I’m already hearing reports of rather large voter purges happening right now in Georgia, Indiana, and Texas. It’s shocking but not surprising, and I don’t have a clue what to do about it, I hope some lawsuits get brought, but that’s not the subject of tonight’s blog.
Gerrymandering is a serious problem, but that’s not the subject of tonight’s blog, either, although it’s what made me think of it. I’m assuming everybody’s seen those memes of maps of congressional districts, if those districts were designed by computer algorithm, instead of by some sleazy weasels in congress. Pretty impressive, huh? Radically different, and obviously fair.
Then I thought, what if Supreme Court justices were picked by computer. The program could filter for a certain amount of experience on the bench, number of cases worked, give extra points for attendance and punctuality, deduct points for any time their rulings were over-ruled, stuff like that. Party politics wouldn’t even need to come into it.
The only reason this isn’t done is that back when the founding fathers founded the nation, back before that, deep in the mists of time when people started doing things in the way that we know say “we’ve always done it like that,” they didn’t have computers, so it was up to humans to make the decisions.
And the human beings who make the decisions are almost always assholes. I trust computers more.
