10 ms·

How I Teach Gerrymandering

146 points by jakob223 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Nilzor 11y ago
What's this doing on HN?
- damon_c 11y ago
  To me it's a good example of one of those things for which the code would be easier to write (while not that easy) than the requirements for the code.
- nanny 11y ago
  "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"
- gtk40 11y ago
  The guidelines do say most things about politics don't belong, but I feel like this would not fall into that. Is that your concern? I think the guidelines are broad enough that the opposite question needs to be asked.
- terminado 11y ago
  Diagrams, information, graphs and abstract graphical representation of said information in various states, intellectually stimulating. Seems about right.
aidos 11y ago
I'd heard the term before but never looked into it – it was useful to have something to prompt me (partially because this article doesn't even mention what it is). It's when the government manipulates electorates to increase their chances of being re-elected. As someone in the UK this is something I've wondered about a lot over the last year. If you don't follow UK politics, we have a government that was elected with 51% of the seats on 36.9% of the votes. I found this article which explains some of the mechanisms used to manipulate the outcome of these elections. https://medium.com/@georgetaitedwards/is-britain-now-too-gerrymandered-to-be-a-genuine-democracy-fe2fcbd95d14 https://medium.com/@georgetaitedwards/is-britain-now-too-ger...
- Siecje 11y ago
  Here is a short CGP Grey video on Gerrymandering https://youtu.be/Mky11UJb9AY https://youtu.be/Mky11UJb9AY
  - aidos 11y ago
    Good video. Thanks!
  - narcissus 11y ago
    The entire "Politics in the Animal Kingdom" series is great, I think... http://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/ http://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/
- notahacker 11y ago
  UK election outcomes have nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything to do with being a multi-party democracy using a FPTP electoral system, which tends to boost the representation of leading parties at the expense of smaller parties. Indeed, you'd actually need gerrymandering for such a system to have any hope of returning seats broadly in proportion to vote share. (the conspiracy theory about disenfranchisement advanced by the blog article is orthogonal to the tendency of the FPTP electoral system to distort shares of actual votes. It's also a little difficult to take seriously an argument which suggests that a short-lived poll tax abolished in 1991 would be a significant factor in the 2015 election. Especially when the party that enacted it spent 13 of the intervening years out of power, with the electoral system and distribution of voters heavily favouring their rivals at the time. The article is equally ludicrous in suggesting Labour would be disadvantaged by a fraction of voters in strongly Labour-supporting boroughs being under financial pressure to relocate)
  - bonzini 11y ago
    > UK election outcomes have nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything to do with > being a multi-party democracy using a FPTP electoral system, which tends to boost > the representation of leading parties at the expense of smaller parties. More precisely, FPTP tends to boost the representation of leading national _and local_ parties (the latter being best exemplified by the SNP) at the expense of smaller national parties. Small local parties are usually toast anyway even in proportional systems due to thresholds. During the 2015 elections the system worked exactly as designed, by favoring parties that are strong in one or more nations of the UK at the expense of parties that are a bit meh in all of them.
gortok 11y ago
This is a great way to teach gerrymandering. It also illustrates the problem with 'Party X is evil, Party Y is not.' Political parties (stripping away all else) are groups of people who identify with one another. Take that one step further, and they're groups of people that identify with one another and believe their group is the best one to represent the whole. Or, if you are less idealistic, they want to win (I subscribe to the idea that they want to win because they think their way is the best way and they like the power). Once you believe those few things, it's easy to understand why politicians aren't evil, they're just vested in their group; in the same way you'd be vested in your group of friends vs. some random sampling of people you met on the street. Does this make our current set of political problems insurmountable? No; we just have to mold the system so that no one party can have absolute control even if they control the central government. Maybe by delegating a small set of powers to the central government and keeping most governing done at the local level. Maybe we could call it a constitutional republic?
- meric 11y ago
  Other ways: Limit the proportion of seats a party can contest to 50% so no party can control the government and will depend on other parties. Force each party to setup a voting platform so citizens in the district can vote bindingly on individual bills. The district will have two votes, one is the representative and the other is proportional vote depending on how many citizens in that district voting for that specific bill. (Can be partial vote e.g 63%)
- minority-one 11y ago
  > Once you believe those few things, it's easy to understand why politicians aren't evil, they're just vested in their group So you judge politicians based not on their actions but on their supposed intentions? > Maybe we could call it a constitutional republic? Nice save. A constitutional republic is the true "a better government, one tweak at a time" since federalism is the laboratory of government. No one even remembered that was the point of federalism here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10290172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10290172
- ergothus 11y ago
kgreene2 11y ago
To anyone interested in the subject, I'd strongly recommend playing the Redistricting Game [0] which takes you through many of the processes outlined in the article [0] - http://www.redistrictinggame.org/ http://www.redistrictinggame.org/
- jameshart 11y ago
  Seconded - great example of how a game mechanic can be used to highlight how real world incentives play out.
dheera 11y ago
Alternatively, by switching to popular vote, this problem, and many other problems could be avoided entirely. Above all things, is it fair that a voter in Massachusetts has exactly zero (and I mean exactly zero, not their fair 1/3.2e8 share) say over the election, while a voter in Ohio carries a lot of weight?
- twoodfin 11y ago
  Gerrymandering of Congressional districts could only affect the Presidential election results in two small states, Nebraska and Maine. Eliminating the Electoral College and moving to a nationwide popular vote for President would have essentially no effect on the motivation to gerrymander. On the other hand, if all 50 states allowed each Congressional district to choose its own elector (and presumably elected the other two statewide), it would represent a massive shift in favor of the GOP, and gerrymandering would have very little to do with it. Instead, the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas would be decisive.
- hodwik 11y ago
  Gerrymandering has more to do with local elections than presidential -- unless you're suggesting that the outlines of the states are 200 year old conspiracies by and against parties that didn't even exist yet.
- LordKano 11y ago
  There's a very good reason why we don't use the popular vote for Presidential elections. It's precisely because without the electoral college, small states would receive zero attention on national politics. Why would anyone spend time courting votes anywhere north of New York when there's a much bigger payoff to be had working the rest of the eastern seaboard and the west coast? To use your examples of Massachusetts and Ohio, why waste time on a campaign stop in Boston when you can hit Columbus? Columbus has a much larger population and one can also hit Detroit and Indianapolis in the same day to maximize their face time with the public. Going to a popular vote will have consequences that people really need to thing about.
  - notahacker 11y ago
emehrkay 11y ago
I haven't read the article yet, but I was halfway expecting to see this picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/How_to_Steal_an_Election_-_Gerrymandering.svg/2000px-How_to_Steal_an_Election_-_Gerrymandering.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Ho...
- dzdt 11y ago
  That picture is great: by basically eliminating the geography it makes the math clear. If someone understands this picture, it will be easy to get a good idea about the more complicated real-world cases.
  - twoodfin 11y ago
    It's not a great picture. For one thing, it's unnecessarily provocative (Title: "How to Steal an Election") and not-so-subtly partisan: The use of blue for the 'natural' winner and red for the 'thief' is clearly meant to echo (and comment on) contemporary U.S. politics. Yes, gerrymandering happens, and yes, it currently disproportionately benefits the GOP: Some lucky wave election timing put them in charge of more states during the post-2000 and post-2010 Census redistricting. But the benefit they get over their popular vote share is on par with the benefit the Democrats saw in the '90's[1]. And the benefit isn't that great. It's good for maybe 8 seats[2], far short of the 30 seats Democrats would need to swing to regain the majority. The problem for Democrats in the House is that their districts are too natural: It makes sense to put urban voters with similar needs and issues into Congressional districts with each other, rather than diluting their influence with very different suburban areas. The Voting Rights Act even made concentrating minority votes to create majority-minority districts mandatory in some areas. But the result is winning Chicago wards 95-5 while losing out in the 'burbs 55-45. To have a chance at consistently winning the House, Democrats need to draw districts that look an awful lot like the 5-0 image in that picture. Practically and politically, that's a non-starter. That's why ITT and elsewhere you see calls for multicandidate districts, proportional statewide representation, etc. It's not to "fix" gerrymandering, it's to fix the "problem" of concentrated Democratic votes. [1] http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/gerrymandering-the-u-s-house-1972-2014/ http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/gerrym... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/upshot/why-democrats-cant-win.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/upshot/why-democrats-cant-...
Robadob 11y ago
In the UK under FPTP atleast, I can imagine there is also an effect or reverse gerrymandering or similar. When it comes round to elections, generally the result of the majority of seats is already known, so they're classified by parties into stronghold (ours), stronghold (theirs), marginal. When your located within a Labour stronghold, your unlikely to see as much pro-Conservative media, as they are better off spending their time campaigning in marginals and defending their reputations in existing strongholds. Surely, this effect simply compounds strongholds, making them even harder to change hands overtime, without a significant event to cause the public opinion to shift significantly (e.g. the Scottish independence referendum). The only way to fix such a problem, would be to randomise the boundaries each election, but this would cause various extra complexities.
- kaffeemitsahne 11y ago
  It could also be fixed by not having any such boundaries whatsoever.
  - Robadob 11y ago
    This leads to a situation whereby elected representatives are assigned local constituencies, rather than having any particular link. Or atleast that's the argument which is always returned when people suggest a full PR system. Personally I think larger multi-member constituencies under STV provide the best compromise.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
civilian 11y ago
The best solution to Gerrymandering is the Alternate Vote. CGP Grey has a great video explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE He also has a great "what is gerrymandering" video that illustrated this same idea, but with fun animals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY
- tristanj 11y ago
  > The best solution to Gerrymandering is the Alternate Vote This is false. Alternate vote is still susceptible to gerrymandering. It even says so in the video you linked (@3:00).

146 points by jakob223 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Nilzor 11y ago

What's this doing on HN?

damon_c 11y ago
To me it's a good example of one of those things for which the code would be easier to write (while not that easy) than the requirements for the code.
nanny 11y ago
"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"
gtk40 11y ago
The guidelines do say most things about politics don't belong, but I feel like this would not fall into that. Is that your concern? I think the guidelines are broad enough that the opposite question needs to be asked.
terminado 11y ago
Diagrams, information, graphs and abstract graphical representation of said information in various states, intellectually stimulating. Seems about right.

aidos 11y ago

I'd heard the term before but never looked into it – it was useful to have something to prompt me (partially because this article doesn't even mention what it is). It's when the government manipulates electorates to increase their chances of being re-elected. As someone in the UK this is something I've wondered about a lot over the last year. If you don't follow UK politics, we have a government that was elected with 51% of the seats on 36.9% of the votes. I found this article which explains some of the mechanisms used to manipulate the outcome of these elections. https://medium.com/@georgetaitedwards/is-britain-now-too-gerrymandered-to-be-a-genuine-democracy-fe2fcbd95d14 https://medium.com/@georgetaitedwards/is-britain-now-too-ger...

Siecje 11y ago
Here is a short CGP Grey video on Gerrymandering https://youtu.be/Mky11UJb9AY https://youtu.be/Mky11UJb9AY
- aidos 11y ago
  Good video. Thanks!
- narcissus 11y ago
  The entire "Politics in the Animal Kingdom" series is great, I think... http://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/ http://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/
notahacker 11y ago
UK election outcomes have nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything to do with being a multi-party democracy using a FPTP electoral system, which tends to boost the representation of leading parties at the expense of smaller parties. Indeed, you'd actually need gerrymandering for such a system to have any hope of returning seats broadly in proportion to vote share. (the conspiracy theory about disenfranchisement advanced by the blog article is orthogonal to the tendency of the FPTP electoral system to distort shares of actual votes. It's also a little difficult to take seriously an argument which suggests that a short-lived poll tax abolished in 1991 would be a significant factor in the 2015 election. Especially when the party that enacted it spent 13 of the intervening years out of power, with the electoral system and distribution of voters heavily favouring their rivals at the time. The article is equally ludicrous in suggesting Labour would be disadvantaged by a fraction of voters in strongly Labour-supporting boroughs being under financial pressure to relocate)
- bonzini 11y ago
  > UK election outcomes have nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything to do with > being a multi-party democracy using a FPTP electoral system, which tends to boost > the representation of leading parties at the expense of smaller parties. More precisely, FPTP tends to boost the representation of leading national _and local_ parties (the latter being best exemplified by the SNP) at the expense of smaller national parties. Small local parties are usually toast anyway even in proportional systems due to thresholds. During the 2015 elections the system worked exactly as designed, by favoring parties that are strong in one or more nations of the UK at the expense of parties that are a bit meh in all of them.

gortok 11y ago

This is a great way to teach gerrymandering. It also illustrates the problem with 'Party X is evil, Party Y is not.' Political parties (stripping away all else) are groups of people who identify with one another. Take that one step further, and they're groups of people that identify with one another and believe their group is the best one to represent the whole. Or, if you are less idealistic, they want to win (I subscribe to the idea that they want to win because they think their way is the best way and they like the power). Once you believe those few things, it's easy to understand why politicians aren't evil, they're just vested in their group; in the same way you'd be vested in your group of friends vs. some random sampling of people you met on the street. Does this make our current set of political problems insurmountable? No; we just have to mold the system so that no one party can have absolute control even if they control the central government. Maybe by delegating a small set of powers to the central government and keeping most governing done at the local level. Maybe we could call it a constitutional republic?

meric 11y ago
Other ways: Limit the proportion of seats a party can contest to 50% so no party can control the government and will depend on other parties. Force each party to setup a voting platform so citizens in the district can vote bindingly on individual bills. The district will have two votes, one is the representative and the other is proportional vote depending on how many citizens in that district voting for that specific bill. (Can be partial vote e.g 63%)
minority-one 11y ago
> Once you believe those few things, it's easy to understand why politicians aren't evil, they're just vested in their group So you judge politicians based not on their actions but on their supposed intentions? > Maybe we could call it a constitutional republic? Nice save. A constitutional republic is the true "a better government, one tweak at a time" since federalism is the laboratory of government. No one even remembered that was the point of federalism here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10290172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10290172
ergothus 11y ago

kgreene2 11y ago

To anyone interested in the subject, I'd strongly recommend playing the Redistricting Game [0] which takes you through many of the processes outlined in the article [0] - http://www.redistrictinggame.org/ http://www.redistrictinggame.org/

jameshart 11y ago
Seconded - great example of how a game mechanic can be used to highlight how real world incentives play out.

dheera 11y ago

Alternatively, by switching to popular vote, this problem, and many other problems could be avoided entirely. Above all things, is it fair that a voter in Massachusetts has exactly zero (and I mean exactly zero, not their fair 1/3.2e8 share) say over the election, while a voter in Ohio carries a lot of weight?

twoodfin 11y ago
Gerrymandering of Congressional districts could only affect the Presidential election results in two small states, Nebraska and Maine. Eliminating the Electoral College and moving to a nationwide popular vote for President would have essentially no effect on the motivation to gerrymander. On the other hand, if all 50 states allowed each Congressional district to choose its own elector (and presumably elected the other two statewide), it would represent a massive shift in favor of the GOP, and gerrymandering would have very little to do with it. Instead, the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas would be decisive.
hodwik 11y ago
Gerrymandering has more to do with local elections than presidential -- unless you're suggesting that the outlines of the states are 200 year old conspiracies by and against parties that didn't even exist yet.
LordKano 11y ago
There's a very good reason why we don't use the popular vote for Presidential elections. It's precisely because without the electoral college, small states would receive zero attention on national politics. Why would anyone spend time courting votes anywhere north of New York when there's a much bigger payoff to be had working the rest of the eastern seaboard and the west coast? To use your examples of Massachusetts and Ohio, why waste time on a campaign stop in Boston when you can hit Columbus? Columbus has a much larger population and one can also hit Detroit and Indianapolis in the same day to maximize their face time with the public. Going to a popular vote will have consequences that people really need to thing about.
- notahacker 11y ago

emehrkay 11y ago

I haven't read the article yet, but I was halfway expecting to see this picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/How_to_Steal_an_Election_-_Gerrymandering.svg/2000px-How_to_Steal_an_Election_-_Gerrymandering.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Ho...

dzdt 11y ago
That picture is great: by basically eliminating the geography it makes the math clear. If someone understands this picture, it will be easy to get a good idea about the more complicated real-world cases.
- twoodfin 11y ago
  It's not a great picture. For one thing, it's unnecessarily provocative (Title: "How to Steal an Election") and not-so-subtly partisan: The use of blue for the 'natural' winner and red for the 'thief' is clearly meant to echo (and comment on) contemporary U.S. politics. Yes, gerrymandering happens, and yes, it currently disproportionately benefits the GOP: Some lucky wave election timing put them in charge of more states during the post-2000 and post-2010 Census redistricting. But the benefit they get over their popular vote share is on par with the benefit the Democrats saw in the '90's[1]. And the benefit isn't that great. It's good for maybe 8 seats[2], far short of the 30 seats Democrats would need to swing to regain the majority. The problem for Democrats in the House is that their districts are too natural: It makes sense to put urban voters with similar needs and issues into Congressional districts with each other, rather than diluting their influence with very different suburban areas. The Voting Rights Act even made concentrating minority votes to create majority-minority districts mandatory in some areas. But the result is winning Chicago wards 95-5 while losing out in the 'burbs 55-45. To have a chance at consistently winning the House, Democrats need to draw districts that look an awful lot like the 5-0 image in that picture. Practically and politically, that's a non-starter. That's why ITT and elsewhere you see calls for multicandidate districts, proportional statewide representation, etc. It's not to "fix" gerrymandering, it's to fix the "problem" of concentrated Democratic votes. [1] http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/gerrymandering-the-u-s-house-1972-2014/ http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/gerrym... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/upshot/why-democrats-cant-win.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/upshot/why-democrats-cant-...

Robadob 11y ago

In the UK under FPTP atleast, I can imagine there is also an effect or reverse gerrymandering or similar. When it comes round to elections, generally the result of the majority of seats is already known, so they're classified by parties into stronghold (ours), stronghold (theirs), marginal. When your located within a Labour stronghold, your unlikely to see as much pro-Conservative media, as they are better off spending their time campaigning in marginals and defending their reputations in existing strongholds. Surely, this effect simply compounds strongholds, making them even harder to change hands overtime, without a significant event to cause the public opinion to shift significantly (e.g. the Scottish independence referendum). The only way to fix such a problem, would be to randomise the boundaries each election, but this would cause various extra complexities.

kaffeemitsahne 11y ago
It could also be fixed by not having any such boundaries whatsoever.
- Robadob 11y ago
  This leads to a situation whereby elected representatives are assigned local constituencies, rather than having any particular link. Or atleast that's the argument which is always returned when people suggest a full PR system. Personally I think larger multi-member constituencies under STV provide the best compromise.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

civilian 11y ago

The best solution to Gerrymandering is the Alternate Vote. CGP Grey has a great video explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE He also has a great "what is gerrymandering" video that illustrated this same idea, but with fun animals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY

tristanj 11y ago
> The best solution to Gerrymandering is the Alternate Vote This is false. Alternate vote is still susceptible to gerrymandering. It even says so in the video you linked (@3:00).