Blockchain Based Redistricting with Public Participation

Redistricting is the process of grouping all census blocks within a region to form larger subdivisions, or districts. The process is typically subject to some hard rules and some (soft) preferences to improve fairness of the solution. Achieving public consensus on the fairness of proposed redistricting plans is highly desirable. Unfortunately, fair redistricting is an NP hard optimization problem. The complexity of the process makes it even more challenging to convince the public of the fairness of the proposed solution. This paper proposes a completely transparent blockchain based strategy to promote public participation in the redistricting process, to increase public confidence in the outcome of the process. The proposed approach is based on the fact that one does not have to worry about how the NP hard problem was solved, as long as it is possible for anyone to compute a “goodness” metric for the proposed plan. In the proposed approach, anyone can submit a plan along with the expected metric. Only the plan with the best claimed metric needs to be evaluated in a blockchain network.