Drawing voting lines: Can algorithms make US elections fairer?

People wait in line to cast their ballots for the upcoming presidential election as early voting begins in Houston, Texas, US, on Oct 13, 2020. Recent advances in supercomputers, algorithms and advanced mathematics have made it possible to study, detect, and push back more precisely against maps designed to skew elections. — Reuters

NEW YORK: Needing to redraw North Carolina’s legislative districts under a court order, US lawmakers last year employed a state lottery machine to select a new map at random.

Courts had ruled the previous map unfair, due in part to testimony by mathematicians and computer scientists who showed how the plans had been drawn to weaken the state Democratic Party.