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I do find the focus on compactness and contiguousness kind of strange. There was a recent image[1] going around that describes how gerrymandering works, and wha

I do find the focus on compactness and contiguousness kind of strange. There was a recent image[1] going around that describes how gerrymandering works, and what struck me is that having three completely blue districts and two completely red districts is considered "most fair", in that every voter in the district feels completely represented. In reality, voters are more scrambled than that - so if you try to retain that "most fair" sense, then you are by definition going to have extremely non-compact, non-contiguous districts. You can get back to more compactness by making some voters "unrepresented" (meaning, a representative other than the one they voted for). As long as that balances out between parties, then you're okay (which is what the "efficiency gap" is all about). But by itself non-compactness is not a guarantee that the district is unfair. It's really just an indication, that so far, it probably means that the district drawers were up to shenanigans. It's just not necessarily so. You may want to get more creative with district shapes to help more voters feel represented. By the way, I should point out again that there are plenty of other weird tradeoffs like this. For instance, Schwarzenegger was recently complaining about "non-competitive" districts, while others regularly complain that the Federal house districts are not very representative of the voting population as a whole. These two aims are actually in tension with one another! The "most fair" scenario above is about as non-competitive as you can get. [1] http://i.imgur.com/jK8VFZx.jpg http://i.imgur.com/jK8VFZx.jpg

dragonwriter 10y ago
> I do find the focus on compactness and contiguousness kind of strange. They are "looks nice" (in a picture of district outlines) criteria that actually (given the geographical distribution of party members) are equivalent to deliberately gerrymandering in favor of Republicans. And that's really the key point: as long as you have single member districts and data about the existing distribution of voting preferences (which people in a position to adopt or sell policies do), you can design facially neutral criteria whose application will result in any distortions of representation you could seek to gain from gerrymandering, and say "let's automate with these criteria, take people out of the loop, and avoid gerrymandering", when all you are really doing is automating gerrymandering.
- clavalle 10y ago
  >you can design facially neutral criteria whose application will result in any distortions of representation you could seek to gain from gerrymandering I seriously doubt this assertion is true. If you were to take, say, one state and design a set of district division rules based on, say, population density, geographic similarity and boundaries, infrastructure boundaries, existing political borders like counties and cites and manipulate the weights given to each factor so that one party comes out over- represented, the very next time the districts are redrawn after significant changes that carefully constructed balance will fall apart.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > If you were to take, say, one state and design a set of district division rules based on, say, population density, geographic similarity and boundaries, infrastructure boundaries, existing political borders like counties and cites and manipulate the weights given to each factor so that one party comes out over- represented, the very next time the districts are redrawn after significant changes that carefully constructed balance will fall apart. No, there's not. The patterns of geographical distribution of partisan identification in the US is relatively stable over decades (and that of broad ideology is even more stable, as much of the shift in distribution of party identification is realignment of parties rather than redistribution of ideology), it's also pretty similar across the nation in many key ways. I started hearing about and researching the idea of algorithmic districting to address gerrymandering the same year I started college, 27 years ago; optimizing for compactness and contiguity was a popular proposed standard then, and that it overrepresentingamong conservative views and the Republican party because urban cores nationally tend to contain liberal supermajorities whereas rural and suburban areas broadly have a narrower conservative majorities was true and not even a new observation then. And it remains just as true now.
    - slavik81 10y ago
      Some things are very consistent. I was surprised by the map of election results in Alabama from 1892 and 2016 in this article: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21716658-why-counties-had-fewer-slaves-1860s-voted-president-alabama-support http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21716658-why-cou...
ouid 10y ago
all constraints make gerrymandering harder to do. The solution is therefore to add more constraints.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> I do find the focus on compactness and contiguousness kind of strange. They are "looks nice" (in a picture of district outlines) criteria that actually (given the geographical distribution of party members) are equivalent to deliberately gerrymandering in favor of Republicans. And that's really the key point: as long as you have single member districts and data about the existing distribution of voting preferences (which people in a position to adopt or sell policies do), you can design facially neutral criteria whose application will result in any distortions of representation you could seek to gain from gerrymandering, and say "let's automate with these criteria, take people out of the loop, and avoid gerrymandering", when all you are really doing is automating gerrymandering.

clavalle 10y ago
>you can design facially neutral criteria whose application will result in any distortions of representation you could seek to gain from gerrymandering I seriously doubt this assertion is true. If you were to take, say, one state and design a set of district division rules based on, say, population density, geographic similarity and boundaries, infrastructure boundaries, existing political borders like counties and cites and manipulate the weights given to each factor so that one party comes out over- represented, the very next time the districts are redrawn after significant changes that carefully constructed balance will fall apart.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > If you were to take, say, one state and design a set of district division rules based on, say, population density, geographic similarity and boundaries, infrastructure boundaries, existing political borders like counties and cites and manipulate the weights given to each factor so that one party comes out over- represented, the very next time the districts are redrawn after significant changes that carefully constructed balance will fall apart. No, there's not. The patterns of geographical distribution of partisan identification in the US is relatively stable over decades (and that of broad ideology is even more stable, as much of the shift in distribution of party identification is realignment of parties rather than redistribution of ideology), it's also pretty similar across the nation in many key ways. I started hearing about and researching the idea of algorithmic districting to address gerrymandering the same year I started college, 27 years ago; optimizing for compactness and contiguity was a popular proposed standard then, and that it overrepresentingamong conservative views and the Republican party because urban cores nationally tend to contain liberal supermajorities whereas rural and suburban areas broadly have a narrower conservative majorities was true and not even a new observation then. And it remains just as true now.
  - slavik81 10y ago
    Some things are very consistent. I was surprised by the map of election results in Alabama from 1892 and 2016 in this article: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21716658-why-counties-had-fewer-slaves-1860s-voted-president-alabama-support http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21716658-why-cou...

ouid 10y ago

all constraints make gerrymandering harder to do. The solution is therefore to add more constraints.