12 ms·

What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

145 points by fritzw 9y ago

j_s 9y ago
Re-posting my comment on Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with Geometry | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252 4 months ago: [...] a need for expert witnesses who understand the mathematical concepts applicable to gerrymandering. To meet that need, she’s spearheaded the creation of a five-day summer program at Tufts [the first in a series of regional trainings] that aims to train mathematicians to do just that [...] over 900 people have indicated their interest by signing up for a mailing list http://tufts.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7aa8ab22ea62&id=a979bdf71d http://tufts.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7... -- Quoting from the end of that article, calling out the "efficiency gap" as the spark for work towards a mathematical definition of "compactness" satisfying districting requirements in a way that is convincingly explainable as fair: Recently there was a big media sensation in Wisconsin around something called the "efficiency gap." It was a new metric of partisan gerrymandering that, for the first time, a court said they liked. The way it was devised was that the people who created it, they went back and they read all of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s written decisions about measuring gerrymandering. By reading his words and by reading what he said he found convincing and less convincing, they designed a statistic to appeal to him.
- paulmd 9y ago
  To rephrase this a little more concisely: SCOTUS turns based on which side of the bed Kennedy wakes up on (on most issues). There are 4 solid liberal votes and 4 solid conservative votes and Kennedy in the middle. Kennedy indicated in a ruling a few years ago that in theory he's uncomfortable with gerrymandering and might be open to striking them down, but apart from "I know it when I see it" he doesn't know a neutral/nonpartisan way to actually detect it. And "I know it when I see it" doesn't work well as a judicial test, there needs to be a bright-line somewhere that lower courts can apply. Well, a bunch of mathematicians heard that and said "challenge accepted" and have been working on mathematical models to quantify the level of gerrymandering. And now the court cases are working their way back up to SCOTUS, only with the academic models that Kennedy has indicated he wants. Now we get to find out whether Kennedy's interest in neutering gerrymandering actually goes as far as being willing to strike down a gerrymander. Because it's easy to talk the talk, but at the end of the day Kennedy is still conservative-ish and gerrymandering heavily benefits conservatives overall.
  - manyoso 9y ago
    My guess is Kennedy will punt and say there are two many models to choose from with no clear way to determine which one is best even though they are clearly better than what we have now.
    - bluGill 9y ago
      To a large extent the court should punt. Congress - as the ones who make the laws - should decide which model is used, not the courts. The job of the courts is only to say if any particular model congress decides on is fair enough.
      - manyoso 9y ago
        So you think the very people who unfairly have benefit from this partisan gerrymandering should be able to choose whether to continue it? Let me guess, you happen to politically side with the benefiting partisans?
        bluGill 9y ago
        the courts benefit too. Liberal justices looking to retire tend to wait for a liberal president, and vice versa conservative justices wait for a conservative president.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - burkaman 9y ago
    > SCOTUS turns based on which side of the bed Kennedy wakes up on (on most issues). I think this is a little bit misleading. Most Supreme Court decisions are unanimous.
    - pklausler 9y ago
      When unanimous, SCOTUS isn't turning.
crb002 9y ago
I wish SCOTUS would put out a Euclidian distance Voronoi metric, where the redistricting map presented with minimum error wins. You quickly get into non-linear territory by using travel time instead of Euclidian distance. Roads and bridges become weapons for cutting or connecting districts. Bad bad stuff.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mapmeld 9y ago
  Programmers like to come up with mathematical plans like this, but you would likely run into the Voting Rights Act! Many districts which aren't compact have been created as majority-minority districts, to prevent disenfranchisement of racial minorities. Plans which divide or erase one of these districts get stopped by the Supreme Court all the time. It's a 1960s approach to equality, but you can tell its effectiveness by how the House is much more representative of the US population's diversity than the Senate is.
  - ihaveajob 9y ago
    The nature of the institutions, not the district shaping, is what makes the House more diverse than the Senate: * Many more seats in smaller districts mean more independent population "samples" * 2-senator per state rule means that ND has the same Senate weight as CA, regardless of population
  - graycamry 9y ago
    > Many districts which aren't compact have been created as majority-minority districts, to prevent disenfranchisement of racial minorities. [citation needed] I have seen many examples of horribly shaped districts, but all of them were done for partisan advantage. I would love it if you 1. Give an example of a majority minority district that is horribly shaped explicitly to accommodate the VRA. 2. Give citation for statement that there are "Many" such districts.
    - karlshea 9y ago
andrewla 9y ago
I'm not convinced that the "efficiency gap" is a good metric. My main issue, aside from the difficulty in describing what a "good" map should look like, much less measuring it, is that it is sharply discontinuous around the "winning" criteria -- for a single district, in a 49-51 victory vs. a 51-49 loss, there's a 2% difference in the number of votes, but the wasted votes goes from -50 to +50. It's not difficult to see that the optimal partitioning is 75/25 (in either direction), which seems very arbitrary. From a democracy perspective, it seems like the ideal partitioning would be much closer to 50-50 -- hopefully even in the margin of error for the area, so that candidates would have to make a real effort to represent their entire district in order to be assured re-election. Even this feels very questionable, because as I understand it, the idea of congressional districts is that representation should follow groups of shared problems and interests, irrespective of proposed solutions to those problems.
- rgoddard 9y ago
  The measure by itself is not sufficient. Which is why all the additional analysis was needed. 1. Using the current district map the last set of elections show that Wisconsin had a large gap. 2. Compared to other state's the gap is an outlier. 3. By creating a large number of alternate maps within the state satisfying all the other requirements that gap was still an outlier. 4. Calculating the gap under different voting outcomes showed the result to be robust even under a 5 point swing to the democrates. (This is where the discontinuity would show up if there results were not robust.)
- maxerickson 9y ago
  You are stating the efficiency gap incorrectly in the single district case. There can never be one, because the seat goes to the party with more votes (the party with less votes should have 0 seats, no efficiency gap). The simplest example you can work is with 2 districts.
  - andrewla 9y ago
    The efficiency gap, as described, is the number of "wasted" votes for one party, minus the number of wasted votes for the other party, summed over all districts and divided by the total voting population. So fundamentally it's just a normalized version of the wasted votes metric. Wasted votes is the thing that concerns me as a metric, and it has the discontinuity noted. Notably, if you have a circular uniformly populated state that is exactly 50-50 -- let's say the north of the state is 100% Republican and the south is 100% Democrat, and we restrict our districting to straight lines through the center. Then there are two solutions that minimize the efficiency gap, the line going from southwest to northeast, and the one going from southeast to northwest, because both of those result in 75/25 districts (that have 0 net wasted votes). This seems really odd to me.
bluetwo 9y ago
Personally I wish my state would enact a law that says representative districts must be drawn to cross as few county lines as possible. Yes, some manipulation would still be possible, but it would be greatly diminished.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  As possible given what constraints? There's no requirement that they have equal population; it seems like your rule would always require districts to cross zero county lines.
  - bluetwo 9y ago
    If it could be drawn while crossing zero lines, then yes. But even then it is likely several different options would exist, and each party would try to pick one that favors them. I'm OK with that as a solution.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      > If it could be drawn while crossing zero lines, then yes What would prevent this?
    - s73ver 9y ago
      Then why not make the county the de facto district, and subdivide the county as needed when populations rise?
- s73ver 9y ago
  Take the power to create districts away from the legislature. Give it to a non-partisan commission. 1/3 Democrats, 1/3 Republicans, and 1/3 other/no party. We did that in California, and almost none of the legislators were happy with it, which means it probably did a good job. The state still wound up with mostly Democratic representation, but that's more a product of California being heavily Democrat. I'd imagine that if you did the same thing in Texas, even if the districts were much less gerrymandered, you'd still have mostly Republicans.
bradleyjg 9y ago
This is an interesting article, but the headline is deceptive. The article doesn't answer that question it poses. The reason the Supreme Court granted cert is because the court below, which in this case was a special 3 judge district court panel whose opinions skip the Court of Appeals, ruled in favor of the challengers. If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this lower court opinion would have in effect (but not technically) stood as a nationwide precedent modifying existing Supreme Court decisions.
- tanderson92 9y ago
  Thanks, this is what I was looking for. More coverage at SCOTUS blog: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gill-v-whitford/ http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gill-v-whitford/
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  That's the procedural reason -- the case ended up in the SC because the lower court sent it up the chain, but that's still not an explanation for why they chose to accept it. As far as I know, they still had the option to refuse it.
  - pyre 9y ago
    > If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this lower court opinion would have in effect (but not technically) stood as a nationwide precedent modifying existing Supreme Court decisions. I think this is the part that matters. It's possible that the Supreme Court would rather that the judgement came from them rather than the lower court. Leaving it as-is would modify existing Supreme Court caselaw, but the decision itself wouldn't have come from the Supreme Court, which could lead to a bit of ambiguity. If the Supreme Court itself weighs in, even just to agree with the lower court, it eliminates that ambiguity. No one is left wondering "What if it had gone to the Supreme Court" about the decision. I am not a lawyer, but that is my interpretation.
    - pmoriarty 9y ago
mtgx 9y ago
A proportional representation voting system would also largely solve the gerrymandering problem (no district would be dominated by a single party anymore so exploiting the gerrymandering system wouldn't help much), along with having many other benefits for democracy: http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation > They complied with the Constitution’s one person, one vote requirement That line is interesting. How is the electoral college system not in conflict with the Constitution then, if a person's vote in one state is much stronger than another person's vote in another state? Or is it enough that it satisfies the requirement technically (still "one vote"), even if not in spirit/based on a (I would think) more common interpretation of the Constitution?
- infosample 9y ago
  Look at the history of compromise that lead to the Electoral College - Madison acknowledged that while a popular vote would be ideal, it would be difficult to get consensus on the proposal given the prevalence of slavery in the South: There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat...
- tzs 9y ago
  It's a bit of a tangent, but the discussion of voting systems reminds me of another modification to voting that I sometimes think might be reasonable: weighting votes based on voter age, with the weight starting off low for the youngest voters and increasing to a peak, and then dropping off again. What brought this on was thinking about the brexit vote over in the UK, which from what I read had very different outcomes among different age groups. It seems quite unfair that people who are likely to die before brexit is complete should have the same say as people who will be living decades under the outcome.
  - 9y ago
mark-r 9y ago
Surpreme? Somebody fix the title please.
- sctb 9y ago
  Thanks! Updated.
  - mark-r 9y ago
    Now that this comment is no longer necessary, how do I delete it?
fernandopj 9y ago
"Gerrymandering" is a word difficult enough to grasp, and "partisan gerrymandering" (for me at least) doesn't ring any bells either, so for those of us who don't come from an USA background, but are interested in how someone could mathematically define that, I found this link: https://www.senate.mn/departments/scr/REDIST/Red2000/ch5parti.htm https://www.senate.mn/departments/scr/REDIST/Red2000/ch5part... > Partisan (or political) gerrymandering is the drawing of electoral district lines in a manner that discriminates against a political party.
- jon_richards 9y ago
  Gerrymandering is by definition partisan (or political). The term comes from when Governor Gerry redrew districts to benefit his party, resulting a district some described as looking like a salamander, causing it to be named the "gerrymander".
throwawaymanbot 9y ago
I'm so glad this is happening. Gerrymandering is for 2nd rate banana republics, not the greatest Republic of all time. This IS a national security threat. I would add which party is mostly responsible, but apparently mentioning the party, although factually correct, would lead me to get in trouble here. Which is Grand, coz im really Old, and I dont like to Party... anymore!

145 points by fritzw 9y ago

j_s 9y ago

Re-posting my comment on Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with Geometry | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252 4 months ago: [...] a need for expert witnesses who understand the mathematical concepts applicable to gerrymandering. To meet that need, she’s spearheaded the creation of a five-day summer program at Tufts [the first in a series of regional trainings] that aims to train mathematicians to do just that [...] over 900 people have indicated their interest by signing up for a mailing list http://tufts.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7aa8ab22ea62&id=a979bdf71d http://tufts.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7... -- Quoting from the end of that article, calling out the "efficiency gap" as the spark for work towards a mathematical definition of "compactness" satisfying districting requirements in a way that is convincingly explainable as fair: Recently there was a big media sensation in Wisconsin around something called the "efficiency gap." It was a new metric of partisan gerrymandering that, for the first time, a court said they liked. The way it was devised was that the people who created it, they went back and they read all of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s written decisions about measuring gerrymandering. By reading his words and by reading what he said he found convincing and less convincing, they designed a statistic to appeal to him.

paulmd 9y ago
To rephrase this a little more concisely: SCOTUS turns based on which side of the bed Kennedy wakes up on (on most issues). There are 4 solid liberal votes and 4 solid conservative votes and Kennedy in the middle. Kennedy indicated in a ruling a few years ago that in theory he's uncomfortable with gerrymandering and might be open to striking them down, but apart from "I know it when I see it" he doesn't know a neutral/nonpartisan way to actually detect it. And "I know it when I see it" doesn't work well as a judicial test, there needs to be a bright-line somewhere that lower courts can apply. Well, a bunch of mathematicians heard that and said "challenge accepted" and have been working on mathematical models to quantify the level of gerrymandering. And now the court cases are working their way back up to SCOTUS, only with the academic models that Kennedy has indicated he wants. Now we get to find out whether Kennedy's interest in neutering gerrymandering actually goes as far as being willing to strike down a gerrymander. Because it's easy to talk the talk, but at the end of the day Kennedy is still conservative-ish and gerrymandering heavily benefits conservatives overall.
- manyoso 9y ago
  My guess is Kennedy will punt and say there are two many models to choose from with no clear way to determine which one is best even though they are clearly better than what we have now.
  - bluGill 9y ago
    To a large extent the court should punt. Congress - as the ones who make the laws - should decide which model is used, not the courts. The job of the courts is only to say if any particular model congress decides on is fair enough.
    - manyoso 9y ago
      So you think the very people who unfairly have benefit from this partisan gerrymandering should be able to choose whether to continue it? Let me guess, you happen to politically side with the benefiting partisans?
      - bluGill 9y ago
        the courts benefit too. Liberal justices looking to retire tend to wait for a liberal president, and vice versa conservative justices wait for a conservative president.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- burkaman 9y ago
  > SCOTUS turns based on which side of the bed Kennedy wakes up on (on most issues). I think this is a little bit misleading. Most Supreme Court decisions are unanimous.
  - pklausler 9y ago
    When unanimous, SCOTUS isn't turning.

crb002 9y ago

I wish SCOTUS would put out a Euclidian distance Voronoi metric, where the redistricting map presented with minimum error wins. You quickly get into non-linear territory by using travel time instead of Euclidian distance. Roads and bridges become weapons for cutting or connecting districts. Bad bad stuff.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mapmeld 9y ago
Programmers like to come up with mathematical plans like this, but you would likely run into the Voting Rights Act! Many districts which aren't compact have been created as majority-minority districts, to prevent disenfranchisement of racial minorities. Plans which divide or erase one of these districts get stopped by the Supreme Court all the time. It's a 1960s approach to equality, but you can tell its effectiveness by how the House is much more representative of the US population's diversity than the Senate is.
- ihaveajob 9y ago
  The nature of the institutions, not the district shaping, is what makes the House more diverse than the Senate: * Many more seats in smaller districts mean more independent population "samples" * 2-senator per state rule means that ND has the same Senate weight as CA, regardless of population
- graycamry 9y ago
  > Many districts which aren't compact have been created as majority-minority districts, to prevent disenfranchisement of racial minorities. [citation needed] I have seen many examples of horribly shaped districts, but all of them were done for partisan advantage. I would love it if you 1. Give an example of a majority minority district that is horribly shaped explicitly to accommodate the VRA. 2. Give citation for statement that there are "Many" such districts.
  - karlshea 9y ago

andrewla 9y ago

I'm not convinced that the "efficiency gap" is a good metric. My main issue, aside from the difficulty in describing what a "good" map should look like, much less measuring it, is that it is sharply discontinuous around the "winning" criteria -- for a single district, in a 49-51 victory vs. a 51-49 loss, there's a 2% difference in the number of votes, but the wasted votes goes from -50 to +50. It's not difficult to see that the optimal partitioning is 75/25 (in either direction), which seems very arbitrary. From a democracy perspective, it seems like the ideal partitioning would be much closer to 50-50 -- hopefully even in the margin of error for the area, so that candidates would have to make a real effort to represent their entire district in order to be assured re-election. Even this feels very questionable, because as I understand it, the idea of congressional districts is that representation should follow groups of shared problems and interests, irrespective of proposed solutions to those problems.

rgoddard 9y ago
The measure by itself is not sufficient. Which is why all the additional analysis was needed. 1. Using the current district map the last set of elections show that Wisconsin had a large gap. 2. Compared to other state's the gap is an outlier. 3. By creating a large number of alternate maps within the state satisfying all the other requirements that gap was still an outlier. 4. Calculating the gap under different voting outcomes showed the result to be robust even under a 5 point swing to the democrates. (This is where the discontinuity would show up if there results were not robust.)
maxerickson 9y ago
You are stating the efficiency gap incorrectly in the single district case. There can never be one, because the seat goes to the party with more votes (the party with less votes should have 0 seats, no efficiency gap). The simplest example you can work is with 2 districts.
- andrewla 9y ago
  The efficiency gap, as described, is the number of "wasted" votes for one party, minus the number of wasted votes for the other party, summed over all districts and divided by the total voting population. So fundamentally it's just a normalized version of the wasted votes metric. Wasted votes is the thing that concerns me as a metric, and it has the discontinuity noted. Notably, if you have a circular uniformly populated state that is exactly 50-50 -- let's say the north of the state is 100% Republican and the south is 100% Democrat, and we restrict our districting to straight lines through the center. Then there are two solutions that minimize the efficiency gap, the line going from southwest to northeast, and the one going from southeast to northwest, because both of those result in 75/25 districts (that have 0 net wasted votes). This seems really odd to me.

bluetwo 9y ago

Personally I wish my state would enact a law that says representative districts must be drawn to cross as few county lines as possible. Yes, some manipulation would still be possible, but it would be greatly diminished.

thaumasiotes 9y ago
As possible given what constraints? There's no requirement that they have equal population; it seems like your rule would always require districts to cross zero county lines.
- bluetwo 9y ago
  If it could be drawn while crossing zero lines, then yes. But even then it is likely several different options would exist, and each party would try to pick one that favors them. I'm OK with that as a solution.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    > If it could be drawn while crossing zero lines, then yes What would prevent this?
  - s73ver 9y ago
    Then why not make the county the de facto district, and subdivide the county as needed when populations rise?
s73ver 9y ago
Take the power to create districts away from the legislature. Give it to a non-partisan commission. 1/3 Democrats, 1/3 Republicans, and 1/3 other/no party. We did that in California, and almost none of the legislators were happy with it, which means it probably did a good job. The state still wound up with mostly Democratic representation, but that's more a product of California being heavily Democrat. I'd imagine that if you did the same thing in Texas, even if the districts were much less gerrymandered, you'd still have mostly Republicans.

bradleyjg 9y ago

This is an interesting article, but the headline is deceptive. The article doesn't answer that question it poses. The reason the Supreme Court granted cert is because the court below, which in this case was a special 3 judge district court panel whose opinions skip the Court of Appeals, ruled in favor of the challengers. If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this lower court opinion would have in effect (but not technically) stood as a nationwide precedent modifying existing Supreme Court decisions.

tanderson92 9y ago
Thanks, this is what I was looking for. More coverage at SCOTUS blog: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gill-v-whitford/ http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gill-v-whitford/
lobster_johnson 9y ago
That's the procedural reason -- the case ended up in the SC because the lower court sent it up the chain, but that's still not an explanation for why they chose to accept it. As far as I know, they still had the option to refuse it.
- pyre 9y ago
  > If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this lower court opinion would have in effect (but not technically) stood as a nationwide precedent modifying existing Supreme Court decisions. I think this is the part that matters. It's possible that the Supreme Court would rather that the judgement came from them rather than the lower court. Leaving it as-is would modify existing Supreme Court caselaw, but the decision itself wouldn't have come from the Supreme Court, which could lead to a bit of ambiguity. If the Supreme Court itself weighs in, even just to agree with the lower court, it eliminates that ambiguity. No one is left wondering "What if it had gone to the Supreme Court" about the decision. I am not a lawyer, but that is my interpretation.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago

mtgx 9y ago

A proportional representation voting system would also largely solve the gerrymandering problem (no district would be dominated by a single party anymore so exploiting the gerrymandering system wouldn't help much), along with having many other benefits for democracy: http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation > They complied with the Constitution’s one person, one vote requirement That line is interesting. How is the electoral college system not in conflict with the Constitution then, if a person's vote in one state is much stronger than another person's vote in another state? Or is it enough that it satisfies the requirement technically (still "one vote"), even if not in spirit/based on a (I would think) more common interpretation of the Constitution?

infosample 9y ago
Look at the history of compromise that lead to the Electoral College - Madison acknowledged that while a popular vote would be ideal, it would be difficult to get consensus on the proposal given the prevalence of slavery in the South: There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat...
tzs 9y ago
It's a bit of a tangent, but the discussion of voting systems reminds me of another modification to voting that I sometimes think might be reasonable: weighting votes based on voter age, with the weight starting off low for the youngest voters and increasing to a peak, and then dropping off again. What brought this on was thinking about the brexit vote over in the UK, which from what I read had very different outcomes among different age groups. It seems quite unfair that people who are likely to die before brexit is complete should have the same say as people who will be living decades under the outcome.
- 9y ago

mark-r 9y ago

Surpreme? Somebody fix the title please.

sctb 9y ago
Thanks! Updated.
- mark-r 9y ago
  Now that this comment is no longer necessary, how do I delete it?

fernandopj 9y ago

"Gerrymandering" is a word difficult enough to grasp, and "partisan gerrymandering" (for me at least) doesn't ring any bells either, so for those of us who don't come from an USA background, but are interested in how someone could mathematically define that, I found this link: https://www.senate.mn/departments/scr/REDIST/Red2000/ch5parti.htm https://www.senate.mn/departments/scr/REDIST/Red2000/ch5part... > Partisan (or political) gerrymandering is the drawing of electoral district lines in a manner that discriminates against a political party.

jon_richards 9y ago
Gerrymandering is by definition partisan (or political). The term comes from when Governor Gerry redrew districts to benefit his party, resulting a district some described as looking like a salamander, causing it to be named the "gerrymander".

throwawaymanbot 9y ago

I'm so glad this is happening. Gerrymandering is for 2nd rate banana republics, not the greatest Republic of all time. This IS a national security threat. I would add which party is mostly responsible, but apparently mentioning the party, although factually correct, would lead me to get in trouble here. Which is Grand, coz im really Old, and I dont like to Party... anymore!