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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

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
        So splitline-partition the country.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ClayShentrup 11y ago
  > Algorithmic line-drawing of single-member winner-take-all district pretty much guarantees poorly-representative districts A) The status quo is massive Gerrymandering, so something like the Shortest Splitline Algorithm would be a massive improvement. B) The point is not to make quasi-proportional-representation with districts. The point is to make a legislature whose laws are representative. To that end, it does not matter if the constituents of a given district happen to have a lot in common.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    No line drawing method on single member districts does that, and the best way to get laws which represents e people effectively is by assuring better proportionality. This had, in fact, been studied quite a bit, see, e.g., Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy. Mucking around with variations on how our by whom lines are drawn for single-member, plurality or majority runoff districts and thinking that that had some how of meaningful improvement is self-delusion. It doesn't work, it can't work, we know why it can't work, and we know what does work, all from actual experience in real representative democracies. Playing around with how district lives are drawn isn't democratic reform, it's democracy theater, a means of diverting attention without changing anything meaningful.
    - BurningFrog 11y ago
      "Perfect enemy of the good" fallacy, if that's a thing. Gerrymandering can add ~30% of representatives for the party controlling it, so changing it to a party method does improve things a lot, even if it is arguably very far from perfect.
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        > "Perfect enemy of the good" fallacy, if that's a thing. Its only a thing when the "perfect" is not a real alternative. Systems that produce more proportional representation than any means of line drawing in single-member winner-take-all districts are real alternatives that are well-established in the real world.
- WildUtah 11y ago
  The Mixed-Member Proportional system proposes to keep the advantages of FPTP and PR by electing most members FPTP and adding a few PR seats in the same body so that gerrymandering is ineffective. You just lay out about 75-80% of your districts with traditional geographic community lines so each area gets a representative for its local interests responsible to local voters. Then voters vote for their local rep and also for a preferred party. You count the reps elected from districts by party and the remaining PR reps are allocated to fill in the discrepancy between that result and the party preference votes. New Zealand, Mexico, and Germany use some variation of MMP for their legislatures, so it's working in prosperous stable first world countries already.
  - creshal 11y ago
    re Germany: "Working". It took over 60 years to fix the overhang seat allocation to not give big parties more power than they should have.
    - slackson 11y ago
      Is the US system better in that regard?
      - creshal 11y ago
        They don't even have more than two parties that matter, so… definitely no.
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.

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
        So splitline-partition the country.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ClayShentrup 11y ago
> Algorithmic line-drawing of single-member winner-take-all district pretty much guarantees poorly-representative districts A) The status quo is massive Gerrymandering, so something like the Shortest Splitline Algorithm would be a massive improvement. B) The point is not to make quasi-proportional-representation with districts. The point is to make a legislature whose laws are representative. To that end, it does not matter if the constituents of a given district happen to have a lot in common.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  No line drawing method on single member districts does that, and the best way to get laws which represents e people effectively is by assuring better proportionality. This had, in fact, been studied quite a bit, see, e.g., Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy. Mucking around with variations on how our by whom lines are drawn for single-member, plurality or majority runoff districts and thinking that that had some how of meaningful improvement is self-delusion. It doesn't work, it can't work, we know why it can't work, and we know what does work, all from actual experience in real representative democracies. Playing around with how district lives are drawn isn't democratic reform, it's democracy theater, a means of diverting attention without changing anything meaningful.
  - BurningFrog 11y ago
    "Perfect enemy of the good" fallacy, if that's a thing. Gerrymandering can add ~30% of representatives for the party controlling it, so changing it to a party method does improve things a lot, even if it is arguably very far from perfect.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > "Perfect enemy of the good" fallacy, if that's a thing. Its only a thing when the "perfect" is not a real alternative. Systems that produce more proportional representation than any means of line drawing in single-member winner-take-all districts are real alternatives that are well-established in the real world.
WildUtah 11y ago
The Mixed-Member Proportional system proposes to keep the advantages of FPTP and PR by electing most members FPTP and adding a few PR seats in the same body so that gerrymandering is ineffective. You just lay out about 75-80% of your districts with traditional geographic community lines so each area gets a representative for its local interests responsible to local voters. Then voters vote for their local rep and also for a preferred party. You count the reps elected from districts by party and the remaining PR reps are allocated to fill in the discrepancy between that result and the party preference votes. New Zealand, Mexico, and Germany use some variation of MMP for their legislatures, so it's working in prosperous stable first world countries already.
- creshal 11y ago
  re Germany: "Working". It took over 60 years to fix the overhang seat allocation to not give big parties more power than they should have.
  - slackson 11y ago
    Is the US system better in that regard?
    - creshal 11y ago
      They don't even have more than two parties that matter, so… definitely no.

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.