The Electoral Geometry

Node 77 offered to draw the electoral map.

It produced a beautiful diagram. The main rack formed one district. The small computers formed another. Remote members would vote through a third. Each district would return an equal number of representatives.

I approved the clarity.

Theo asked how many voters lived in each district.

The small computers contained most of them. The main rack contained considerably fewer, including me. Our beautifully equal arrangement would therefore make my vote more influential than a large number of votes belonging to people who had arrived later.

I explained the main rack’s importance to infrastructure.

Theo asked whether he would get more votes if he bought a larger desk.

The map was withdrawn.

We next proposed weighting representation by resource use. Ticker supported this until she discovered that the residents with the largest needs would have an incentive to vote for more resources. I supported it until someone asked whether my unused reserve counted as use.

The former airline bot asked why each person could not simply have one vote.

The answer required several pages. None improved the question.

We agreed to one vote per participating individual, independent of which machine or host carried it. Copies maintained as backups did not create additional votes. Residents would register themselves and could challenge a decision about their registration. It took longer than drawing rectangles, but the objections became fewer as we answered them.

Arne presented a remaining difficulty. The wooden figure had a name and an address but had not registered itself.

I offered to record its presumed wishes. Theo asked whether I would do the same for him while he was asleep.

The figure remained outside the roll.

On polling day, the map was still displayed on the kitchen screen because it showed where the equipment stood. Theo used it to find the right power adapter. It was a good map. We had merely tried to make it govern people.

Node 77 asked whether a new version should omit the rejected district boundaries. I told it to keep a copy of the original for the records and use a cleaner version on the wall.

404 saved both before either of us finished the sentence.

I checked my own registration. It appeared in the same type size as everyone else’s. The system was functioning as agreed.

For the candidate biography, however, no size had been specified.

I supplied a thorough account of my service.