5 ms·

Can you explain why you believe that mandatory voting would solve Gerrymandering? I've given it a cursory thought, and it doesn't seem obvious...

by Others 10y ago

quadrangle 10y ago
It doesn't, the poster was mistaken. I just explained in my reply.
- kmicklas 10y ago
  OP actually has some sound reasoning in reply to parent comment. I'm not sure how convinced I am without evidence. Also stopping gerrymandering is way more politically feasible than mandatory voting.
  - quadrangle 10y ago
    Their argument isn't sound. Gerrymandering already provides extremely complex districts that are close to as ludicrous as considering particular city blocks. It's not an all-or-nothing thing. It's not like the 42% of non-voters are a random mix of people in such a randomly placed geography that it would hamper the efforts to gerrymander. Instead, we have every reason to believe that the non-voters are still segregated and partisan enough to be identifiable for gerrymandering. And the gerrymandering needs only to be partially effective to have a significant impact.
ImTalking 10y ago
Because if everyone voted, it would be prohibitively expensive to gerrymander down to small areas such as individual city-blocks. You may have a generally Republican area but a small area/block within would be Democrat because of (say) a respected church leader, for example. Also, older people vote at much higher percentages than the young and are usually much more settled. If everyone voted, then gerrymandering would have to deal with a population much more in-flux, and the partisan areas would be much harder to identify and maintain. If you had 1,000 people voting, it would be very easy to gerrymander; 330M people not so much.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  "Because if everyone voted, it would be prohibitively expensive to gerrymander down to small areas such as individual city-blocks. " Citation needed. This is honestly a pretty trivial ILP problem. Certainly you realize they already know each individual voter's political affiliation if they've declared one or votedin primaries? The data set also includes their address,etc. I've seen the data they used. Heck, we were the only ones who asked the data providers to not include people's names or other PII (we just wanted to map street segments to political districts), and they pretty much laughed and said nobody had asked for that before.

Can you explain why you believe that mandatory voting would solve Gerrymandering? I've given it a cursory thought, and it doesn't seem obvious...

by Others 10y ago

Can you explain why you believe that mandatory voting would solve Gerrymandering? I've given it a cursory thought, and it doesn't seem obvious...

quadrangle 10y ago

It doesn't, the poster was mistaken. I just explained in my reply.

kmicklas 10y ago
OP actually has some sound reasoning in reply to parent comment. I'm not sure how convinced I am without evidence. Also stopping gerrymandering is way more politically feasible than mandatory voting.
- quadrangle 10y ago
  Their argument isn't sound. Gerrymandering already provides extremely complex districts that are close to as ludicrous as considering particular city blocks. It's not an all-or-nothing thing. It's not like the 42% of non-voters are a random mix of people in such a randomly placed geography that it would hamper the efforts to gerrymander. Instead, we have every reason to believe that the non-voters are still segregated and partisan enough to be identifiable for gerrymandering. And the gerrymandering needs only to be partially effective to have a significant impact.

ImTalking 10y ago

Because if everyone voted, it would be prohibitively expensive to gerrymander down to small areas such as individual city-blocks. You may have a generally Republican area but a small area/block within would be Democrat because of (say) a respected church leader, for example. Also, older people vote at much higher percentages than the young and are usually much more settled. If everyone voted, then gerrymandering would have to deal with a population much more in-flux, and the partisan areas would be much harder to identify and maintain. If you had 1,000 people voting, it would be very easy to gerrymander; 330M people not so much.

DannyBee 10y ago
"Because if everyone voted, it would be prohibitively expensive to gerrymander down to small areas such as individual city-blocks. " Citation needed. This is honestly a pretty trivial ILP problem. Certainly you realize they already know each individual voter's political affiliation if they've declared one or votedin primaries? The data set also includes their address,etc. I've seen the data they used. Heck, we were the only ones who asked the data providers to not include people's names or other PII (we just wanted to map street segments to political districts), and they pretty much laughed and said nobody had asked for that before.