break. In previous years, StartLabs has gone on TechTrek trips to Germany, Switzerland, and Israel. On these fully funded trips, StartLabs members have visited and collaborated with industry leaders, incubators, startups, and academic institutions. They take these treks both to connect with the global startup sphere and to build closer relationships within the club itself.
Most important, however, the process of organizing the TechTrek is itself an expedited introduction to entrepreneurship. The trip is entirely planned by StartLabs members; we figure out travel logistics, find sponsors, and then discover ways to optimize our funding.
COURTESY PHOTO
In organizing this year’s trip to Iceland, we had to learn how to delegate roles to all the planners and how to maintain morale when making this trip a reality seemed to be an impossible task. We woke up extra early to take 6 a.m. calls with Icelandic founders and sponsors. We came up with options for different levels of sponsorship, used pattern recognition to deduce the email addresses of hundreds of potential contacts at organizations we wanted to visit, and all got scrappy with utilizing our LinkedIn connections.
And as any good entrepreneur must, we had to learn how to be lean and maximize our resources. To stretch our food budget, we planned all our incubator and company visits around lunchtime in hopes of getting fed, played human Tetris as we fit 16 people into a six-person Airbnb, and emailed grocery stores to get their nearly expired foods for a discount. We even made a deal with the local bus company to give us free tickets in exchange for a story post on our Instagram account.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
How ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk
For millions of Chinese people, the first software they download onto devices is always the same: a keyboard app. Yet few of them are aware that it may make everything they type vulnerable to spying eyes.
QWERTY keyboards are inefficient as many Chinese characters share the same latinized spelling. As a result, many switch to smart, localized keyboard apps to save time and frustration. Today, over 800 million Chinese people use third-party keyboard apps on their PCs, laptops, and mobile phones.
But a recent report by the Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto–affiliated research group, revealed that Sogou, one of the most popular Chinese keyboard apps, had a massive security loophole. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
Why we should all be rooting for boring AI
Earlier this month, the US Department of Defense announced it is setting up a Generative AI Task Force, aimed at “analyzing and integrating” AI tools such as large language models across the department. It hopes they could improve intelligence and operational planning.
But those might not be the right use cases, writes our senior AI reporter Melissa Heikkila. Generative AI tools, such as language models, are glitchy and unpredictable, and they make things up. They also have massive security vulnerabilities, privacy problems, and deeply ingrained biases.
Applying these technologies in high-stakes settings could lead to deadly accidents where it’s unclear who or what should be held responsible, or even why the problem occurred. The DoD’s best bet is to apply generative AI to more mundane things like Excel, email, or word processing. Read the full story.
This story is from The Algorithm, Melissa’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
The ice cores that will let us look 1.5 million years into the past
To better understand the role atmospheric carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s climate cycles, scientists have long turned to ice cores drilled in Antarctica, where snow layers accumulate and compact over hundreds of thousands of years, trapping samples of ancient air in a lattice of bubbles that serve as tiny time capsules.
By analyzing those cores, scientists can connect greenhouse-gas concentrations with temperatures going back 800,000 years. Now, a new European-led initiative hopes to eventually retrieve the oldest core yet, dating back 1.5 million years. But that impressive feat is still only the first step. Once they’ve done that, they’ll have to figure out how they’re going to extract the air from the ice. Read the full story.
—Christian Elliott
This story is from the latest edition of our print magazine, set to go live tomorrow. Subscribe today for as low as $8/month to ensure you receive full access to the new Ethics issue and in-depth stories on experimental drugs, AI assisted warfare, microfinance, and more.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 How AI got dragged into the culture wars
Fears about ‘woke’ AI fundamentally misunderstand how it works. Yet they’re gaining traction. (The Guardian)
+ Why it’s impossible to build an unbiased AI language model. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Researchers are racing to understand a new coronavirus variant
It’s unlikely to be cause for concern, but it shows this virus still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. (Nature)
+ Covid hasn’t entirely gone away—here’s where we stand. (MIT Technology Review)
+ Why we can’t afford to stop monitoring it. (Ars Technica)
3 How Hilary became such a monster storm
Much of it is down to unusually hot sea surface temperatures. (Wired $)
+ The era of simultaneous climate disasters is here to stay. (Axios)
+ People are donning cooling vests so they can work through the heat. (Wired $)
4 Brain privacy is set to become important
Scientists are getting better at decoding our brain data. It’s surely only a matter of time before others want a peek. (The Atlantic $)
+ How your brain data could be used against you. (MIT Technology Review)
5 How Nvidia built such a big competitive advantage in AI chips
Today it accounts for 70% of all AI chip sales—and an even greater share for training generative models. (NYT $)
+ The chips it’s selling to China are less effective due to US export controls. (Ars Technica)
+ These simple design rules could turn the chip industry on its head. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Inside the complex world of dissociative identity disorder on TikTok
Reducing stigma is great, but doctors fear people are self-diagnosing or even imitating the disorder. (The Verge)
7 What TikTok might have to give up to keep operating in the US
This shows just how hollow the authorities’ purported data-collection concerns really are. (Forbes)
8 Soldiers in Ukraine are playing World of Tanks on their phones
It’s eerily similar to the war they are themselves fighting, but they say it helps them to dissociate from the horror. (NYT $)
9 Conspiracy theorists are sharing mad ideas on what causes wildfires
But it’s all just a convoluted way to try to avoid having to tackle climate change. (Slate $)
10 Christie’s accidentally leaked the location of tons of valuable art 
Seemingly thanks to the metadata that often automatically attaches to smartphone photos. (WP $)
Quote of the day
“Is it going to take people dying for something to move forward?”
—An anonymous air traffic controller warns that staffing shortages in their industry, plus other factors, are starting to threaten passenger safety, the New York Times reports.
The big story
Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present
October 2022
Since its birth in the late 2000s, effective altruism has aimed to answer the question “How can those with means have the most impact on the world in a quantifiable way?”—and supplied methods for calculating the answer.
It’s no surprise that effective altruisms’ ideas have long faced criticism for reflecting white Western saviorism, alongside an avoidance of structural problems in favor of abstract math. And as believers pour even greater amounts of money into the movement’s increasingly sci-fi ideals, such charges are only intensifying. Read the full story.
—Rebecca Ackermann
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ Watch Andrew Scott’s electrifying reading of the 1965 commencement address ‘Choose One of Five’ by Edith Sampson.
+ Here’s how Metallica makes sure its live performances ROCK. ($)
+ Cannot deal with this utterly ludicrous wooden vehicle.
+ Learn about a weird and wonderful new instrument called a harpejji.
