[HN Gopher] Auto-Redistrict - automatically creates electoral di...
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Auto-Redistrict - automatically creates electoral districts
Author : Corrado
Score : 57 points
Date : 2021-01-22 17:45 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (autoredistrict.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (autoredistrict.org)
| clircle wrote:
| The website is down, so I don't have much to say. But I will be
| very interested in how the authors define 'fairness' for this
| sort of problem.
|
| Algorithms are fair right guys? It can't be biased if it's just
| math. \s
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I can't access the website either, but I'm really curious to
| see if their definition of fairness creates districts that
| violate the majority-minority rules in the Voting Rights Act
| totalZero wrote:
| One advantage of a system like this can be the static nature of
| the objective function. If you set the rules up clearly
| beforehand (perhaps in a Constitutional amendment), then after
| a while the ebb and flow of two-party politics will balance out
| in the new reality (see Duverger's Law) and you no longer have
| to deal with gerrymandering.
| sudosteph wrote:
| I'm a North Carolinian - so it's fair to say that "creative"
| redistricting has harmed my state a bit more than most. However,
| I disagree with fundamental precepts they are using because they
| do not take culture into account. The representative system works
| best when it's able to group people with similar interests and
| values and lets them elect someone who can share those interests.
|
| I do not think that valuing "compact" districts is necessarily
| helpful for that. The better approximation here should be to aim
| for grouping similar population densities together. For example,
| rural voters should have much larger districts, which are made up
| of mostly other rural voters and urban voters should have much
| smaller districts.
|
| Likewise, "minimal county splits" is not especially meaningful
| either. In NC, Charlotte is in Mecklenburg County - that county
| probably shouldn't get split. However, the population which lives
| edges of the counties which surround Mecklenburg (ie, southern
| Iredell, parts of Cabbarus county, Gaston county - are hugely
| impacted by Charlotte. Those counties have tons of growth from
| commuters to Charlotte and have very different needs depending on
| how close they are to Charlotte. These outer suburbs voters
| should be represented together, across county lines.
|
| And finally - I don't every district needs to be all that
| competitive. We shouldn't be pitting people with totally
| different needs against each other for representation just for
| the sake of it.
|
| It's a cool idea and interesting to see what a "fair" algorithm
| says - but the fundamentals here are critical.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Competitive districts select representative candidates.
|
| Safer districts select the candidate aligned with the majority
| party (competitive primaries are less common than competitive
| elections).
|
| Michigan has term limits. The notional goal is to avoid people
| that become lifetime representatives; much of the actual
| outcome is that policy expertise is concentrated in lobbying
| groups, and well liked, effective legislators are forced out.
| More rules end up making it easier to work the system.
| sudosteph wrote:
| I don't think your first sentence necessarily holds true - at
| least it doesn't lately. We just don't see powerful "blue dog
| democrats" and moderate republicans holding the keys any
| more.
|
| While moderate candidates have more independent appeal - it's
| voter turnout that wins elections, even in competitve
| districts. Appealing to emotions, especially appealing to
| fear has been extremely successful at getting turnout for
| particular voters (ie, anti-abortion voters for example).
| Maybe that will calm down or moderates will turn out more and
| end this trend (as they did with Biden) - but even
| competitive races can turn out extreme candidates.
|
| Another possibility to consider, is that what we call
| "competitive districts" are really just "moderate districts"
| to begin with. Places the population isn't particularly
| threatened by or well-served by either party. In that case,
| it makes sense that they would be both more competitive, and
| more moderate.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Sure, it isn't an absolute effect, I could have phrased
| that better. I think it's pretty clearly a directional
| effect that safer districts pick their representatives in
| the primary (which often have a candidate backed by the
| institutional power structure).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| But that just reflects the fact that a given party has
| overwhelming support in those districts. It doesn't mean
| that the result is unrepresentative. So Phila. and NYC
| pick their mayors in the Democratic Party primary. The
| result isn't unrepresentative - there was no question
| that the mayor was going to be a Democrat.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not arguing that it isn't representative, I'm
| arguing that we shouldn't design for that outcome,
| because it shifts power in the direction of the party and
| away from the constituents (and it does so even in
| districts where the constituents are largely comfortable
| with the resulting representative).
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with this. It seems to create a lot of
| safe seats but with just one single token representative for
| the entire group who doesn't have enough power to get an agenda
| passed.
|
| If those voters were spread across all of the state's
| representatives then they would have to care what the group
| thinks, but when they're all crammed into a single token rep
| they can be more easily ignored.
| sudosteph wrote:
| That sounds bad, but it's really not. First of all, sometimes
| groups should be ignored. For example, the pig farming
| agriculture industry of NC is causing huge environmental
| destruction. If the rest of the state doesn't like the
| precedent it sets to let these companies contaminate our
| water supply - then we shouldn't have to all compromise our
| values just because people in that industry want special
| treatment and command a lot of money / swing votes in
| multiple districts. Secondly, it incentivizes disticts to
| elect representatives who are good at coaltion building and
| who are capable of compromising and winning over allies to
| actually get stuff done.
| ablerman wrote:
| Who gets to decide which groups "should be ignored". The
| pig farmers certainly don't agree. The whole point of
| competitive districts is that the groups who should be
| ignored will be eliminated by competition. Your whole
| premise seems to set up all districts with functional
| lifetime appointments rather than elections.
| sudosteph wrote:
| In competitive districts, politicians are far more
| dependent on campaign funding. Competitive elections are
| extremely expensive. So the group that gets ignored is
| just the group that has the least money to throw at
| candidates. It's the average person that always loses in
| that case. That's not fair either.
|
| I would certainly prefer term limits, but if a population
| thinks their representative does a good job representing
| their needs - why shouldn't they get re-elected? Nobody
| is stopping them from having a competitive primary.
| Remember, AOC only got elected because her district was
| so non-competitive for republicans, that the
| establishment didn't bother channeling massive money into
| the primary for the incumbent. So this setup would
| actually make it easier for non-establishment candidates
| to sneak in, and even incentivize the other party to run
| a non-traditional candidate to compete (ie, like how dems
| used to win with blue dog democrats in rural areas).
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > In competitive districts, politicians are far more
| dependent on campaign funding.
|
| If we're dreaming big here, how about we try fixing
| campaign funding too? To give a concrete suggestion, the
| US should pass a constitutional amendment which allows
| Congress to limit expenditure on political advertising
| (but not other forms of political speech). Here is one
| such approach:
|
| https://www.movetoamend.org/amendment
| majormajor wrote:
| > The representative system works best when it's able to group
| people with similar interests and values and lets them elect
| someone who can share those interests.
|
| This sounds plausible, but I've been doubting it the past few
| years. It seems like a big driver in polarization because the
| most extreme subset of those "shared values" groups can more
| easily take the driver seat.
| sudosteph wrote:
| I think there are cases where that happens - but I also think
| we can't underestimate how much reactionary sentiment has
| stoked this polarization outcome as well. Politicians have
| learned that "fear of the other guy" can be just as powerful
| of a motivator (if not more so) to get turnout. So they know
| that in some cases running an extreme "anti candidate"
| improves their chances of winning - if only because it
| energizes the base that is most afraid, and thus most likely
| to turn out.
|
| For this issue in particular, I think ranked choice could be
| a huge help.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| A lot of that gets to the question of what are we optimizing
| our k-clusters for?
|
| The idea of geography-based representation spurs from the ideal
| that a representative should be able to "shake hands" with
| everyone they represent, right? That a townhall with one's
| representative might be isomorphic with one's "neighborhood
| meeting"?
|
| In those cases things like "compact" serve a purpose in going
| back towards that "neighborhood" ideal (which arguably has
| never existed in US practice).
|
| But it's 2021 and is geography and the "neighborhood" ideal
| still useful for us in selecting representatives? When was the
| last time you shook hands with your representative? When was
| the last time you had a neighborhood meeting where the
| representative just swung by for an impromptu townhall?
|
| Maybe we should find a better optimization for our k-means
| clustering that isn't geography because gerrymandering seems to
| imply that we'll never fix geographic clustering? With tools
| like TV and the internet, geography may not even matter like it
| did to 18th century Americans. A Zoom call isn't a handshake,
| of course, but we have more tools for virtual shared interest
| groups than ever before and don't necessarily need to remain
| tied to the vagaries of geography.
|
| I don't necessarily have good answers for what those
| metrics/optimizations could be/should look like beyond
| geography. All I know is that it would be hard to impossible to
| find good ones under the current two party system and as with
| most things, the blame for a lot of our problems continues to
| be directly on the two party system.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| The important thing about geography is that cultures tend to
| develop along with it. That matters a little less today than
| in the past, but someone in Fresno is still going to have
| more in common with someone from Los Angeles than someone
| from Louisiana.
|
| We also already have systems of representation along other
| lines that feed into geographically-representative government
| - consumer groups, interest groups, lobbyists, etc.
| scarmig wrote:
| > someone in Fresno is still going to have more in common
| with someone from Los Angeles than someone from Louisiana
|
| I question this. Someone from San Francisco is likely to
| have much more in common with someone from Portland or even
| NYC or London than they would someone from Bakersfield or
| Shasta. You can see that in lots of different areas, from
| migration patterns to election results to what they do on
| Sunday morning to which media people consume.
| tshaddox wrote:
| This sounds nice, but who gets to choose what attributes of
| populations are the right ones to group together into
| districts? You suggest grouping by population density, which
| certainly makes sense for grouping together certain political
| interests (like zoning). And yet by doing that, you've
| essentially maximally fragmented people by gender, which is
| another attribute that makes sense for grouping together
| certain political interests.
|
| That's an extreme example of course, and I'm not suggesting to
| instead create single-gender districts, but I hope it
| illustrates my point.
| sudosteph wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. What does
| gender have to do with population density? I chose population
| density, because it was the only value that I could think of
| that closely correlated with culture and that was not a
| protected status (ie, not race, religion, sex, etc). If it's
| done algorithmically, it doesn't seem like a bad measure.
|
| Anyhow, the "who gets to choose" thing is tough. Right now
| legislators get to choose, but the judges said that they are
| failing at that, so IIRC, now an academic from a state
| university got to make some map adjustment. Ideally, I'd have
| a committee of academics provide vetted map recommendations
| that elected officials choose from, and that a judge signs
| off on.
| tshaddox wrote:
| My interpretation was that you chose to group together
| areas with similar population density because there are
| important policy concerns directly related to population
| density. And indeed that's true: water rights, zoning,
| building codes, pollution and noise restrictions, and more
| ought to depend highly on the population density of the
| area, and it doesn't seem necessary or even moral for rural
| voters to have much say in how dense cities set those
| policies.
|
| But my point is that there are plenty of _other_ policies
| which don 't (or shouldn't) vary based on population
| density, and thus grouping districts based _only_ on
| population density might give very little influence to
| interest groups for those other policies. Civil rights are
| the extremely obvious example, but there are others.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > but who gets to choose what attributes of populations are
| the right ones to group together into districts?
|
| Let the voters decide. Allow them to group themselves into
| self-selecting affinity groups, i.e. have proportional
| representation.
| tshaddox wrote:
| How would that work with representative democracy? With
| direct democracy that's pretty straightfoward: one could
| vote with conservationists on land policies, libertarians
| on drug policies, progressives on welfare policies, etc.
| instead of having to vote for a representative who probably
| disagrees wildly with at least one of those views.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > How would that work with representative democracy?
|
| With PR there would be a larger number of viable parties,
| for example in the last Dutch election, 13 parties got
| elected.
|
| > instead of having to vote for a representative who
| probably disagrees wildly with at least one of those
| views
|
| With 13 parties you'd probably be able to find one which
| is reasonably close to your own views.
| wffurr wrote:
| A maximally representative district would be a large multi-
| representative district that elects 5 representative using
| ranked choice or approval voting.
|
| Then you get the property of representation you're looking for
| without having to draw fine-grained arbitrary distinctions on a
| map.
|
| https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation#what_is_fair_vo...
| jdmichal wrote:
| I assume you mean that all the candidates run against each
| other simultaneously, and the top 5 all win a seat? I don't
| think that has the properties you are claiming. At least not
| with approval voting.
|
| Let's spherical cow this for a second and say that 51% of the
| population would like candidates from the Foo party, and 49%
| would like candidates from the Bar party. What prevents the
| 51% from electing five Foo candidates? When a "fair" split
| would be three Foo candidates and two Bar candidates.
|
| In Approval voting, one would expect five Foo candidates with
| 51% votes, and five Bar candidates with 49% vote.
|
| Ranked choice might fix this, but the actual results would
| depend entirely on the vote resolution mechanism.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Make it proportional to the vote. If it's 51/49, bar still
| gets 2. Also makes third parties feasible that way.
| wffurr wrote:
| The idea you are looking for is Single Transferable Vote
| aka STV: https://www.fairvote.org/rcv#how_rcv_works
| Forbo wrote:
| I'm a fan of STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff):
| https://www.starvoting.us/
| clircle wrote:
| Archive link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201129022227/http://autoredist...
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Any attempt to completely automate this process is destined to
| fail, for all the reasons given in this thread. Weighting factors
| matter, and it is naive to assume that nobody is going to attempt
| to subvert a nonpartisan board, when so much power is at stake.
|
| Don't despair! There's an alternative that generates an equitable
| outcome between two parties that are _trying_ to screw their
| rivals: Cake Cutting.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781v1
|
| You've probably heard the basic version of how to fairly divide a
| piece of cake between two children. Have one of them cut it, then
| the other choose which piece to keep. The cutter guarantees the
| largest possible piece of cake by cutting the cake in half.
|
| This is the same idea, just extended: one party divides the state
| into districts, then the other chooses one district to "lock" and
| divides the remainder, then the process repeats.
| [deleted]
| jrussino wrote:
| Whenever the topic of of redistricting/gerrymandering or voting
| comes up, I always like to recommend CGP Gray's series of videos
| on the subject: https://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-
| kingdom
|
| I think the "meta" issue of improving our political system is
| probably the most important political issue we should focus on
| for the long-term health of our society. Does anybody here have
| other good resources to recommend for learning about these
| issues, both from a theoretical standpoint as well as
| groups/organizations that are advocating for improvements in this
| area?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Another popular resource that is often shared is the explorable
| explanation "To Build A Better Ballot" by Nicky Case here:
|
| https://ncase.me/ballot/
|
| It's a great way to get to grips with some of the theory of
| different voting systems, and has some links at the bottom to
| various relevant groups.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This is a mostly great idea.
|
| The only thing I can't get behind is their mechanism for
| competitiveness. While it sounds like a feature that is
| desirable, I suspect that in reality, it serves to provide the
| minority candidates with disproportionately high influence.
|
| I feel like it introduces the same problem that the electorial
| college does, where a swing of 10,000 votes in one region can be
| used to negate 100,000 votes in another.
|
| I think a better target would be to optimize for for minimal
| difference in demographic between neighboring districts. That way
| districts act as kind of a gradient, where neighboring districts
| influence each other slightly, keeping each district closer to
| the overall political affiliation of the region.
| spankalee wrote:
| Districts themselves are the problem. They can be more "fair"
| than they are currently, but they can't overcome the fact that
| common interests and voting alignment are not exclusively
| geographic.
|
| Removing districts, or enlarging them so the borders barely
| matter, and implementing ranked choice voting and proportional
| representation is a far, far better solution.
| mcguire wrote:
| At-large elections are also a good way to avoid having
| minorities elected to office.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965
| dragonwriter wrote:
| That's at-large FPTP elections, which basically guarantee the
| statewide plurality gets all the seats.
|
| At-large STV, guaranteeing that a faction which got
| floor(1/n+1)+1 votes in a district with n seats (to make
| balloting manageable, you probably want 3<=n<=7) provide
| representation to significant minority interests regardless
| of geographical distribution.
| spankalee wrote:
| That's why you need proportional representation. Various
| minorities, not just racial, can form blocs that ensure a
| fair chance of representation.
| andrewla wrote:
| You have to be very cautious with this approach. The intent is
| not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the
| office, but an individual that you hold personally accountable
| for their political actions.
|
| Removing districts means that you are moving to statewide
| elections, and then it becomes a statewide office rather than a
| local office, which is not the intent.
|
| The better solution is to make the scarce resource less so;
| limit districts to 60k people (i.e. pre-Reapportionment Act
| levels) and expand the house of representatives
| correspondingly. Then this problem mostly becomes moot.
|
| The other problem, of having ~5000 people in the house of
| representatives, presents additional challenges, naturally, but
| the house has the power to set its rules so it can put more
| work on committees (which can have additional specialization
| levels) and less work on floors.
| scarmig wrote:
| > The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member
| of a party to the office
|
| The "intent"? Whose intent?
|
| Regardless, that's not how modern elections work. The
| strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan
| affiliation. Candidates (on both sides!) who are known for
| exceptional constituent services are regularly voted out for
| faceless party hacks. When people do switch their votes, it's
| a consistent shift up and down the ballot. The days when
| representatives carefully pursued their local constituents'
| interest are long gone: consider how Californian Republican
| representatives voted to hike their own property owning
| constituents' taxes in 2017.
|
| It doesn't make sense to have local elections, because
| politics isn't local now.
| andrewla wrote:
| > The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is
| partisan affiliation
|
| I mean, I guess I think this is a problem, rather than
| something that we should encode structurally into the
| system.
|
| I personally would prefer reforms that push back in the
| local direction. Right now there is a very small number of
| heterodox senators (Manchin, maybe Sanders, any others?)
| and a larger number of heterodox reps. To lower those
| barriers to make it more feasible for people to run for
| national office as a representative would be a vast
| improvement.
| scarmig wrote:
| I don't disagree that creating a much larger House would
| lead to better representation and better constituent
| services. It's also probably one of the most feasible
| approaches we could take to electoral reform. So,
| pragmatically we see eye to eye.
|
| I predict it wouldn't change the tendency toward
| governance by party hacks, though. That's an effect, not
| a cause. The root cause is that residents of
| geographically contiguous regions don't represent a
| shared interest in the same way they did in the past:
| there are different dividing lines nowadays.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| What's really needed to fix this is to switch from first the
| post to range voting:
|
| https://rangevoting.org/
|
| Then where you draw the district lines doesn't matter nearly as
| much because no matter where you put them, the candidate that
| pleases more of the voters in their district has the advantage,
| which makes it hard to disenfranchise anybody.
|
| By removing spoilers from the equation you can have two highly
| similar candidates running against each other without splitting
| the vote and both losing, so a candidate that satisfies more of
| the district defeats one that disregards the concerns of 49% of
| the voters.
|
| It also makes it much harder to gerrymander for the advantage
| of a particular party because it would make third party
| candidates and independents viable, and shifting voters around
| would have hard to predict results on party balance. Moving
| some Democrats you "didn't need" from a Democratic district to
| one that used to go to the Republicans might make the first
| district go to the Libertarians and the second to the Greens.
| specialist wrote:
| PR seems like the ultimate end goal. Especially for assemblies.
| Ideally, eliminating districts.
|
| Because of path dependencies (the legal version of technical
| debt), we gotta start where we're at. So I support any and all
| reforms that move us in that direction.
|
| I've long advocated approval voting for executive and single
| member districts. But since I support any move away from FPTP,
| I support my friends working on RCV. (Don't let perfection be
| the enemy of good enough.)
|
| I'm newly curious about multimember districts. I don't really
| get the math (details) yet. I read that Illinois' state house
| had multimember districts and that it was more effective and
| less polarized today. And this reform might be an easier lift.
|
| I'm also newly curious about unicameral legislatures.
| Especially at the state level. Meaning no upper houses aka
| senates. Or maybe giving the senates different
| responsibilities. Like the lower house controls the budget and
| appropriations whereas the upper house does more meta stuff
| like democratic and governmental reforms. I like the notion of
| a fast changing lower house and a slower changing upper house.
| One of the stated intents of the US Senate. But without a more
| clear division of labor (balance of powers), it hasn't seemed
| to work out.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| How is that working out for the Senate?
| spankalee wrote:
| Horribly. States borders are one of the worst districting
| systems imaginable, and the fundamentally undemocratic nature
| of the Senate makes it a huge, and basically insurmountable,
| problem.
| sudosteph wrote:
| States aren't supposed to be districting systems though -
| they're meant to be independent governing bodies that work
| under a set of shared constraints for a shared repbublic.
| The entire point of the Sentate is to give a representation
| to the need of the state as its own entity - _not_ as a
| representation to the people in the state. It wasn 't even
| intended to be an elected body.
|
| It may feel unfair, but it's intentional, and it does help
| ensure overall stability of the nation. The entire
| philosophy behind the US, right down to the the name of the
| nation, revolves around the fact that states are the
| fundamental unit and they have long-term needs which are
| not always understood or valued by the people. The house of
| reps is for the the needs of the people, not the Senate.
| This is why the US is a democratic republic, not a pure
| democratic state.
| spankalee wrote:
| I know it's intentional, but it's unfair and broken.
| There's no valid reason for a WY resident to have 60x the
| voting power of a CA resident.
| totalZero wrote:
| The reason is that WY would never become part of a
| federation where its partial sovereignty means nothing.
| Look up the Great Compromise.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| WY was _created_ by the United States of America. It wasn
| 't some pre-existing entity that opted to join the union.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| There is if both California and Wyoming are sovereign
| states within the federal system of the United States.
| The alternative is the abject subjugation of vast regions
| to the will of the more populous regions. Should Canada
| be subject to the will of the American people because the
| American people outnumber the Canadian people 10 to 1?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The concept of "a state as its own entity - not [ ... ]
| the people in the state" is so broken as to almost need
| no remark.
|
| What on earth does that even mean? How does a Senator
| represent "the state as its own entity - not [ ... ] the
| people in the state" ? Presumably the Senator responds to
| legislative proposals based on how their perceive them to
| affect the state, but what can it mean to say "how it
| affects the state" if that doesn't actually mean "how it
| affects the people of the state" ?
|
| Well, I'll suggest how: it makes sense only if you
| reinterpret "the state as its own entity - not [ ... ]
| the people in the state" as meaning "the existing
| distribution of power and resources within the state".
| That is, the role of the Senator from state XX is to
| ensure that the existing power structure of the state
| remains in place.
|
| I cannot imagine any other intepretation of "the state as
| its own entity" that can be offered. Do you have one?
|
| Also, this notion of "the states as the fundamental unit"
| is a concept that was certainly in place at the time of
| the DoI. It simply isn't how most Americans experience
| their citizenship or lives, and arguably it suffered a
| fatal blow post-civil war. You can argue, if you wish to,
| that the Constitution still reflects the old arrangement
| (there are some smart folk who will disagree with you).
| The de facto situation on the ground, however, is that
| Americans conceive of themselves living in a single
| nation with differences in laws and regulations from
| state to state.
|
| [ EDIT: clarify para 3 and drop word bombs ]
| totalZero wrote:
| The advantage of state borders is that they are static and
| precede many years of polity shift and demographic
| migration.
|
| Districts, on the other hand, are drawn to serve the
| drawer.
| scarmig wrote:
| States are also drawn to serve the drawer. Why do we have
| a North Dakota and a South Dakota? It's not because we
| had a North Dakota Territory and a South Dakota
| Territory; it was because they would enter the Union as
| solidly Republican states, cementing Republican dominance
| in the Senate and in the Presidency, and admitting two
| states instead of one doubles the effect.
|
| There's no particular reason to treat the current
| boundaries as holy writ.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| A voting system which leads to more proportional outcomes is
| probably the correct solution here, but there is a "hack" which
| could fix gerrymandering specifically (if implemented) without
| changing the ballots, the size of districts, or the counting
| process.
|
| The idea is to look, after an election, at the proportion of
| seats won by each party, and the proportion of votes won (in
| aggregate) by each party, and ask "Could these two sets of
| proportions be brought more into line by appointing a different
| winner in one of the districts?".
|
| If a change to some winner could improve the proportionality,
| then a rule would say that this change to the results should be
| imposed (on the district where the losing party came closest to
| winning).
|
| Of course, overriding the true result in a district would be
| hugely controversial, but the idea is that the rule would act
| as a deterrent and never need to be invoked, because the
| districts would be drawn in a proportional way to begin with.
| walshemj wrote:
| PR unfortuetly can give the extremes kingmaking powers which
| can go against the well being of the majority.
|
| The German greens forcing Angel Merkle into shutting nuclear
| energy early and having to use more ghastly lignite coal.
| chalst wrote:
| The Greens actually had little parliamentary influence then:
| the CDU could have counted on the support of their coalition
| partners, the pro-nuclear FDP, at the time. Merkel went with
| massive anti-nuclear sentiment post-Fukushima to pass
| legislation with over 80% Bundestag support to phase out
| nuclear power.
| obelos wrote:
| It depends on the voting system. Some methods like
| Proportional Approval Voting are less prone to this kind of
| gaming in PR/MMD settings:
| https://electionscience.org/problem-solution/
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I think that similar "kingmaking" problems can exist in non-
| PR systems, but the effect is obscured by how
| unrepresentative the parties are.
|
| For example, instead of a small party forcing one unpopular
| policy on a coalition, you end up with a single large party
| that only 25% of the population voted for, running the
| government without any accountability (because of "safe"
| gerrymandered seats).
|
| Moreover, these large parties usually contain multiple
| competing wings, and so are effectively coalitions
| themselves, except their "coalition agreements" are done
| behind the scenes, and then internal party discipline
| mechanisms are used to force all the politicians in that
| party to follow the party line, even if that party line is
| set by a minority of a minority.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Your average kindergartener could draw up districts which are
| more fair than the current ones.
|
| The problem has never been finding a fair way to do it. The
| problem is that the people in power aren't at all interested in
| doing it fairly.
| phnofive wrote:
| Are geographic districts required by the Constitution? State and
| Federal laws certainly follow from this assumption, but could a
| state simply assign registered voters at random (per election,
| roughly in line with ballots being finalized) to each of its
| districts? Single-seated states already enjoy this luxury.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I believe the requirement to have single-member districts was
| introduced with 2 U.S.C. SS 2c in 1967. The name for the
| previous practice was "at Large" election, and the text of the
| law[0] includes a reference to that practice as part of a
| transitional measure:
|
| "a State which is entitled to more than one Representative and
| which has in all previous elections elected its Representatives
| at Large may elect its Representatives at Large to the Ninety-
| first Congress"
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c
| ogre_codes wrote:
| It is good to know who your representative is and for a
| representative to be able to visit their district and have
| community meetings so they can (in theory) represent the
| interests of the people in that community. If the district is
| spread across the state like avocado on toast, you aren't
| really representing anyone.
| phnofive wrote:
| I get the idea, but if you can live across the street from
| another district while living in the same neighborhood, I
| don't think it bears out.
|
| It would also make a two-party campaign schedule impossible,
| so it's unlikely to gain traction. Just wondering aloud.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| If you keep the group small enough per representative you can
| still hold community meetings. The internet adds more options
| for "central meeting places" even if the geography is
| absurdly large (say, a random sampling of Texas or Alaska)
| even if you can't find other ways to incentivize travel to in
| person meetings.
|
| That said though, when was the last time any representative
| in the US was concerned about in person community meetings?
| It's a beautiful ideal, but in practice it seems nonexistent.
| The status quo, especially when you look at the maps of how
| some districts have been gerrymandered to incredibly abstract
| shapes is already broken from the ideal. Maybe it's time to
| shift the ideal? We have the technology to try new things
| that aren't necessarily beholden to geography today, among
| other ideas.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > The status quo, especially when you look at the maps of
| how some districts have been gerrymandered to incredibly
| abstract shapes is already broken from the ideal.
|
| This is something we can fix though.
|
| I know where our representative's office is. While I
| haven't gone to our representative for specific needs, I
| know people who have. Knowing our representative lives in
| our district and is local means I know he understands what
| our community is dealing with at least at some level.
|
| While there are a lot of things broken with the current
| representative model, being regional is not the problem.
| (The stupid way they designate the "regions" on the other
| hand is)
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I'm not saying being regional is the problem, but that we
| have an opportunity to question the
| definitions/assumptions behind "regional". A lot of our
| country's ideals of a representative district stem from
| concepts/assumptions that a representative's office
| should be no more than a brief horse ride away.
| Gerrymandering has insured that isn't the case in a lot
| of places today hence the assertion that the original
| ideals are unmet ("broken").
|
| But what happens if we question the assumption directly?
| Is it okay to take public transportation into account?
| What about car travel? To get into useful extremes for
| illustrative purposes, what about air travel? How far in
| travel time is feasible/allowable, an hour's distance?
| Four or more, like some of the classic representative
| horse "ridings"?
|
| It doesn't entirely matter where you stand with specifics
| to those travel methods/distance qualifiers: the point is
| that those are variables/knobs in the equation. If the
| outcome is better representation overall, knowing that
| your representative is less than four hours by car away,
| for instance, may still be sufficient to meet the useful
| parts of the "regional" ideal while providing more
| options to explore in optimizing representation (such as
| random sampling or some k-means clustering gradient) than
| the traditional "geographies need to be contiguous and no
| more than a simple horse ride big".
|
| Technology also presents other opportunities to explore:
| Would you be happy if your Representative's "Office" was
| a Discord server of "the right size" (say, small enough
| that it isn't a cacophony, big enough that it isn't just
| in jokes and memes of two to three shitposters every day)
| and your Representative had mandated "Office hours" to
| "hang out/townhall" in a voice or video chat channel? I
| know that a lot of people might find the idea ugly or
| terrifying, but I find it an interesting ideal of a
| different more modern sort. You might feel more likely
| that your voice is directly heard, and a good Discord
| server can feel very "regional" even when the actual
| participants are scattered to the winds geographically.
| I'm not saying "Discord but for Politics" is necessarily
| the best idea either, just that it is a useful thought
| experiment in questioning what it means to be "regional"
| in 2021.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't think that political parties or race should be included
| in redistricting plans, especially since I think that this could
| often accidentally result in _optimally_ "cracking" or "packing"
| minority districts. Neither political parties nor races should be
| intentionally institutionalized.
|
| The defining characteristic of a district is that it is
| geographically contiguous. A defining specification for districts
| is that they have a roughly even population. With those
| constraints, what you would want to do is find physical
| commonalities (not abstract loyalties.) For example: water
| sources, proximity to commercial areas, types of housing stock,
| local weather patterns, local roads/accessibility, proximity to
| major land features/employers (like quarries, factories, lakes.)
| That's harder than doing this.
|
| A problem I have with with doing this by political parties is
| that the two parties aren't themselves part of government and
| shouldn't be. A real problem I have with making racial guarantees
| (other than the possibility of packing and cracking) is that it
| seems to be calculated through averaging "diversity" - meaning
| that a group with 6% representation would be guaranteed 6% voting
| power on the district level (assuming people vote purely based on
| racial allegiance.) "Diversity" is a red herring; it's remedy
| that is important. 6% can be ignored at the district level nearly
| as easily as it can be ignored at the individual level. You're
| not going to get remedy from redistricting, but districts that
| grow from material features of the places where people live will
| end up shaped by race anyway (due to the history of those
| places.)
| scarmig wrote:
| Physical commonalities are easily gameable. You could divide a
| city into east-bank/west-bank, or upstream/downstream, or even
| near-bank/far-bank. Give me enough factors and write me a large
| enough check, and I can give you whatever kind of partisan
| results you want.
|
| I do find watershed democracy (legislative district boundaries
| defined by watershed) kind of an interesting thought
| experiment. At the very least it'd help to solve water
| politics.
| chris123 wrote:
| Pretty sure the politicians don't want it fair. Politicians don't
| do fair. It's the worst of humans that are attracted to politics
| and surviving politics, after all.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The more you believe this, the more you guarantee its truth.
|
| If you want it to be otherwise, you have to believe that it can
| be. You have to believe that we can have political systems
| where people who actually care about issues, about people,
| about the welfare of other people, about justice, abdout the
| future can play a role.
|
| If you really don't believe that's possible ... I don't want to
| be you.
| specialist wrote:
| Most every incumbent tries to pull the ladder up after
| themselves. That's why it's so ridiculous to have electeds in
| charge of redistricting, reforms, oversight.
|
| Even the appearance of a conflict of interest should be treated
| as a conflict of interest. No burden of proof required.
| ndiscussion wrote:
| These things are all just opinion - there is no such thing as a
| "fair" district.
|
| Or do you not really agree with this concept?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
|
| Voting blocks are how they are... and these kinds of changes will
| have sweeping, unpredictable consequences. I find it humorous
| that people have a big enough ego to think that they could get it
| "right".
|
| More generally, what people consider "fair" voting policies are
| what benefit their political party.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Suppose you have a state with five districts and the state is
| 60% Brown Party and 40% Black Party.
|
| If you draw five districts that are each 60% Brown, you get
| five Brown representatives even though 40% of the state is
| Black.
|
| If you draw districts along party lines then you get three
| Brown representatives and two Black representatives, but the
| districts are totally uncompetitive and the representatives
| from both parties can steamroll everybody because none of them
| ever have any chance of losing their district no matter what
| they do.
|
| There are also several other options, and most of those are
| even worse.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| It used to be that geographic proximity caused a lot of
| similarity in needs/votes. But now our votes are more alike
| when our "tribe" is alike - e.g. professional, rural, urban
| poor. Plus few people ever see their local representative
| except on national TV. So maybe the time for geographic
| districts has passed.
|
| To get real minority interests some representation, and to
| solve the geography problem, I'd like to see a state say
| they've got 10 representative positions, and you're all going
| to have a vote (or maybe 10). The top 10 vote-getters are
| then chosen.
| majormajor wrote:
| You seem to be suggesting that tyranny of the minority would be
| no less preferable to tyranny of the majority, while it seems
| strictly worse: it still isn't properly representing everyone,
| but now the unrepresented population is larger...
|
| Don't let an improvement not being perfect prevent any
| improvements from happening.
| manux wrote:
| > Don't let an improvement not being perfect prevent any
| improvements from happening.
|
| I strongly agree. I often hear this type of argument and it
| appears to me as just another kind of Nirvana Fallacy.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
| ndiscussion wrote:
| Tyranny of the minority is a different problem, and I don't
| think it's a given that this will occur if you take away
| majority rule.
|
| Think historically - would you really want the tyranny of the
| majority in the 1960s? 1920s? It's my opinion that minorities
| deserve a place at the table.
| tshaddox wrote:
| This might be controversial, but how about no tyranny at
| all?
| majormajor wrote:
| > Think historically - would you really want the tyranny of
| the majority in the 1960s? 1920s? It's my opinion that
| minorities deserve a place at the table.
|
| Do you think we didn't have that? It took a LOT of
| protesting and lobbying and effort to get changes made in
| the US, more than in many other nations which, say, _didn
| 't_ need civil wars to end slavery.
|
| We had to change the majority to get those things, and
| while it's sad that the majority didn't move faster (and
| that's a _different_ problem), now we have problems created
| by groups that can 't even command a majority of the
| population being able to set policy.
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