[HN Gopher] How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surpri...
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How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising
Author : lkrubner
Score : 61 points
Date : 2022-05-11 20:41 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (demodexio.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (demodexio.substack.com)
| RappingBoomer wrote:
| gerrymandering has the potential to increase homogeneity of
| voting districts...more homogeneity means that the electorate is
| more united and can therefore force the politicians to do what
| the voters want.
| pavlov wrote:
| Gerrymandering and a first-past-the-post electoral system can
| result in parliaments where a clear majority of all voters
| chose party X, yet the majority of seats are held by party Y.
| (There are several examples of these in the American states.)
|
| That doesn't seem to represent "what voters want" very well.
| kelnos wrote:
| That only works if the elected official from a particular
| voting district has complete say over the law in that district,
| which they do not. They go on to represent their district in a
| larger body, which may then vote against that district's
| wishes.
| totierne2 wrote:
| Swiss canton? We prefer blood than clocks...
| saxonww wrote:
| That's not what gerrymandering does. No districting scheme
| forces the elected representative to do what the voters want.
| Once they get elected, they have their term, and can vote
| however they want barring expulsion or recall.
|
| Gerrymandering is where you draw up districts such that the
| voting power of people who won't vote for you is minimized. It
| doesn't have to result in homogeneous districts. The point is
| to maximize your party's voting power as durably as possible.
| onphonenow wrote:
| Very quick solutions that at least drive politics towards the
| middle vs extremes:
|
| Open primaries with ranked choice voting.
|
| Top two to general.
|
| Done.
|
| The current model, in a "safe" dem seat (45% R / 55% D) whoever
| wins D primary wins everything. This means the D primary (with
| 20% of voters - most activist) are deciding things. Same on the
| right.
|
| With open primaries, you will get 2 D's potentially in general,
| but now the R vote actually matters. This drives towards the
| middle.
|
| Additionally RCV in the primary (ie pick 3 in order) also allows
| votes for less well known folks without as much wasted voting.
|
| Another method is RCV with a multi-seat election. So you rate 5
| candidates and their are 5 winners in the larger geo area. This
| tends to give even groups with let's say 20% makeup of voter pool
| a seat at the table. Traditional winner takes all does not.
| dllthomas wrote:
| RCV encompasses a lot of different systems, but the most common
| instantiation is something resembling instant runoff, and I am
| skeptical that it drives towards the middle.
|
| If we believe that the appropriate compromise is no one's first
| choice, the first thing IRV does is throw away any "appropriate
| compromise".
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Open primaries
|
| I don't get the idea of open primaries - why should someone who
| is not a member of a party get to vote on who the party wants
| to represent them?
|
| Imagine there was a Women's Equality Party party (there is in
| the UK.) Should a large number of men, with no interests in
| women's equality, be able to come along and tell the Women's
| Equality Party who will represent them in an election?
| derbOac wrote:
| I am someplace that has open primaries and nothing like you
| are concerned about transpires. The reason is that if you
| participate in one primary you lose the ability to
| participate in the other. In some sense the threat of each
| side doing it keeps people from doing it.
|
| Also you can't really in keep people from registering for a
| given party, so enforcing a non open primary isn't feasible
| in practice.
| birken wrote:
| You are confused by what the OP means by open primary. It
| doesn't mean that anybody can choose in which party's primary
| a person can vote for (which actually is already the case...
| anybody can register for any party). It means there is just
| one giant open primary, and all candidates run in the same
| single primary at the same time. The top 2 vote getters move
| on to the general election.
|
| The point here is that if for instance 2 candidates of the
| same party make the general election, all of the people who
| are not in that party have to choose between only those two
| candidates, and their votes may make the difference. So this
| generally would favor the more moderate candidate. IE, if the
| general election was between two republicans, and one were
| very extreme and one was more moderate, all the democratic
| voters would be motivated to vote for the moderate republican
| as that is likely the better of the two options for their
| point of view.
|
| In your example, if the Women's Equality Party candidate was
| unappealing to some subset of voters, but extremely appealing
| to another one, then they'd do fine in an open primary. By
| definition if you get at least 1/3rd of the votes in the open
| primary, you are guaranteed to make the general election.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > anybody can register for any party
|
| Presumably only if they'll have you? People often get
| ejected from political parties in the UK if they for some
| reason are being destructive (in someone's opinion.)
| [deleted]
| aidenn0 wrote:
| If that is what GP meant, then they used the wrong term.
| The term usually used is "Blanket Primary" or "Jungle
| Primary" (Jungle Primary is a specific type of blanket
| primary) for what you describe. An open primary allows
| people to vote regardless of party affiliation; the states
| which have these may not even ask you for party affiliation
| when you register to vote (Virginia, where I first voted
| does not, for example).
|
| It does make an aggregate difference because few people
| vote in primaries anyways, and even fewer will change their
| party affiliation every year, making raiding much harder.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| That's a California-style jungle primary, not an open
| primary, and it's very dubious that it promotes centrism.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Given that parties don't restrict membership in the US, in
| places that are majority one party, you effectively get an
| open primary. I'm registered as
| $MAJORITY_PARTY_IN_MY_DISTRICT because the primary election
| is essentially the only one that matters.
| abirch wrote:
| I'm with you on the ranked choice voting, but I would say that
| the general is the duopoly. This can enable more viable parties
| and the death to the duopoly.
|
| And having more representatives (districts) will help immensely
| as well. The current limit is capped by statute and can be
| changed, this would especially help counter the over-
| representation of unpopulated states.
| drewcoo wrote:
| I, for one, think that extremely D and extremely D and even
| somewhere in the middle are all equally problematic.
|
| As long as 3rd parties are not electable, we're stuck with some
| right wing, corporate-backed politician regardless of who wins.
|
| All the talk of gerrymandering is just a partisan distraction.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's also Democratic Party excuse-making. They act as if
| Republicans invented and have a greater propensity to
| gerrymander than Democrats, when they both aggressively and
| energetically gerrymander when they're in the position to.
| The constant discussion of it is to distract from Democrats
| being completely wiped out in state and local elections over
| the past 20 years, giving exclusive gerrymandering power to
| Republicans.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Very quick solutions that at least drive politics towards the
| middle vs extremes
|
| This is a very good goal if you want to replace duopoly which
| alienates a large number of people with monopoly which
| alienates a larger number of people.
|
| What we need is almost the opposite: a system that, to the
| extent possible without compromising things like manageable
| legislature size and personal electoral accountability,
| provides proportional representation so that governing
| compromises are forced out in the open between parties in
| government, rather than done behind the scenes within parties
| so as to attempt to attain a minimal winning coalition
| leveraging limited substantive choices in the general election.
|
| (Using Single Transferrable Vote, or a similar system, in small
| multimember districts, say 5 members per district, would do
| this quite well.)
| samatman wrote:
| The problem posed by gerrymandering is a social problem, not a
| math problem.
|
| There are all kinds of geographical and legal boundaries in a
| country, with varying levels of affinity to them. Defining
| gerrymandering precisely isn't possible, it isn't even a know it
| when you see it thing, and in practice it's a Russell
| conjugation: they gerrymander, and we redistrict so that people
| get proper representation.
|
| However, social problems can be solved with maths, law could
| require something like this to be performed after every census:
|
| https://sites.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/uw_1034.pdf
|
| I think this has considerable advantages, the biggest being that
| it's objective, the next being that just looking at a Voronoi
| diagram makes it clear what's going on.
|
| This essentially removes human factors from redistricting, and
| says you get the Congressional district you get when the
| population heatmap is relaxed in the simplest way it can be into
| the appropriate number of partitions.
|
| Remember there's nothing about this which is 'fair', except for
| the part where people could perhaps be persuaded to abide by the
| results.
| crowbahr wrote:
| Perhaps the best way to district is more about maximum
| contention in a race? Voroni partitioning so that the maximum
| number of "purple" districts are achieved makes sense to me.
| daenz wrote:
| >Congratulations, you've now created a totalitarian one-party
| dictatorship! The blues hold 60% of every district, so they win
| every district, so 100% of the national legislature is in the
| control of the blues, even though they only hold 60% of the vote.
|
| I'm afraid too many people would be ok with this. There is a
| strong desire for "democracy" over "republic" (not a combination
| of the two), meaning 51% of your average voters can do whatever
| they want to the remaining 49%. Fundamentally, including a
| "republic" in the formulation means that some people get a
| prioritized say. I think a strong case can be made for that, but
| the idea itself is deeply unpopular.
| mastazi wrote:
| I grew up learning that "republicanism" means that you are
| opposed to the monarchy so I'm really confused by your comment.
| It seems that you are using the term "republic" as an
| equivalent of "pluralism" or possibly of "indirect democracy"?
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| There's rule by majority and then there's individual rights.
| Pure democracy prioritizes majority rule and does not
| guarantee any right to individuals. A Republic has a
| constitution that usually lays out the fundamental rights of
| a person and laws are valid only if those rights are not
| violated.
| daenz wrote:
| I'm using "republic" here to point out that a district is
| acting like an elected representative.
| wahern wrote:
| "The United States is a republic, not a democracy" is a meme
| started by the John Birch Society that spread to the broader
| conservative movement and beyond, losing much of its
| coherency and substance. Now it's just become a hollow
| rebuttal to [often equally hollow] claims of anti-democratic
| policies or opinions. But those who have received the meme
| tend to understand "republic" as having a far more specific
| definition (centering on Birch Society political philosophy)
| than in general discourse, including historic discourse--the
| Founding Fathers used the terms "democracy" and "republic"
| more loosely, including giving republic the meaning you
| ascribe (which, I think, is the more correct literal
| definition), but also sometimes using them interchangeably or
| at least ambiguously.
| Jensson wrote:
| > There is a strong desire for "democracy" over "republic" (not
| a combination of the two), meaning 51% of your average voters
| can do whatever they want to the remaining 49%.
|
| This is the dumbest argument for first past the post, how is
| this better than "35% of your average voters can do whatever
| they want to the remaining 65%"? No matter how you count the
| votes you will have a winner, and that winner can abuse the
| loser. 51% winning just means you get the fewest number of
| losers, and any other protections you can get with first past
| the post can also be gotten in a popularity vote system. The
| only thing you now miss is that some votes become worth much
| more than other votes, instead you just have 1 person 1 vote,
| which I thought was the standard of modern democracy.
| daenz wrote:
| >51% winning just means you get the fewest number of losers
|
| That's the wrong thing to optimize for.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| If you donate to both sides, you can do whatever you want with
| 1% of the vote. Imagine the horror if the 99% could do whatever
| they want to the 1%!
| [deleted]
| daenz wrote:
| I'm not sure how this is relevant to my point, please
| explain.
| elicash wrote:
| Part of why partisan gerrymandering has become such a problem is
| that the tech makes it easier to gerrymander.
|
| But mostly, political party matters much more than ever before.
| The electorate is more ideological and the candidates for office
| are much more loyal to the party platform. In an era where
| political party mattered less than, say, geography, then partisan
| gerrymandering was less of a national problem.
|
| Of course, there are several types of gerrymandering and this is
| just one of them. The best summary of possible solutions and
| their limitations I've seen was done by 538 as part of a larger
| gerrymandering project: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-
| probably-not-possib...
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| I'm not really an expert on the issue, but there's this
| suggestion that I kinda like: let people living in a district
| choose to vote in the adjacent districts if they want to do so.
| This "blurs" the arbitrary lines a bit.
|
| Also, this is probably an unpopular opinion, but I actually kinda
| like gerrymandering. In the sense that I like the fact that it
| exposes the absurdity of counting votes and claiming that it
| somehow represents the voice of the people.
|
| The outcome is clearly very dependent on what voting method is
| used, how the districts maps are drawn, who is eligible to vote,
| etc. It's all just vanity of vanities.
| Loughla wrote:
| >it exposes the absurdity of counting votes and claiming that
| it somehow represents the voice of the people.
|
| I actually 100% disagree with this sentence. I do not,
| honestly, believe it exposes that. My experience with people
| who vote is that they harangue about the "other side"
| gerrymandering, but when their preferred candidate wins their
| district, it's because voting works.
|
| I genuinely believe people are either (a) willfully ignorant,
| or (b) pants-on-head idiotic when it comes to this issue.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| There is no "both sides" to be had here.
|
| Republican candidates winning Staten Island sometimes is not
| gerrymandering.
|
| The Republican National Committee hiring gerrymandering
| consultant Thomas Hofeller in 2009 to draw them maps of
| Wisconsin and North Carolina that will give them absolute
| supermajorities even if they lose the popular vote by a wide
| margin, and then using those supermajorities to strip
| incoming Democratic governors of all of their powers thus
| instituting permanent one-party rule forever, that's
| gerrymandering.
| [deleted]
| jimbob45 wrote:
| What if I told you FiveThirtyEight's ongoing investigation
| into gerrymandering is finding that the Democratic Party is
| gerrymandering much more than the Republican Party? 538 is
| a left-leaning site too.
|
| https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-2022-map
| s...
| corrral wrote:
| > is finding that the Democratic Party is gerrymandering
| much more than the Republican Party
|
| Are those findings somewhere else? That particular page
| _does not_ clearly support that claim.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You should go look. They're making a claim and showing
| their work, and when you make a opposite claim, if you've
| looked, you'll have work to show.
| corrral wrote:
| I did go look. If the claim made is supported by that
| page, I sure didn't see it. You may also go look. We're
| all using the same link here, and it's already been
| supplied.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| "Redistricting has created more lean-blue districts than
| there once were, reducing the red bias in the house" and
| "dems gerrymander more than the reps" are different
| claims.
| corrral wrote:
| It's local lingo.
|
| From Wikipedia:
|
| > A distinct set of definitions of the term "republic"
| evolved in the United States, where the term is often equated
| with "representative democracy."
|
| The term "representative democracy" is typical in poli-sci
| circles and basically everywhere that's not the US, but I
| don't think that's actually the distinction the poster was
| looking for--some kind of constitution or other super-law
| that's relatively hard to change, plus strong rule of law
| (which is more about practices and norms than about what's
| written on some paper), seem much more important for
| preserving minority interests.
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| if you enable to choose districts freely this can be mass
| gamed.
| maxwell wrote:
| > You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a
| legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is
| not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we
| wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would
| have 5,000 people in it -- clearly not realistic.)
|
| Madison said the same thing, but we didn't have contemporary
| communication tools. My company's Slack has over 5,000 people and
| works just fine. Why is it unrealistic to repeal the Permanent
| Apportionment Act of 1929 and increase membership in the House by
| an order of magnitude?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Increasing membership of the House has the effect of reducing
| the advantage less-populous states have (both in the house and
| in the electoral college). That might make it politically
| infeasible to pass.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > politically infeasible to pass.
|
| Probably true. But I would hope that argument could be
| deflated easily, since it was the senate that was supposed to
| give smaller states a disproportionate amount of influence.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Which is why people who don't want to pass it for this
| reason will state some other reason, like "5000
| representatives is _obviously_ silly and way too many "
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Because it might be possible to stand out in a crowd of 500 but
| not 5,000. And it certainly is not possible to do deals other
| than "this is good for everyone".
|
| It would almost certainly end political parties. Lead to good
| ideas being debated openly by people who have no chance of
| hanging together long enough to force a direction.
|
| My god man what are you thinking !
|
| (/s)
| christkv wrote:
| Why stop at 5000 make it 50 000 to make it even harder. It
| would mess with everything from party discipline to lobbying.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > (/s)
|
| IMO we should just drop this notation altogether and just let
| angry people get angry, and ignore 'em. Sarcasm is better
| when it doesn't have to be labeled.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > Sarcasm is better when it doesn't have to be labeled.
|
| Which is why nobody ever uses a different tone of voice
| when speaking sarcastically.
| haswell wrote:
| This does not match my experience. One of the reasons /s
| exists is because it's much harder to read the intent of
| a written paragraph than the intent of someone speaking
| directly to us.
|
| The hallmarks of sarcasm are subtle, and come in a few
| forms - sometimes it's intentional emphasis on a
| particular word, sometimes it's a quizzical look or
| raised eyebrow, etc.
|
| But at least in my experience, I can usually tell when
| someone is being sarcastic in person, but it gets harder
| and harder to tell on the Internet.
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| > Madison said the same thing
|
| Interesting, I didn't know that. I looked it up, and I really
| liked this Madison quote:
|
| > In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters
| composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason.
| Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian
| assembly would still have been a mob.
|
| (from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._55)
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| How many people in your company with 5000 slack users are the
| real decision makers ? I highly doubt it's more than a few. If
| you had 5000 people in the legislature they would most likely
| still vote party line based on the decision of a few.
| no_protocol wrote:
| Why do they need to only have single-member districts? How about
| having fewer districts with more members per district? It seems
| like Fix Gerrymandering is a solution aimed at the wrong problem
| when the entire problem could just be eliminated.
| yonran wrote:
| Yes. After observing San Francisco's acrimonious supervisor
| redistricting last month (in which politicians and special
| interests lobbied the nonpartisan commission to move
| neighborhoods to one district or other to maintain or gain
| political power), this article has convinced me that the
| problem is single-winner district elections in the first place.
| Every map is flawed when only one person represents the
| district per election. And the solution is proportional
| representation where multiple people win in each election
| (although the exact method of proportional representation can
| be debated).
|
| https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfchronicle.com%2F...
| rtkwe wrote:
| Space partially, the US House of Reps is already pretty packed
| so to add enough to get to >2 members per district you'd have
| to add a lot. You also get into potential issues diluting power
| that much, with so many members things like committee
| memberships become the only people with real power on an
| individual level.
| q-big wrote:
| > Space partially, the US House of Reps is already pretty
| packed so to add enough to get to >2 members per district
| you'd have to add a lot.
|
| Then make the districts bigger to compensate for this effect.
| colechristensen wrote:
| That's what the Senate is. This has neutralizing effect on
| tyranny of a single party by forcing that party to win in
| separate kinds of representation strategies.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The senate is wildly antidemocratic giving power to a party
| just based on the amount of land/states they control. It's
| also effectively single winner from the party level because
| there are only 6 split senate delegations at this point.
| colechristensen wrote:
| What are the qualifications to label something as
| "antidemocratic"?
|
| There are many separate interests in a large country and
| thinking the only morally correct government is strictly
| majority rule is definitely a matter of debate.
|
| The founders made it the way it is to prevent tyranny of
| the majority which was a major topic in political
| philosophy. You likewise wouldn't want to live in a place
| absolutely controlled by the 50% +1.
|
| Geographic areas with lower population densities getting
| higher representation makes sense, interests aren't equally
| distributed nor are they distributed just to areas of high
| density. If you don't do this you risk power concentrations
| where people have to leave lower density places for higher
| density places if they don't go along with the majority
| opinion because they don't get representation and get
| disadvantaged by the majority.
|
| People tend to like this when it benefits them and hate it
| when it doesn't, but there is good sense in it, especially
| when nationally the party split is nearly always very close
| to even.
| kelnos wrote:
| In the US, the Senate directly causes the tyranny of the
| minority that we're currently experiencing.
|
| The House also has representation issues: since the total
| number of representatives in the House hasn't increased over
| time as population has increased, there's a "floor" on the
| number of per-state representatives that causes smaller
| states to have outsized representation.
|
| The article doesn't really deal with any of this, though: it
| assumes each "district" has the same number of people in it,
| which isn't the case for House or Senate seats when you
| consider the entire country. The article is more about
| considering the representation within a single US state,
| based on its division into districts.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I have a hard time with this because it's not like the
| tyranny of 20% of the population, elections are all pretty
| damn close to 50:50 overall much of the time. People have a
| hard time accepting that about half the population voted
| for things they really hate and choose instead to attack
| the small percentage of difference as the unfairness
| responsible for all their woes instead of the other
| high-40s percentage of people who want want happens when
| the majority loses.
|
| Currently, arguably, democrats in power in the senate had
| fewer popular votes than republicans. (48 dem + 2
| independent popular vote was about 1.5 million less than
| the 50 republican senators, with VP deciding ties... well
| it's just not so clean cut a minority-in-power situation)
|
| (I blame most of the current situation on democrats being
| bad at politics and not having the guts to do things they
| should have.)
|
| There's no way to be completely fair, the current setup is
| there in order to prevent several kinds of runaway power
| processes and really it has worked quite well for a very
| long time (unless you expect people to just be angels then
| go pick a dictator you think will be good).
| no_protocol wrote:
| It doesn't talk about a senate at all:
|
| > It is divided up into 10 districts, each of which sends one
| representative to the national legislature, which consists of
| 10 people.
|
| They take this as a given and try to come up with convoluted
| ways to 'fix' the problem, when just fixing this axiom would
| solve it much easier.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Yes they don't talk about the Senate because it's not
| gerrymandered because it's a statewide position not subject
| to districting.
|
| We already have the bundled-population representation in a
| senator, the House uses a different strategy explicitly
| because it's different for the benefits of competing means
| of representation to even out power.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Yeah, I never understood really this district thing... Do they
| that often really represent only the certain area? Or would it
| be more sane to have larger districts? Maybe in some cases up
| to whole state where the winners were selected in proportional
| way.
|
| Then again this would allow third parties to actually gain
| foothold and the corrupt duopoly can't allow that.
|
| Also this whole electoral college thing. Why is there this
| idiotic winner takes all method? Why not also maybe have lists.
| So electors would be chosen in order of list and voters could
| pick a list endorsing certain candidate pair?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| This article nicely explains the problem, but is a bit defeatist
| about the possibility of reforms that could mitigate it. To offer
| one reform, allow me to present the following:
|
| Suppose in the hypothetical country, the total number of votes
| cast for Blue is some number "B", and the total for Violet is
| "V". Further suppose that the number of seats won by Blue is "C"
| and the seats for Violet is "W". A non-gerrymandered map would be
| one where B:V is approximately C:W (or at least there is no
| possible change to the seats result that would make C:W any
| closer to B:V).
|
| My proposed reform, therefore, is that after an election, if
| those ratios are not as close as possible, the electoral officers
| would go down the list of seats that were lost by the under-
| represented party (from best performance to worst) and flip the
| result so that the under-represented party gains representation,
| until the ratio can't be improved any more.
|
| Obviously this would feel hugely unfair to the voters in the
| districts where the result was flipped, but they should blame the
| people who drew the unfair map in the first place. Indeed, the
| incentive would be on both parties to draw districts which were
| most likely to produce a balanced result that doesn't need any
| flipping. This method has the added bonus that it would encourage
| parties to appeal to voters in "safe seats" just as much as
| "swing seats", since everyone's vote would count towards the B:V
| ratio.
|
| The maths gets a little more complicated when dealing with more
| than 2 parties, and with independent candidates who don't belong
| to any party, but I don't believe these are insurmountable
| obstacles. Solving the problem of gerrymandering,
| unrepresentative legislatures, and voter apathy with this one
| weird trick (that doesn't involve changing the ballot papers or
| counting process) seems like such a big win that the cost of a
| few flipped seats has to be an acceptable price to pay.
| quink wrote:
| Or you could just do IRV or multi-member electorates or any
| number of other things done in other more democratic countries
| that are at least harder to characterise as stealing votes.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Like I say, my proposal allows the electorate to keep the
| same ballot papers, the same counting process, and the same
| number of seats in the legislature.
|
| You're right, though, that if voters were prepared to
| sacrifice some of that familiarity, they could do much better
| than the system I proposed (which was somewhat inspired by
| the multi-member system I mentioned in another comment).
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >My proposed reform, therefore, is that after an election, if
| those ratios are not as close as possible, the electoral
| officers would go down the list of seats that were lost by the
| under-represented party (from best performance to worst) and
| flip the result so that the under-represented party gains
| representation, until the ratio can't be improved any more.
|
| This seems like an implementation that would harm the trust in
| the system. If you're going to bother having representation by
| geography in a democratic system, it should be based purely on
| geography, not based on demographics within the geography.
|
| I agree with the author of the post that the geographic element
| itself is the source of the issue and that there are perhaps
| other better ways of dealing with the "tyranny of the majority"
| issue that the founding fathers intended to handle via
| republicanism.
| magpi3 wrote:
| > Congratulations, you've now created a totalitarian one-party
| dictatorship!
|
| This is not true. It totally discounts independents (38% of
| American are independent), and districts obviously evolve and the
| popularity of the party in power tends to wane as that party
| either fails to fulfill its promises or abuses its authority in
| some way. It is no coincidence that in modern times whenever a
| party has control over all three houses in the U.S., they lose
| that control in the very next election.
| Jensson wrote:
| Gerrymandering is very easy to fix: don't make voting districts
| matter that much. Have local seats in districts so they get
| represented, but also have popular vote seats to even out so each
| party gets seats corresponding to the total vote. Done,
| gerrymandering no longer matters enough for it to be a big deal.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Yes, this is effectively the solution that Mixed-Member
| Proportional Representation (MMP) offers.
|
| The normal complaint with this is that it typically involves
| having closed lists of candidates who get a free ticket into
| parliament without any local accountability, and this is only
| slightly improved by having an open list system (although that
| requires teaching voters to mark extra ballot papers in
| unfamiliar ways).
|
| Fortunately a better solution has been found and actually
| implemented in Baden-Wurttemberg, and they call it the
| Zweitmandat system. Basically, the "proportional seats are
| filled by losing candidates who won the highest proportion of
| votes".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zweitmandat
| Jensson wrote:
| Yeah, that seems reasonable. I'm all for giving more power to
| people to pick the candidates they want instead of having
| political parties handpick the last ones.
| dmasi wrote:
| I'm not understanding this math can I get a hand?
|
| 1,000,000 people that can vote
|
| 600K : blue & 400K : violet
|
| 4 districts hold 400K : blue
|
| 6 districts hold 33.3K : blue & 66.6K : violet
|
| if that's all of the districts... then isn't that only 500k?
| rdw wrote:
| This is written in such a way that it seems like it makes sense,
| but it ultimately takes its conclusion as an axiom and is thus
| essentially meaningless.
|
| Gerrymandering is to draw districts according to political party
| affiliations. So of course if you only divide up your districts
| by political party affiliation (in rather extreme ways) you will
| discover that doing so doesn't lead to stable political systems.
| No shit, that's the problem with gerrymandering.
|
| Any serious analysis of this problem needs to confront the
| realities of geographical location and migration.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Gerrymandering is to draw districts according to political
| party affiliations._
|
| That not really what it is. It's to draw districts in order to
| give a particular party an advantage. Usually the way to do
| that is _not_ to draw them along party lines, but to mix voters
| of different affiliations in the same district such that your
| party comes out with a majority in as many districts as
| possible.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I think this article is too absolutist in its conclusions (and
| its interpretation of Arrow's theorem). There are definitely ways
| to limit the worst effects of gerrymandering. We came close with
| a lawsuit from Wisconsin (I forget the details) and there was
| hope that Justice Kennedy was waiting for that to make it to the
| Supreme Court, but then he decided the other way and promptly
| retired.
|
| EDIT: I'm thinking of the Efficiency Gap:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote#Efficiency_gap
| Krisjohn wrote:
| Anyone should be able to submit new boundaries to break up a
| large area into the required districts. It should be accepted
| automatically if; the populations are equal based on the last
| official census, no boundaries pass through a residential
| property, the total length of all the boundaries is less than the
| current divisions.
| not2b wrote:
| While Germany is mentioned in the article, they don't mention the
| best features of the German system: two choices -- one for the
| candidate who will represent your district, one for the party you
| prefer. So you get someone who truly represents the district, and
| you also guarantee that the party that wins the most votes gets
| the most seats.
| seunosewa wrote:
| MMPR. There's a balancing step to enforce proportional
| representation.
| q-big wrote:
| Why not solve the problem of gerrymandering by getting rid of the
| "winner takes all" property?
|
| E.g. instead of having 100 districts selecting 1 representative
| using the winner-takes-all principle, which are very sensitive
| with respect to gerrymandering, make 10 districts where each one
| sends 10 representatives, where the distribution of
| representatives approximates the distribution of the submitted
| votes.
|
| This should decrease the problem a lot.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| That would be my preference. Or split between a number of
| representatives selected by winning a district and a number of
| representatives selected by the popular vote. Germany has a
| system like this.
| david_draco wrote:
| "Gerrymandering is universal in any political system that has
| geographic units that demand representation." A unstated
| assumption here is a winner-takes-all election system, which is
| common in the US and UK, but not other countries, where
| parliament is proportional, and coalitions are common. It works.
|
| A more interesting question would be how to build incentives in a
| winner-takes-all election system towards reducing gerrymandering,
| and to discuss what it would take to change away from a winner-
| takes-all geographical election system.
| bumper_crop wrote:
| The crux of this is that the majority/plurality system is a
| winner-takes-all outcome. I would like to propose a completely
| fair (and totally unacceptable) Voting system:
|
| Blues and Violets each get a single vote. On election day,
| everyone puts their vote into a big hat, and one of the ballots
| is pulled out. Whoever is on that ballot, gets a unilateral
| victory. This system has numerous good properties:
|
| 1. Power never falls into a state where the majority party can
| stay in control. Gerrymandering is a non-issue.
|
| 2. Every vote counts. Instead of a single, tie breaking vote
| changing the outcome of the election, each additional vote
| increases the odds. If there are 40% violets and 60% blues, the
| likelihood of a violet leader is still 40%.
|
| 3. Extreme minority votes still matter. If 99% of the population
| is blue, and 1% of the population is violet, violet supporters
| still feel their voice can be heard.
|
| 4. (edit) Political spending is massively reduced, since there is
| a diminishing return to spending ever more money trying to tip
| the 49% into being 51%.
| noduerme wrote:
| Assuming that the 1% extreme minority wants to turn it into a
| dictatorship, you'd be guaranteeing that sooner or later the
| democracy would fail.
| bumper_crop wrote:
| Sure, but we could have separate rules for changing how the
| voting works, compared to the day to day operation of the
| groups. Also, on the good end, maybe the 1% have some
| amazingly good ideas that the other side would never
| implement otherwise.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| The rules don't need to be perfect. The fundamental issue with
| gerrymandering is that we want politicians to compete by
| appealing to voters, rather than competing by toying with
| election rules.
|
| And while I agree there are tradeoffs involved in having
| geographic representation, these bizarrely shaped districts don't
| really provide that. They don't align with any administrative or
| cultural borders.
| marricks wrote:
| Don't some European counties like Germany have it so the number
| of delegates us to roughly equal the total vote totals for a
| party? So if you have "60% violet party and 40% teal party" but
| the seats are split 50/50 10 closest seats move over to violet?
|
| Theres no _perfect_ way to solve it but the ultimate problem is t
| social it's just simply one party is willing to gerrymander to
| win at any cost and the other doesn't because they don't have to
| but would if they actually saw any gain in it.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I think the US needs some form of representation based on the
| popular vote and not by winning districts. For example if a
| certain percentage of the House would be allocated to parties
| based on the popular vote, districts would be less important and
| third parties would be viable.
|
| Basically we should reduce the importance of districts and give
| the popular vote more weight. In my view everything else doesn't
| have a chance to solve the real issues.
| Msw242 wrote:
| This is dumb. We could just vote for parties instead of
| candidates, then have the party choose representatives, or have
| party members vote to choose representatives to fill their slots.
|
| Not everything is first past the poll, vote for your candidate,
| etc.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or you could have situation in between. Have people vote for
| candidate and share the votes between party and then rank those
| candidates in order of votes received.
|
| Would mean that winners would first be the most popular and the
| extra votes would still go towards the party. And the unpopular
| in terms of votes received candidates of party wouldn't get
| elected.
| bumper_crop wrote:
| Live in California? The candidates for (Republican|Democratic)
| parties are wildly different in their ability and likelihood to
| do a good job. A 30 yearold candidate of the same party as a 50
| yearold are going to have vastly different social networks,
| favors to lean on, money, appearance, etc. Picking the person
| is a much better choice to make than the party.
| penneyd wrote:
| There is no political will to do anything whatsoever about
| gerrymandering. Sad state of affairs.
| Loughla wrote:
| When the party in power gets to decide how the lines are drawn,
| there is zero incentive to do anything to fix it.
|
| I think the solution is really, really easy. Treat politicians
| like kids.
|
| One gets to draw the lines, but they have to draw several
| different versions, that are at least XX% different, in terms
| of voter groupings. Then the other gets to pick which one gets
| used.
|
| And when they can't get along, I get to send them to the
| naughty step.
| sky_rw wrote:
| Of course not. Both parties use it at all levels of government.
| Getting rid of it only helps non-politicians, ergo politicians
| will never support it (unless they are losing).
| hannasanarion wrote:
| Assuming you're talking an an American context, is is
| absolutely not true that "both parties use [gerrymandering]
| at all levels of government".
|
| The US Democratic party has a national policy of non-
| gerrymandering at all levels of government. Maryland had a
| Democratic gerrymander in the 00s, but it was exchanged for a
| fair map in 2011.
|
| The US Republican party, on the other hand, has a national
| policy of gerrymandering as much as possible. The national
| committee hired gerrymandering consultant Thomas Hofeller to
| draw Republican-maximizing maps for every state in 2009, and
| used those maps as the backbone of their REDMAP plan to seize
| permanent control of every state through extreme
| gerrymandering.
| nemo44x wrote:
| An independent council just rejected New York states
| proposed congressional map because it was so obviously
| gerrymandered. Democrats do it too.
| [deleted]
| kelnos wrote:
| How does that explain the new NY map that was recently
| tossed because it was so obviously gerrymandered in favor
| of Democrats? I believe the same happened in Maryland a
| couple months ago as well.
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