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Gerrymandering and a cure for it – the shortest splitline algorithm

160 points by clukic 11y ago

tunesmith 11y ago
Isn't gerrymandering a much more complex problem than that makes it out to be? I've always thought the problem was that it's actually difficult to even come up with a definition of what fair is. For instance, do you want each district to be as representative of the population as possible? Or do you want the house of representatives to be as representative of the population as possible? I suspect that you can't have both. For instance, if you have a state that is 60/40, then do you want each district to be 60/40? Or if it has ten representatives/districts, do you want 6 reps of one party and 4 of the other? What is districting even supposed to aim for? I don't think there is one reasonable answer to this question, which is why I think any attempt to answer this question for all states is doomed to fail. The only way I can think of to get both is to increase the number of representatives. The House of Representatives was originally supposed to scale with the size of the population, and they eventually put a stop to that. If they had continued, then we'd have a house with a makeup that matches national polling much more closely than it does now, and gerrymandering wouldn't be as much of a problem. Isn't it true that as you add more representatives, gerrymandering distortions lessen?
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Isn't gerrymandering a much more complex problem than that makes it out to be? No, its vastly simpler: the problem with gerrymandering is that there is no good way to draw single-member winner-take-all districts, and the solution is just don't do that. Multimember districts with a system that provides proportional representation within each district (e.g., five-member districts with STV) solve the problem pretty much completely. Algorithmic line-drawing of single-member winner-take-all district pretty much guarantees poorly-representative districts, but without anyone being able to control how and where they are bad (well, except that there are quite a lot of algorithms that can be chosen, so the political choice of which to choose will be influenced by the effect the particular algorithm would have on the particular jurisdiction adopting it.)
  - specialist 11y ago
    Agreed. But even when the USA sees the light on proportional representation, there will continue to be winner takes all elections. Executive positions (president, governor, mayor), senators, judges, ballot issues, etc. In those cases, approval voting is the correct answer. Easy to explain, easy to tabulate, most mathematically fair, hardest to game. Per Duvenger's Law, approval voting would probably also help replace the current two party system with more choices.
    - powera 11y ago
      On the other hand, you can't gerrymander Senate seats. (it's not representative now, but it's not changing either)
      - specialist 11y ago
        I'm totally on board with starting over with new state boundaries.
        afarrell 11y ago
        I'm actually really intensely curious how one would design a voting system for people to choose what subentities to belong to. How would you populate the ballot? Would you run a clustering algorithm on the votes? What if New Jersey and Michigan just decide they want to be as they are, but excluding Camden and Detroit respectively? Or would you do something whimsical like draw lines based on football/baseball teams and cleave states like CT in half?
        vpeters25 11y ago
        Unlike the House, which represents the people, the Senate represents the states. That's why each state has 2 senators regardless of its size and population: I think the idea was to prevent oppression by large states.
        tadfisher 11y ago
- specialist 11y ago
  Gerrymandering is simply incumbency protection. Fairness is simply maximal competitiveness.
  - tunesmith 11y ago
    Define "maximal competitiveness" in a 60-40 state with ten districts. Ten 60-40 districts? Eight 51-49 districts, and two 96-4 districts? Either could be argued as incumbency protection.
    - specialist 11y ago
      Flip a coin. Duverger's Law suggests that a two party system is the logical result of winner takes all elections, because aspirant will attempt to win with the smallest coalition. In other words, fair redistricting will reduce polarization.
  - SapphireSun 11y ago
    It's not clear to me that maximum competitiveness is "fair". Suppose you do in fact have a state that is perfectly divided into a red district and a blue district, but instead of drawing a representative from each side, you split it on the orthogonal side to create maximum competitiveness. Then, by essentially random chance, you might end up with two blue reps or two red reps when fair representation would probably be one red and one blue.
    - Retra 11y ago
      I really don't know enough to have an opinion on this matter, but I also don't see the substance of your argument. If you flip a fair coin twice, you might get two heads. That doesn't mean the coin isn't fair; fairness is a property gleaned of repeating the trial many times. So over many elections, the aggregate result would be fair.
      - SapphireSun 11y ago
        That's true, but every time an individual result is unfair... it's still unfair. If I live on the red side and there are two blue reps, I have literally no representation despite comprising 50% of the population. The fact that I sometimes get to sock it to the blue side with two red reps is unfair to them. This isn't a case of turnabout is fair play, as the promise of representative government is that everyone gets a voice and decisions are generally made by consensus, compromise, and occasionally a smack down vote. Let me put it another way, which system would you prefer to live in?
- ashearer 11y ago
  This is very true--trying to create a single outcomes-based ideal of what's fair is both difficult and subject to the same strategizing that caused gerrymandering in the first place. Instead of choosing what "fair" is and maximizing it, the proposal takes a different approach: by using an extremely simple geometric rule, the algorithm seeks to avoid choices that would be susceptible to influence for political gain. Those are the choices that tend to result in gerrymandering, which by locking down power is expressly designed to be the opposite of fair to future voters. So instead of the difficult task of directly maximizing fairness, the proposal aims to minimize a great source of unfairness. I'd be curious to know how well it would work in practice.
- curun1r 11y ago
  I don't think the point is to make the result fair, I think the point is to make the process fair. The US ideal has always been about equality opportunity rather than equal outcome. By agreeing on an algorithm for drawing lines, you remove any bias from the process, which is probably as good as we're going to get. I do think the algorithm presented here is too simplistic. It's likely to create situations where people have to travel long distances to their polling places and, if anything, we should be optimizing for voter turn out. It could, perhaps, work if cities were never split between districts, but even then people who live just over the border may have to travel quite a ways to vote. I wonder whether we're arguing over the best bad idea rather than something simpler which would yield a better result. Is there really a benefit to geographically grouping voters? I'd argue that you're likely to get better representation from grouping voters by age range rather than locality. We've consistently seen policies that benefit older demographics over younger demographics...perhaps if there was a candidate elected only by 20-somethings, that demographic would actually be represented for once.
  - nickff 11y ago
    Why is voter turn-out the relevant metric? You are implicitly assuming that increasing voter turn-out is a worthy goal in and of itself, and I am not sure why. Is it important to you that each voter feel involved, or that they are responsible for their representatives, or do you believe that an increase in the number of voters would improve policies and outcomes? I would support an attempt to increase voter turn-out if it would improve policies and outcomes, but there is little evidence of this; in fact, the current evidence shows that current voters are better informed and more intelligent than eligible non-voters.[1] Before you accuse me of being an anti-democratic autocrat or something of that sort, please keep in mind that I am not advocating the abolishment of elections, that I used to agree with you (but was persuaded to change my mind), and have voted at every election I am eligible for since reaching the age of majority. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
    - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
      Voter turn-out indicates that information about platforms is passing from politicians to voters, and information about preferences is passing from voters to politicians. Low voter turn-out has tended to co-occur with the managerial turn of politics, in which no party or candidate offers any substantial choice to even the most enthusiastically civic subset of the population. Essentially, low voter turnout is a correlated symptom of de-facto oligarchy.
- ClayShentrup 11y ago
  That site already acknowledges that there is enormous complexity in the issue. http://scorevoting.net/TheorDistrict.html http://scorevoting.net/TheorDistrict.html
- Spooky23 11y ago
  Not really. The congress works the way it does because it's designed to represent a union of nominally sovereign states. Not matching national polling is a feature -- otherwise, the interests of NY, Boston, Chicago, LA, Atlanta would completely and utterly steamroll everything. The nation doesn't work if nobody gives a shit about Kentucky. Gerrymandering is a different problem made worse by the Supreme Court's decision that every elected body with the exception of the Senate requires proportional representation. Since districts are drawn by state legislatures, and state legislatures are only driven by districts cut up by population, there's no incentive do to anything but preserve/expand the numbers for your party. In other words, you don't get the "adult supervision" role that the US Senate delivers (for better or for worse), and get the quality of governance that you see in the US House -- that is drivel.
- eru 11y ago
  You don't so much need an algorithm that's fair, but one that's seen as unbiased.
- learnstats2 11y ago
  > Isn't gerrymandering a much more complex problem than that makes it out to be? I've always thought the problem was that it's actually difficult to even come up with a definition of what fair is. That's perhaps true, and I observe what you say to be correct, but the lack of an acknowledged fair solution means that the existing solutions are all (party) political. When Party A is in charge, they gerrymander in one direction, and when Party B is in charge, they then gerrymander in exactly the other (or perhaps a convenient tangent). The purpose of gerrymandering is to unfairly extend the period that you're in power. Having an ostensibly party-neutral solution that all parties can agree to is a useful solution. It's not immediately clear that this solution will really be fair, but it's not immediately clear that it's unfair, and at least it removes the politicking over boundaries. If even a few regions start using this solution with the recognition that it is party-neutral, then parties in power elsewhere will start to be pressured into doing the same, to avoid appearing undemocratic. It's a one-step improvement on what happens now.
a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
Doesn't gerrymandering mostly carve out a lot of districts for black congressmen who otherwise wouldn't have districts? I think that's kinda what it boils down to in America. There are conservative areas adjacent to and mixed with majority black areas and they want different representation.
- spoiledtechie 11y ago
  No one ever thinks of it that way.
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago
  Um, no. Here's one example: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/janet-adkins-corinne-brown-prisoners-gerrymandering http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/janet-adkins-corinne-...
- igonvalue 11y ago
  I'm not sure how common it is, but the linked site actually has an interesting discussion of this phenomenon, which Wikipedia calls "affirmative racial gerrymandering"[0], and how it would interact with the proposed scheme: http://scorevoting.net/TheorDistrict.html#Minority http://scorevoting.net/TheorDistrict.html#Minority [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_States#Affirmative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_S...
- panglott 11y ago
  This was more true in the era of overt white supremacy, when majority-white electorates would refuse to vote for black candidates, and thus black candidates could only win elections in strongly majority-black districts. This has changed from the 1990s, which black candidates started winning even in majority-white districts. However, this also led political marginalization as well. To tilt a purple state Republican, you gerrymander districts so that you have more slightly-Republican districts than strongly-Democratic one. Concentrating black Democratic voters in one district is a strategy both to guarantee the presence of a few black representatives as well as an overall Republican majority.
onewaystreet 11y ago
Gerrymandering is an intentional act carried out by politicians, not one of happenstance. It's not something that can be cured with algorithms.
- gjm11 11y ago
  I take it the proposal is that there should be a law requiring that such-and-such an algorithm be used. That would take away the politicians' power to gerrymander. (Of course it would also need to be voted for by the same politicians who presumably won by gerrymandering. Good luck with that.)
specialist 11y ago
The goal isn't pretty lines. The goal is maximal competitiveness. Which boosts voter participation. Which gives legitimacy to the results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Citizens_Redistricting_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Citizens_Redistrict... "While the long-term results will bear out over time, independent studies by the Public Policy Institute of California, the National Journal, and Ballotpedia have shown that California now has some of the most competitive districts in the nation, creating opportunities for new elected officials.[12][13][14]"
- ClayShentrup 11y ago
  Independent redistricting commissions don't work. http://scorevoting.net/GerryComm.html http://scorevoting.net/GerryComm.html
  - caf 11y ago
    Apparently they don't work in the US. That link says that they work in Canada, and they work in Australia too. Without an underlying reason identified, this conclusion is somewhat unsatisfying.
    - Frondo 11y ago
      The link also gives unsatisfying reasons for why it says they don't work, e.g. incumbents keep winning elections. I haven't studied the matter really closely, but from what little I do know of the issue, it makes me wonder--are Arizona, Washington, and NJ examples of the hyper-gerrymandered states that citizen redistricting is supposed to prevent? Could it be that, in those states, they're already starting out from a pretty equitable district layout, such that when the citizenry gets to redraw the layout, it doesn't actually matter much? Or, put another way, how would a citizen redistricting panel work in Florida or North Carolina or Texas?
ROFISH 11y ago
One problem with this: it makes sense that district lines could be along natural (rivers, lakes, mountains) or political (towns, county) lines. Trusting a simple line algorithm may bisect a town down the middle.
- cjensen 11y ago
  Yep. Consider Eastern California: the Sierra Nevada runs north to south creating a natural barrier. There's a small sequence of cities east of the barrier. During the Spring and Fall campaign season, it can be literally impossible to cross that barrier: you must go a long way around or fly. The suggested algorithm would unite cities on both sides of the divide. It would be very difficult for an underfunded candidate to campaign on both sides.
- eru 11y ago
  The problem with taking into account natural or political lines is that there are so many to choose from. You don't want to leave anything to choice. That's where gerrymandering comes in.
chasing 11y ago
The problem with gerrymandering isn't that people aren't capable of drawing simple lines to split states into districts.
- eru 11y ago
  Oh, but this algorithms removes all the choice. So there's nothing up anyone's sleeves.
  - tfinniga 11y ago
    It just moves the problem. Instead of arguing about the borders, you have arguments about which clustering algorithm to use, and what the weights to the inputs should be. A simplistic algorithm like shortest splitline will give impractical results in many cases. For sure you're going to put Eagleton and Pawnee in the same district. Unless you have a mathematical definition of districts that lead to good government, a purely mathematical solution won't be possible.
    - eru 11y ago
      > Instead of arguing about the borders, you have arguments about which clustering algorithm to use, and what the weights to the inputs should be. Yes, that's true. But with any luck the weights will have less knobs to turn, ie less information, than drawing lines. > Unless you have a mathematical definition of districts that lead to good government, a purely mathematical solution won't be possible. We just need to avoid the worst government. Or perhaps the Americans can just look around the world to see how other countries are drawing their voting districts, and compare what works and what doesn't. (Shouldn't federalisms make that kind of experimenting work inside the US alone, too?) In any case, there's a more interesting simple technocratic fix to try: count ballot papers that tick more than one candidate as a vote for each of the ticked candidates. This way you can vote for the lesser evil and who you actually want. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting)
kevinoid 11y ago
This is an elegant solution with a lot of good properties: Equal population balancing, politically unbiased, reasonably understandable by the layman, typically geographically compact districts. But where's the discussion of the desirable and undesirable properties in a districting algorithm and how this algorithm achieves or doesn't achieve these properties? specialist already mentioned maximal competetiveness, ROFISH mentioned clustering due to natural features. Is regional or ethnic representation important, or is it an undesirable bias? How about travel distance (either for voters or campaigners)? I'm sure you guys can think of others you'd like to see or to avoid. Feel free to suggest some, I'm curious. There is a little more information at http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html but did I miss the real weighing of the tradeoffs and advocacy for this particular method above all others? Edit: Found a discussion of the theoretical issues at http://rangevoting.org/TheorDistrict.html http://rangevoting.org/TheorDistrict.html which touches on some, but not all of the points raised.
cryogospel 11y ago
gerrymandering is good--for the electorate. why? Because gerrymandering increases homogeneity. A gerrymandered district is more homogeneous--the voters are more alike than they were before. In general. Homogeneity in general increases unity. A more homogeneous district means the voters in general share more common interests. If the voters share more common interests then it is easier for them to elect and hold accountable a politician who can represent their common interests. Of course if you want the corporations to have more control over the government, and you want the people to have less control, then gerrymandering is indeed bad.
- jkestner 11y ago
  Texas's 23rd stretched from Austin to the Mexico border. You think this has "more common interests"? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/TravisCountyDistricts.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/TravisCo... Regardless of desirability, gerrymandering does not by definition increase homogeneity. It's a tool that is used for political gain, whatever that may be.
- panglott 11y ago
  Nope. Gerrymandering makes districts more or less homogenous in a way that benefits one party. To tilt a balanced state Republican, you concentrate Democratic votes into a few districts where Republicans will never be competitive, then create a larger number of districts where Republicans can consistently win with razor-thin margins. You'll have one homogenous district that is 70% Democratic, and seven Republican districts that are 53% Republican.
username223 11y ago
This is no more a cure for gerrymandering than Condorcet voting is a cure for the various ills of the two-party system. Until you have a plan to implement this algorithm in the current political system, you're just solving sudokus and crosswords.
statenjason 11y ago
The Redistricting Game[1] is an interesting approach to teaching about how gerrymandering works. [1]: http://redistrictinggame.org/game/launchgame.php http://redistrictinggame.org/game/launchgame.php
cmatt85 11y ago
This describes it quite well.
cmatt85 11y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A this explains it quite well.
kevinpet 11y ago
I think this is fascinating even if it will never happen. It's important to keep in mind the nominal and actual result of human drawn district boundaries ("gerrymandering" is a pejorative). In theory, human drawn district boundaries can create districts which are more homogenous so that, for example, a state with a few representatives and a few defined geographic or political divisions can divide things up in a way that makes sense. For example, it would seem odd for Las Vegas to be split into multiple districts in vast barren Nevada (it isn't -- LV is the smallest district). What happens in practice is: "Contrary to one popular misconception about the practice, the point of gerrymandering isn't to draw yourself a collection of overwhelmingly safe seats. Rather, it's to give your opponents a small number of safe seats, while drawing yourself a larger number of seats that are not quite as safe, but that you can expect to win comfortably." http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/15/americas-most-gerrymandered-congressional-districts/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/15/am...
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Contrary to one popular misconception about the practice, the point of gerrymandering isn't to draw yourself a collection of overwhelmingly safe seats. Rather, it's to give your opponents a small number of safe seats, while drawing yourself a larger number of seats that are not quite as safe, but that you can expect to win comfortably. That almost sounds like a tautology.
  - chadzawistowski 11y ago
    What's tautological about it? Here's the same sentiment expressed in image form: http://i.imgur.com/bRPcQ7O.jpg http://i.imgur.com/bRPcQ7O.jpg
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      In the original statement, the latter is just a slightly more detailed strategy for achieving the former.
orik 11y ago
The author of this site seems to think that in the ideal world, districts would be decided up with clear straight lines. This is not the case. Districts should represent distinct groups of people. Ideally, with well drawn districts, political representation will be accurate to the popular vote. I'd recommend you all read the following article if you haven't yet. I think if you wanted to solve districts algorithmically, you would need a neural network. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/01/this-is-the-best-explanation-of-gerrymandering-you-will-ever-see/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/01/th...
wahsd 11y ago
Although I don't necessarily disagree with this concept, I am not sure it is well refined. I noticed, looking at a certain city, that even with this shortest splitline the city was still rather split by more or less ethnically demographic lines.
mudetroit 11y ago
It is pretty... but vastly oversimplifies the problem. If we are ever going to get something for real it needs to take into account real problems. Talking about things like actual operation of elections, not producing high numbers of different ballots because of splitting of districts. For something to really work it is going to need to take into account things like existing political, and probably some physical, boundaries.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
EGreg 11y ago
Gerrymandering has more to do with Simpson's paradox. Look it up :)
- bru_ 11y ago
  Dude... thank you
brianolson 11y ago
Here's a better algorithmic non-gerrymandered districting, solving for compactness: http://bdistricting.com/2010/ http://bdistricting.com/2010/
thephyber 11y ago
Similar to this other algo: http://bdistricting.com/2010/ http://bdistricting.com/2010/
teslaberry 11y ago
gerry mandering is a symptom of democracy not the problem. democracy is the problem, or rather it is a form of self governance which presents many dillemas. historically , we know the bigger and more mature a democracy gets , the more it ages into socially defunct patterns of corruption , lowest common denominator, the decay of ethics, and embedded social passivity. the solution to 'gerrymandering' is the end of our current democratic system, not some 2 bit claim that an algorithm is a solution to a symptom of a bigger problem .
- saryant 11y ago
  And replace it with what?
  - hackeraccount 11y ago
    Duh. Something better.* *"better" is left as an exercise for the reader. I have a better solution but the margins of this textbox don't provide enough room for it.
Glyptodon 11y ago
Another more obvious solution is to get rid of congressional districts and then apportion the seats down the list of highest vote getters to lowest vote getters until there are no more seats (across the entire state).
JDDunn9 11y ago
Gerrymandering gets attention because it is malicious misrepresentation, but unintentional misrepresentation is just as bad. Voting is a flawed system that will always give some voters more voice than others. - The people who voted for the loser will not be represented (one of the reasons minorities are underrepresented). - The need of local representation is illusory. Make a list of all the political issues you care about. How many of them are local? - The effect of a bi-cameral legislature means that in the Senate, voters in Wyoming have over 60x the voting power of voters in California. - Voting itself is irrational under a cost/benefit analysis. So by definition, the least rational citizens are picking candidates. - Name recognition is huge for elections, meaning money will always effect elections. - Candidates suffer self-selection bias (as well as others). To run, you need to be good at public speaking (fear of public speaking is one of the most common fear in America), look a certain way (no tattoos or piercings allowed), and have a lust for power. Representation is a math problem. The only solution is random sampling. Replace Congress with 1 house made up of 1,000 randomly sampled citizens and we will have true representation.
- mannykannot 11y ago
  > Gerrymandering gets attention because it is malicious misrepresentation, but unintentional misrepresentation is just as bad. From an ethics point of view, the intent makes gerrymandering worse than unintentional misrepresentation. If you are not moved by ethical considerations, there is still the purely practical matter that the intent makes it much harder to fix.
- randcraw 11y ago
  Gerrymandering applies as much to local school, county, and state districts as it does federal districts. At the school and county and state level, all issues are local. In fact, most legislation that has a large tangible effect on your kids, your home, and your job occurs locally, not federally.
  - JDDunn9 11y ago
    The Federal government makes decisions for the entire nation. State-specific issues should not make their way into Congress. State issues are likewise at the state level. There is no reason to make sure two counties are represented, since they won't get separate laws/taxes. All that matters is that the people being affected by the laws are equally represented. That cannot happen with districting.
tomohawk 11y ago
I'd love to get rid of gerrymandering. I live in a massively gerrymandered district where the representative can very safely ignore the area where I live. This algorithm appears to have some interesting results though. Check out Maryland: http://rangevoting.org/Splitline2009/md.png http://rangevoting.org/Splitline2009/md.png
- dhimes 11y ago
  (O/T) And I live in the town where Gerry was from (his name is pronounced with a hard-G by the way, like Gail, not Jerry). We have a drinking club named after him! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbridge_Gerry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbridge_Gerry
peter303 11y ago
Splitline doesnt honor community or geographic boundaries. I'd suggest a modification that honors zipcode boundaries. The USPS has figured out basic units already.
- phphphph 11y ago
  Wouldn't just counting total votes rather than winning regions be the simplest fix? (Honest question, not USAmerican)
  - Steuard 11y ago
    In this context, each region sends one member to the House of Representatives in Washington. So it is a "count total votes" process within the region, but there's no way to aggregate between regions (without fundamentally changing our political system).
- chippy 11y ago
  The algorithm uses US Census data, so perhaps using county boundaries would be ideal? I'm not american, but I imagine both census and zipline boundaries as honouring geographic and community boundaries.
  - saalweachter 11y ago
    County boundaries in much of the US are like state boundaries: people drew a bunch of straight lines through a map, with only the slightest regard for natural barriers, to create areas of pleasing size. It is quite common to have large population centers crossing county boundaries, or have natural barriers in the middle of a county with population centers on either side.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > The algorithm uses US Census data, so perhaps using county boundaries would be ideal? Counties are too big to be atomic units in any algorithm that assigns districts that would be meet the requirements for reasonably equal size districts. > I'm not american, but I imagine both census and zipline boundaries as honouring geographic and community boundaries. ZIP codes don't do either particularly well, and census blocks might approximately do one or the other (not always the same for different boundaries) but they can't consistently do both, since the two can conflict.
cschmidt 11y ago
That seems to be a very oversimple approach. Cities are the most obvious problem. You kind of want a population center to have a single congressmen representing it. Mathematically, you want districts to be fairly compact. There have a been several Operations Research papers that try to do things in a more practical way. Also, a greedy approach (split in half, repeat) seems weird to me.
asmithmd1 11y ago
Technology can be used to help with this problem. Take a look at the maps from CommonCensus: http://commoncensus.org/maps.php#local_maps http://commoncensus.org/maps.php#local_maps First people "vote" for the boundaries of their neighborhood and then congressional districts are created using these neighborhoods as atomic.
CWuestefeld 11y ago
I'm concerned with the stability of the district borders. Because of the way this algorithm seems to like to slice through cities, it seems like minor changes in neighborhood density of a city is likely to significantly change the angle of the bisecting line, thus shifting large areas of the outlying region from one district to another. This is bad for two reasons. First, it seems a big weakness of democracy is voter ignorance. Throwing people repeatedly from one district to another, so they don't have time to learn the issues relevant to their district and the record of their representatives, will exacerbate the problem. Second, the system can be gamed. It looks to me like approving or denying the construction of a large apartment complex near the center of a city can be used as a tool to push lines one direction or another. So approving that big apartment building in the city will increase population in that region, tending to tighten the angle made around it, thus freeing some voters from that district and pushing them into a neighboring one. Indeed, since the algorithm is recursive, this could have big follow-on effects subsequent iterations.
DennisP 11y ago
A while back, I was friends with someone who was a forensic accountant and former state senator. She talked about gerrymandering quite a bit. She'd say "you don't choose your representatives, they choose you." She said both parties cooperated in drawing safe seats for everybody, and claimed that most of the people in our state congress were corrupt. Anyone who didn't play along with the graft would find their district redrawn out from under them, if the timing made that possible. This actually happened to another friend who was a former state house member. The two of them were instrumental in revealing the corrupt activities of state House Speaker Jim Black, who ended up serving time in prison.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  I imagine Jim Black was a sacrifice as well - he didn't play along with somebody, so he got tossed to the wolves. And the public thinks "Well, that's been dealt with" and the rest of the corrupt remain safe from further scrutiny. For a while.

160 points by clukic 11y ago

Isn't gerrymandering a much more complex problem than that makes it out to be? I've always thought the problem was that it's actually difficult to even come up with a definition of what fair is. For instance, do you want each district to be as representative of the population as possible? Or do you want the house of representatives to be as representative of the population as possible? I suspect that you can't have both. For instance, if you have a state that is 60/40, then do you want each district to be 60/40? Or if it has ten representatives/districts, do you want 6 reps of one party and 4 of the other? What is districting even supposed to aim for? I don't think there is one reasonable answer to this question, which is why I think any attempt to answer this question for all states is doomed to fail. The only way I can think of to get both is to increase the number of representatives. The House of Representatives was originally supposed to scale with the size of the population, and they eventually put a stop to that. If they had continued, then we'd have a house with a makeup that matches national polling much more closely than it does now, and gerrymandering wouldn't be as much of a problem. Isn't it true that as you add more representatives, gerrymandering distortions lessen?

dragonwriter 11y ago
> Isn't gerrymandering a much more complex problem than that makes it out to be? No, its vastly simpler: the problem with gerrymandering is that there is no good way to draw single-member winner-take-all districts, and the solution is just don't do that. Multimember districts with a system that provides proportional representation within each district (e.g., five-member districts with STV) solve the problem pretty much completely. Algorithmic line-drawing of single-member winner-take-all district pretty much guarantees poorly-representative districts, but without anyone being able to control how and where they are bad (well, except that there are quite a lot of algorithms that can be chosen, so the political choice of which to choose will be influenced by the effect the particular algorithm would have on the particular jurisdiction adopting it.)
- specialist 11y ago
  Agreed. But even when the USA sees the light on proportional representation, there will continue to be winner takes all elections. Executive positions (president, governor, mayor), senators, judges, ballot issues, etc. In those cases, approval voting is the correct answer. Easy to explain, easy to tabulate, most mathematically fair, hardest to game. Per Duvenger's Law, approval voting would probably also help replace the current two party system with more choices.
  - powera 11y ago
    On the other hand, you can't gerrymander Senate seats. (it's not representative now, but it's not changing either)
    - specialist 11y ago
      I'm totally on board with starting over with new state boundaries.
      - afarrell 11y ago
        I'm actually really intensely curious how one would design a voting system for people to choose what subentities to belong to. How would you populate the ballot? Would you run a clustering algorithm on the votes? What if New Jersey and Michigan just decide they want to be as they are, but excluding Camden and Detroit respectively? Or would you do something whimsical like draw lines based on football/baseball teams and cleave states like CT in half?
      - vpeters25 11y ago
        Unlike the House, which represents the people, the Senate represents the states. That's why each state has 2 senators regardless of its size and population: I think the idea was to prevent oppression by large states.
        tadfisher 11y ago
specialist 11y ago
Gerrymandering is simply incumbency protection. Fairness is simply maximal competitiveness.
- tunesmith 11y ago
  Define "maximal competitiveness" in a 60-40 state with ten districts. Ten 60-40 districts? Eight 51-49 districts, and two 96-4 districts? Either could be argued as incumbency protection.
  - specialist 11y ago
    Flip a coin. Duverger's Law suggests that a two party system is the logical result of winner takes all elections, because aspirant will attempt to win with the smallest coalition. In other words, fair redistricting will reduce polarization.
- SapphireSun 11y ago
  It's not clear to me that maximum competitiveness is "fair". Suppose you do in fact have a state that is perfectly divided into a red district and a blue district, but instead of drawing a representative from each side, you split it on the orthogonal side to create maximum competitiveness. Then, by essentially random chance, you might end up with two blue reps or two red reps when fair representation would probably be one red and one blue.
  - Retra 11y ago
    I really don't know enough to have an opinion on this matter, but I also don't see the substance of your argument. If you flip a fair coin twice, you might get two heads. That doesn't mean the coin isn't fair; fairness is a property gleaned of repeating the trial many times. So over many elections, the aggregate result would be fair.
    - SapphireSun 11y ago
      That's true, but every time an individual result is unfair... it's still unfair. If I live on the red side and there are two blue reps, I have literally no representation despite comprising 50% of the population. The fact that I sometimes get to sock it to the blue side with two red reps is unfair to them. This isn't a case of turnabout is fair play, as the promise of representative government is that everyone gets a voice and decisions are generally made by consensus, compromise, and occasionally a smack down vote. Let me put it another way, which system would you prefer to live in?
ashearer 11y ago
This is very true--trying to create a single outcomes-based ideal of what's fair is both difficult and subject to the same strategizing that caused gerrymandering in the first place. Instead of choosing what "fair" is and maximizing it, the proposal takes a different approach: by using an extremely simple geometric rule, the algorithm seeks to avoid choices that would be susceptible to influence for political gain. Those are the choices that tend to result in gerrymandering, which by locking down power is expressly designed to be the opposite of fair to future voters. So instead of the difficult task of directly maximizing fairness, the proposal aims to minimize a great source of unfairness. I'd be curious to know how well it would work in practice.
curun1r 11y ago
I don't think the point is to make the result fair, I think the point is to make the process fair. The US ideal has always been about equality opportunity rather than equal outcome. By agreeing on an algorithm for drawing lines, you remove any bias from the process, which is probably as good as we're going to get. I do think the algorithm presented here is too simplistic. It's likely to create situations where people have to travel long distances to their polling places and, if anything, we should be optimizing for voter turn out. It could, perhaps, work if cities were never split between districts, but even then people who live just over the border may have to travel quite a ways to vote. I wonder whether we're arguing over the best bad idea rather than something simpler which would yield a better result. Is there really a benefit to geographically grouping voters? I'd argue that you're likely to get better representation from grouping voters by age range rather than locality. We've consistently seen policies that benefit older demographics over younger demographics...perhaps if there was a candidate elected only by 20-somethings, that demographic would actually be represented for once.
- nickff 11y ago
  Why is voter turn-out the relevant metric? You are implicitly assuming that increasing voter turn-out is a worthy goal in and of itself, and I am not sure why. Is it important to you that each voter feel involved, or that they are responsible for their representatives, or do you believe that an increase in the number of voters would improve policies and outcomes? I would support an attempt to increase voter turn-out if it would improve policies and outcomes, but there is little evidence of this; in fact, the current evidence shows that current voters are better informed and more intelligent than eligible non-voters.[1] Before you accuse me of being an anti-democratic autocrat or something of that sort, please keep in mind that I am not advocating the abolishment of elections, that I used to agree with you (but was persuaded to change my mind), and have voted at every election I am eligible for since reaching the age of majority. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    Voter turn-out indicates that information about platforms is passing from politicians to voters, and information about preferences is passing from voters to politicians. Low voter turn-out has tended to co-occur with the managerial turn of politics, in which no party or candidate offers any substantial choice to even the most enthusiastically civic subset of the population. Essentially, low voter turnout is a correlated symptom of de-facto oligarchy.
ClayShentrup 11y ago
That site already acknowledges that there is enormous complexity in the issue. http://scorevoting.net/TheorDistrict.html http://scorevoting.net/TheorDistrict.html
Spooky23 11y ago
Not really. The congress works the way it does because it's designed to represent a union of nominally sovereign states. Not matching national polling is a feature -- otherwise, the interests of NY, Boston, Chicago, LA, Atlanta would completely and utterly steamroll everything. The nation doesn't work if nobody gives a shit about Kentucky. Gerrymandering is a different problem made worse by the Supreme Court's decision that every elected body with the exception of the Senate requires proportional representation. Since districts are drawn by state legislatures, and state legislatures are only driven by districts cut up by population, there's no incentive do to anything but preserve/expand the numbers for your party. In other words, you don't get the "adult supervision" role that the US Senate delivers (for better or for worse), and get the quality of governance that you see in the US House -- that is drivel.
eru 11y ago
You don't so much need an algorithm that's fair, but one that's seen as unbiased.
learnstats2 11y ago
> Isn't gerrymandering a much more complex problem than that makes it out to be? I've always thought the problem was that it's actually difficult to even come up with a definition of what fair is. That's perhaps true, and I observe what you say to be correct, but the lack of an acknowledged fair solution means that the existing solutions are all (party) political. When Party A is in charge, they gerrymander in one direction, and when Party B is in charge, they then gerrymander in exactly the other (or perhaps a convenient tangent). The purpose of gerrymandering is to unfairly extend the period that you're in power. Having an ostensibly party-neutral solution that all parties can agree to is a useful solution. It's not immediately clear that this solution will really be fair, but it's not immediately clear that it's unfair, and at least it removes the politicking over boundaries. If even a few regions start using this solution with the recognition that it is party-neutral, then parties in power elsewhere will start to be pressured into doing the same, to avoid appearing undemocratic. It's a one-step improvement on what happens now.

a8da6b0c91d 11y ago

Doesn't gerrymandering mostly carve out a lot of districts for black congressmen who otherwise wouldn't have districts? I think that's kinda what it boils down to in America. There are conservative areas adjacent to and mixed with majority black areas and they want different representation.

spoiledtechie 11y ago
No one ever thinks of it that way.
aaronbrethorst 11y ago
Um, no. Here's one example: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/janet-adkins-corinne-brown-prisoners-gerrymandering http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/janet-adkins-corinne-...
igonvalue 11y ago
I'm not sure how common it is, but the linked site actually has an interesting discussion of this phenomenon, which Wikipedia calls "affirmative racial gerrymandering"[0], and how it would interact with the proposed scheme: http://scorevoting.net/TheorDistrict.html#Minority http://scorevoting.net/TheorDistrict.html#Minority [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_States#Affirmative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_S...
panglott 11y ago
This was more true in the era of overt white supremacy, when majority-white electorates would refuse to vote for black candidates, and thus black candidates could only win elections in strongly majority-black districts. This has changed from the 1990s, which black candidates started winning even in majority-white districts. However, this also led political marginalization as well. To tilt a purple state Republican, you gerrymander districts so that you have more slightly-Republican districts than strongly-Democratic one. Concentrating black Democratic voters in one district is a strategy both to guarantee the presence of a few black representatives as well as an overall Republican majority.

onewaystreet 11y ago

Gerrymandering is an intentional act carried out by politicians, not one of happenstance. It's not something that can be cured with algorithms.

gjm11 11y ago
I take it the proposal is that there should be a law requiring that such-and-such an algorithm be used. That would take away the politicians' power to gerrymander. (Of course it would also need to be voted for by the same politicians who presumably won by gerrymandering. Good luck with that.)

specialist 11y ago

The goal isn't pretty lines. The goal is maximal competitiveness. Which boosts voter participation. Which gives legitimacy to the results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Citizens_Redistricting_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Citizens_Redistrict... "While the long-term results will bear out over time, independent studies by the Public Policy Institute of California, the National Journal, and Ballotpedia have shown that California now has some of the most competitive districts in the nation, creating opportunities for new elected officials.[12][13][14]"

ClayShentrup 11y ago
Independent redistricting commissions don't work. http://scorevoting.net/GerryComm.html http://scorevoting.net/GerryComm.html
- caf 11y ago
  Apparently they don't work in the US. That link says that they work in Canada, and they work in Australia too. Without an underlying reason identified, this conclusion is somewhat unsatisfying.
  - Frondo 11y ago
    The link also gives unsatisfying reasons for why it says they don't work, e.g. incumbents keep winning elections. I haven't studied the matter really closely, but from what little I do know of the issue, it makes me wonder--are Arizona, Washington, and NJ examples of the hyper-gerrymandered states that citizen redistricting is supposed to prevent? Could it be that, in those states, they're already starting out from a pretty equitable district layout, such that when the citizenry gets to redraw the layout, it doesn't actually matter much? Or, put another way, how would a citizen redistricting panel work in Florida or North Carolina or Texas?

ROFISH 11y ago

One problem with this: it makes sense that district lines could be along natural (rivers, lakes, mountains) or political (towns, county) lines. Trusting a simple line algorithm may bisect a town down the middle.

cjensen 11y ago
Yep. Consider Eastern California: the Sierra Nevada runs north to south creating a natural barrier. There's a small sequence of cities east of the barrier. During the Spring and Fall campaign season, it can be literally impossible to cross that barrier: you must go a long way around or fly. The suggested algorithm would unite cities on both sides of the divide. It would be very difficult for an underfunded candidate to campaign on both sides.
eru 11y ago
The problem with taking into account natural or political lines is that there are so many to choose from. You don't want to leave anything to choice. That's where gerrymandering comes in.

chasing 11y ago

The problem with gerrymandering isn't that people aren't capable of drawing simple lines to split states into districts.

eru 11y ago
Oh, but this algorithms removes all the choice. So there's nothing up anyone's sleeves.
- tfinniga 11y ago
  It just moves the problem. Instead of arguing about the borders, you have arguments about which clustering algorithm to use, and what the weights to the inputs should be. A simplistic algorithm like shortest splitline will give impractical results in many cases. For sure you're going to put Eagleton and Pawnee in the same district. Unless you have a mathematical definition of districts that lead to good government, a purely mathematical solution won't be possible.
  - eru 11y ago
    > Instead of arguing about the borders, you have arguments about which clustering algorithm to use, and what the weights to the inputs should be. Yes, that's true. But with any luck the weights will have less knobs to turn, ie less information, than drawing lines. > Unless you have a mathematical definition of districts that lead to good government, a purely mathematical solution won't be possible. We just need to avoid the worst government. Or perhaps the Americans can just look around the world to see how other countries are drawing their voting districts, and compare what works and what doesn't. (Shouldn't federalisms make that kind of experimenting work inside the US alone, too?) In any case, there's a more interesting simple technocratic fix to try: count ballot papers that tick more than one candidate as a vote for each of the ticked candidates. This way you can vote for the lesser evil and who you actually want. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting)

kevinoid 11y ago

This is an elegant solution with a lot of good properties: Equal population balancing, politically unbiased, reasonably understandable by the layman, typically geographically compact districts. But where's the discussion of the desirable and undesirable properties in a districting algorithm and how this algorithm achieves or doesn't achieve these properties? specialist already mentioned maximal competetiveness, ROFISH mentioned clustering due to natural features. Is regional or ethnic representation important, or is it an undesirable bias? How about travel distance (either for voters or campaigners)? I'm sure you guys can think of others you'd like to see or to avoid. Feel free to suggest some, I'm curious. There is a little more information at http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html but did I miss the real weighing of the tradeoffs and advocacy for this particular method above all others? Edit: Found a discussion of the theoretical issues at http://rangevoting.org/TheorDistrict.html http://rangevoting.org/TheorDistrict.html which touches on some, but not all of the points raised.

cryogospel 11y ago

gerrymandering is good--for the electorate. why? Because gerrymandering increases homogeneity. A gerrymandered district is more homogeneous--the voters are more alike than they were before. In general. Homogeneity in general increases unity. A more homogeneous district means the voters in general share more common interests. If the voters share more common interests then it is easier for them to elect and hold accountable a politician who can represent their common interests. Of course if you want the corporations to have more control over the government, and you want the people to have less control, then gerrymandering is indeed bad.

jkestner 11y ago
Texas's 23rd stretched from Austin to the Mexico border. You think this has "more common interests"? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/TravisCountyDistricts.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/TravisCo... Regardless of desirability, gerrymandering does not by definition increase homogeneity. It's a tool that is used for political gain, whatever that may be.
panglott 11y ago
Nope. Gerrymandering makes districts more or less homogenous in a way that benefits one party. To tilt a balanced state Republican, you concentrate Democratic votes into a few districts where Republicans will never be competitive, then create a larger number of districts where Republicans can consistently win with razor-thin margins. You'll have one homogenous district that is 70% Democratic, and seven Republican districts that are 53% Republican.

username223 11y ago

This is no more a cure for gerrymandering than Condorcet voting is a cure for the various ills of the two-party system. Until you have a plan to implement this algorithm in the current political system, you're just solving sudokus and crosswords.

statenjason 11y ago

The Redistricting Game[1] is an interesting approach to teaching about how gerrymandering works. [1]: http://redistrictinggame.org/game/launchgame.php http://redistrictinggame.org/game/launchgame.php

cmatt85 11y ago

This describes it quite well.

cmatt85 11y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A this explains it quite well.

kevinpet 11y ago

I think this is fascinating even if it will never happen. It's important to keep in mind the nominal and actual result of human drawn district boundaries ("gerrymandering" is a pejorative). In theory, human drawn district boundaries can create districts which are more homogenous so that, for example, a state with a few representatives and a few defined geographic or political divisions can divide things up in a way that makes sense. For example, it would seem odd for Las Vegas to be split into multiple districts in vast barren Nevada (it isn't -- LV is the smallest district). What happens in practice is: "Contrary to one popular misconception about the practice, the point of gerrymandering isn't to draw yourself a collection of overwhelmingly safe seats. Rather, it's to give your opponents a small number of safe seats, while drawing yourself a larger number of seats that are not quite as safe, but that you can expect to win comfortably." http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/15/americas-most-gerrymandered-congressional-districts/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/15/am...

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Contrary to one popular misconception about the practice, the point of gerrymandering isn't to draw yourself a collection of overwhelmingly safe seats. Rather, it's to give your opponents a small number of safe seats, while drawing yourself a larger number of seats that are not quite as safe, but that you can expect to win comfortably. That almost sounds like a tautology.
- chadzawistowski 11y ago
  What's tautological about it? Here's the same sentiment expressed in image form: http://i.imgur.com/bRPcQ7O.jpg http://i.imgur.com/bRPcQ7O.jpg
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    In the original statement, the latter is just a slightly more detailed strategy for achieving the former.

orik 11y ago

The author of this site seems to think that in the ideal world, districts would be decided up with clear straight lines. This is not the case. Districts should represent distinct groups of people. Ideally, with well drawn districts, political representation will be accurate to the popular vote. I'd recommend you all read the following article if you haven't yet. I think if you wanted to solve districts algorithmically, you would need a neural network. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/01/this-is-the-best-explanation-of-gerrymandering-you-will-ever-see/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/01/th...

wahsd 11y ago

Although I don't necessarily disagree with this concept, I am not sure it is well refined. I noticed, looking at a certain city, that even with this shortest splitline the city was still rather split by more or less ethnically demographic lines.

mudetroit 11y ago

It is pretty... but vastly oversimplifies the problem. If we are ever going to get something for real it needs to take into account real problems. Talking about things like actual operation of elections, not producing high numbers of different ballots because of splitting of districts. For something to really work it is going to need to take into account things like existing political, and probably some physical, boundaries.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

EGreg 11y ago

Gerrymandering has more to do with Simpson's paradox. Look it up :)

bru_ 11y ago
Dude... thank you

brianolson 11y ago

Here's a better algorithmic non-gerrymandered districting, solving for compactness: http://bdistricting.com/2010/ http://bdistricting.com/2010/

thephyber 11y ago

Similar to this other algo: http://bdistricting.com/2010/ http://bdistricting.com/2010/

teslaberry 11y ago

gerry mandering is a symptom of democracy not the problem. democracy is the problem, or rather it is a form of self governance which presents many dillemas. historically , we know the bigger and more mature a democracy gets , the more it ages into socially defunct patterns of corruption , lowest common denominator, the decay of ethics, and embedded social passivity. the solution to 'gerrymandering' is the end of our current democratic system, not some 2 bit claim that an algorithm is a solution to a symptom of a bigger problem .

saryant 11y ago
And replace it with what?
- hackeraccount 11y ago
  Duh. Something better.* *"better" is left as an exercise for the reader. I have a better solution but the margins of this textbox don't provide enough room for it.

Glyptodon 11y ago

Another more obvious solution is to get rid of congressional districts and then apportion the seats down the list of highest vote getters to lowest vote getters until there are no more seats (across the entire state).

JDDunn9 11y ago

Gerrymandering gets attention because it is malicious misrepresentation, but unintentional misrepresentation is just as bad. Voting is a flawed system that will always give some voters more voice than others. - The people who voted for the loser will not be represented (one of the reasons minorities are underrepresented). - The need of local representation is illusory. Make a list of all the political issues you care about. How many of them are local? - The effect of a bi-cameral legislature means that in the Senate, voters in Wyoming have over 60x the voting power of voters in California. - Voting itself is irrational under a cost/benefit analysis. So by definition, the least rational citizens are picking candidates. - Name recognition is huge for elections, meaning money will always effect elections. - Candidates suffer self-selection bias (as well as others). To run, you need to be good at public speaking (fear of public speaking is one of the most common fear in America), look a certain way (no tattoos or piercings allowed), and have a lust for power. Representation is a math problem. The only solution is random sampling. Replace Congress with 1 house made up of 1,000 randomly sampled citizens and we will have true representation.

mannykannot 11y ago
> Gerrymandering gets attention because it is malicious misrepresentation, but unintentional misrepresentation is just as bad. From an ethics point of view, the intent makes gerrymandering worse than unintentional misrepresentation. If you are not moved by ethical considerations, there is still the purely practical matter that the intent makes it much harder to fix.
randcraw 11y ago
Gerrymandering applies as much to local school, county, and state districts as it does federal districts. At the school and county and state level, all issues are local. In fact, most legislation that has a large tangible effect on your kids, your home, and your job occurs locally, not federally.
- JDDunn9 11y ago
  The Federal government makes decisions for the entire nation. State-specific issues should not make their way into Congress. State issues are likewise at the state level. There is no reason to make sure two counties are represented, since they won't get separate laws/taxes. All that matters is that the people being affected by the laws are equally represented. That cannot happen with districting.

tomohawk 11y ago

I'd love to get rid of gerrymandering. I live in a massively gerrymandered district where the representative can very safely ignore the area where I live. This algorithm appears to have some interesting results though. Check out Maryland: http://rangevoting.org/Splitline2009/md.png http://rangevoting.org/Splitline2009/md.png

dhimes 11y ago
(O/T) And I live in the town where Gerry was from (his name is pronounced with a hard-G by the way, like Gail, not Jerry). We have a drinking club named after him! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbridge_Gerry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbridge_Gerry

peter303 11y ago

Splitline doesnt honor community or geographic boundaries. I'd suggest a modification that honors zipcode boundaries. The USPS has figured out basic units already.

phphphph 11y ago
Wouldn't just counting total votes rather than winning regions be the simplest fix? (Honest question, not USAmerican)
- Steuard 11y ago
  In this context, each region sends one member to the House of Representatives in Washington. So it is a "count total votes" process within the region, but there's no way to aggregate between regions (without fundamentally changing our political system).
chippy 11y ago
The algorithm uses US Census data, so perhaps using county boundaries would be ideal? I'm not american, but I imagine both census and zipline boundaries as honouring geographic and community boundaries.
- saalweachter 11y ago
  County boundaries in much of the US are like state boundaries: people drew a bunch of straight lines through a map, with only the slightest regard for natural barriers, to create areas of pleasing size. It is quite common to have large population centers crossing county boundaries, or have natural barriers in the middle of a county with population centers on either side.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > The algorithm uses US Census data, so perhaps using county boundaries would be ideal? Counties are too big to be atomic units in any algorithm that assigns districts that would be meet the requirements for reasonably equal size districts. > I'm not american, but I imagine both census and zipline boundaries as honouring geographic and community boundaries. ZIP codes don't do either particularly well, and census blocks might approximately do one or the other (not always the same for different boundaries) but they can't consistently do both, since the two can conflict.

cschmidt 11y ago

That seems to be a very oversimple approach. Cities are the most obvious problem. You kind of want a population center to have a single congressmen representing it. Mathematically, you want districts to be fairly compact. There have a been several Operations Research papers that try to do things in a more practical way. Also, a greedy approach (split in half, repeat) seems weird to me.

asmithmd1 11y ago

Technology can be used to help with this problem. Take a look at the maps from CommonCensus: http://commoncensus.org/maps.php#local_maps http://commoncensus.org/maps.php#local_maps First people "vote" for the boundaries of their neighborhood and then congressional districts are created using these neighborhoods as atomic.

CWuestefeld 11y ago

I'm concerned with the stability of the district borders. Because of the way this algorithm seems to like to slice through cities, it seems like minor changes in neighborhood density of a city is likely to significantly change the angle of the bisecting line, thus shifting large areas of the outlying region from one district to another. This is bad for two reasons. First, it seems a big weakness of democracy is voter ignorance. Throwing people repeatedly from one district to another, so they don't have time to learn the issues relevant to their district and the record of their representatives, will exacerbate the problem. Second, the system can be gamed. It looks to me like approving or denying the construction of a large apartment complex near the center of a city can be used as a tool to push lines one direction or another. So approving that big apartment building in the city will increase population in that region, tending to tighten the angle made around it, thus freeing some voters from that district and pushing them into a neighboring one. Indeed, since the algorithm is recursive, this could have big follow-on effects subsequent iterations.

DennisP 11y ago

A while back, I was friends with someone who was a forensic accountant and former state senator. She talked about gerrymandering quite a bit. She'd say "you don't choose your representatives, they choose you." She said both parties cooperated in drawing safe seats for everybody, and claimed that most of the people in our state congress were corrupt. Anyone who didn't play along with the graft would find their district redrawn out from under them, if the timing made that possible. This actually happened to another friend who was a former state house member. The two of them were instrumental in revealing the corrupt activities of state House Speaker Jim Black, who ended up serving time in prison.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
I imagine Jim Black was a sacrifice as well - he didn't play along with somebody, so he got tossed to the wolves. And the public thinks "Well, that's been dealt with" and the rest of the corrupt remain safe from further scrutiny. For a while.