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The Supreme Court discussed my research on gerrymandering: some misconceptions

180 points by clarkevans 9y ago

djrogers 9y ago
I think the author may be getting a bit too defensive of his work here - not that he doesn't have a right to defend it, but he may be seeing attacks on it where they don't really exist. It's exceedingly common for Supreme Court justices to ask controversial questions they think/know others will have, regardless of their own opinions - many times you will see them ask questions or dig in to areas that are in direct contrast to their leanings. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, these are Supreme Court Justices; their opinions become law, and they have a responsibility to understand both sides on an argument. Second, they understand that it's best for the court and the country if controversial/questionable things are brought up and addressed in session rather than debated endlessly after their decisions are issued. In short, don't read too much in to what questions the justices ask, or what aspects of a case they question...
- relaunched 9y ago
  Having one's work discussed by the supreme court is pretty incredible. It might just be a way to continue the conversation and raise awareness of what is undoubtedly a pretty obscure subject, that you've dedicated a significant part of your life to. In that respect, "there were some misconceptions" seems to be the link-bait, white washed with integrity and civility.
- djtriptych 9y ago
  This is sort of a silly argument. While the average/composite justice might ask devil's advocate questions, most the coverage of this issue is also taking into account the individual personalities and histories of the folks asking the questions. So, it means something different if Justice Ginsburg asks a question vs Justice Roberts. In the age of Trump, I think it's far more dangerous to assume politicians and judges don't really mean what they say, than for this author to vigorously defend his work and opinion. Having read the article, it's clear that Alito represented a fundamental misunderstanding of the author's research. It would be irresponsible for him not to respond and clarify.
  - eradicatethots 9y ago
    Probably it’s the job of whoever he was asking to correct him, not he himself?
    - djtriptych 9y ago
      lol this username.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  On examination of the evidence, the motive for a questioning supreme court justice is leaning to supporting the other side. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-justice-kennedys-silence-means-for-the-future-of-gerrymandering/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-justice-kennedys-s...
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    It's a surprisingly modest lean: > That data shows that Kennedy is no different from the rest of the court: You don’t want to be on the receiving end of his questions. When Kennedy votes for the respondent (which would be the Wisconsin Democrats, in this case) he directs 93.3 words to them (57.5 percent of his speech). When he votes against the respondent, he directs 102.0 words to them (61.1 percent of his speech).
    - stevenwoo 9y ago
      I was chose lean instead of favor purposefully! But Kennedy's zero/all the words ratio for this case may tip his hand.
      - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        > Historically, he directed zero words toward the party he went on to vote for 272 times, out of 1,022 cases in this data set. He directed zero words toward the party he wound up voting against only 177 times. So about a 60%-40% split when he has zero words. It does look like he is leaning in favor of the Wisconsin Democrats, but still far from a sure thing.
      - jessriedel 9y ago
        Yep, I wasn't suggesting your summary was inaccurate. I just found it really interesting and wanted to share.
- Tasboo 9y ago
  The questions a justice asks can often be an indication of where they stand on an issue. It's a way for them to tell the other justices their beliefs. If Alito is spouting off misleading or incorrect facts, then this person should feel compelled to defend their work.
  - sukilot 9y ago
    That's true for the statements justices make, not the questions. The two appear together in oral arguments
    - marnett 9y ago
      That's not necessarily true. Justices most certainly ask questions they may personally not need clarifying on in order to plant the question in their colleagues' mind. Oral argument , historically and currently, is still an arena for Justices to share opinions and try to influence one another.
- dcow 9y ago
  This is, in a nutshell, both why I love hackernews and what's so frustrating about discussing a topic these days. It's impossible to explore something you may totally disagree with without people generally reducing that exploration to a proxy for your worldview and consequently making character judgements or finding a way to get offended to the point where the identity politics card gets played and you get labeled a bigot for some conclusion you never supported but was obviously present in the undercurrents of your questions. The Supreme Court judges aren't special in that respect. Anyone should be allowed to question and explore a topic without having to issue trigger warnings or generally be expected to manage the "visceral" response their questions might evoke from a bystander observing the discussion or even the participants. The way you handle input into your personal biological process is your responsibility not mine. And society does not exist to protect you from malicious input, although you are free to choose networks where the chances frequency of receiving such input is relatively low.
  - cbhl 9y ago
    This is tricky because there are lots of people who "ask questions" just to avoid admitting that they are a bigot. If you are genuinely seeking new information, great! But you should do your homework first, which includes finding the right person to ask the question to.
    - KekDemaga 9y ago
      > This is tricky because there are lots of people who "ask questions" just to avoid admitting that they are a bigot. I am confused on how this would work in practice. What kinds of questions do you propose these bigoted people are asking?
      - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        Loaded ones, eg: "Why should I pay for taxes to support single mothers just so black men don't have to pay child support?" Now, I think we should still encourage them to ask those kinds of questions, because I believe in an open and liberal society and that the best reaction to poor thinking is to address it directly, that the answer to speech I don't like is more speech. But it's pretty easy for some really racist opinions about others to hide behind questions like that. Of course, there are also some uncomfortable truths in those questions which cause us to silence them, such as -- "Are the disparaties we see in racial groups purely the effect of lingering racial bias, or is there a modern cultural component that happens to align with racial groups and perpetuates the inequality?" (And in this case -- the more general, is there a disparity in the fatherhood rates that correlates with racial grouping?) Ed: I think the people downvoting proved someone upthread's point -- I literally provided an example I've heard of such a question and got downvoted for providing facts to a discussion.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  The same happens often when you report something to top management. I have been in meetings where the top guys took something I wrote and drew the totally wrong conclusions without me having the opportunity to clarify. It can be frustrating but i guess that's how hierarchical organizations work.
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  It becomes an issue if the justice writes this misunderstanding of the research into their opinion. I think the researcher is merely trying to get their story out ahead of that possibility, just in case.
- illumin8 9y ago
  The problem is that a supreme court justice, Samuel Alito, with a conservative agenda, is cherry-picking older papers that relied on research from 1970-1990, before partisan gerrymandering really picked up steam, and using that to try and muddle the waters. Supreme court justices are supposed to be impartial - this is why the statue of justice has a blindfold on. It's frankly abhorrent that we have such partisan hacks in this role.
erentz 9y ago
In this era, the whole idea of having many small winner take all districts is the problem. Gerrymandering is small by comparison and removing gerrymandering won’t result in much change. The solution is to moved to STV and expanding the size of districts to elect 3 to 5 representatives instead.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  In this particular case in Wisconsin it was so egregious that the idea that gerrymandering as exploited here wouldn't make a difference is ludicrous. How would you answer Sotomayor's question? http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/10/sonia_sotomayor_s_simple_devastating_question_in_gill_v_whitford.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...
  - erentz 9y ago
    My answer would obviously be there is none. You may have misread my comment as some defense of Gerrymandering when clearly it isn't. Gerrymandering is a byproduct of a broken concept: having tiny little districts in a world where people live in one, work in another, eat lunch in a different district, visit their parents in a fourth district, etc. This made sense 200 years ago, but not today. And any fix to Gerrymandering doesn't overall make a dent in the problem of fair representation. My counter-question might be something like: "Could you tell me what difference fixing these individual cases of Gerrymandering would make to outcomes across our congress as a whole over the past 20 years? What helps our democracy more, fixing the technical problem of gerrymandering but not improving representation, or removing the technical feasibility of gerrymandering to exist and so doing provide a fix to the problem of representation?"
    - stevenwoo 9y ago
      I can agree that First Past the Post is suboptimal. I can also believe that we must improve the current system until First Past the Post is replaced, which might be never in the United States and certainly going to be a difficult state by state issue. The leap from the First Past the Post to STV seems insurmountable in the face of how hard the GOP is clinging to power with voter disenfranchisement with the same old tricks of hurdles to voters of color along with this 2010 50 state strategy that led to the extreme gerrymandering. (Having the Democrats be incompetent enough to have the GOP loudly proclaim their strategy in the editorial page of the New York Times pre election and still not react is another issue.)
trendia 9y ago
The efficiency gap fails to guarantee or even optimize compactness, yet many gerrymandered districts are "thin slices" or strange shapes. (one simple defition of compactness is the ratio of perimeter^2/area) What the author fails to do is explain why the efficiency gap is better than district compactness. If they are used together, then in what way are the two measures weighted? If not, why should we pick efficiency over compactness? It should seem obvious that these two methods would result in different districts, but which mwthod to use is more a matter of personal values than objectivity.
- weeksie 9y ago
  That's because compactness doesn't actually tell you anything about unfair voting, demographics, party representation, etc. . . . A district can be shaped like a busted IUD and still be perfectly fair and that's precisely why the efficiency gap is so much better at identifying gerrymandered districts. The gap shows the percentage of wasted votes, which is pretty much all that matters.
- PhineasRex 9y ago
  The efficiency gap is just a measure of the actual effect of gerrymandering in an election, it doesn't say anything about how to draw a district for future elections. Compactness tells us nothing about the effects of gerrymandering. Less compact districts correlate with more gerrymandering but that doesn't tell us whether that gerrymandering was effective. Compactness could be a useful tool to limit the effects of gerrymandering when drawing districts.
- ClayShentrup 9y ago
  Here's a solution. https://youtu.be/kUS9uvYyn3A https://youtu.be/kUS9uvYyn3A
guelo 9y ago
Republicans used their state-level gains from the Obama backlash in 2010 to implement extreme gerrymandering and capture Congress for a decade. But now that Democrats are set to gain from a Trump backlash leading up to the 2020 census all of a sudden there's a lot of movement to neutralize gerrymandering nationwide. I'm probably seeing conspiracy theories where there are none, but conservatives have always played a much better strategical long game working the refs, so to speak, to maintain power. Starting with the national-level gerrymandering from the 19th century where we ended up with bullshit states like Wyoming that permanently tip the scales in their favor.
- wpietri 9y ago
  I was skeptical at the claims of extreme gerrymandering, but it really is shocking. E.g., this rendering of Wisconsin from 2008-2012: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Wisconsin-gerrymandering-rtr-img.png http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/... In 2008, Republicans had 44% of the votes and 47% of the seats. In 2012, they had 47% of the votes and 61% of the seats.
- davidcbc 9y ago
  The movement to neutralize gerrymandering isn't coming from the Republicans so I don't think there is a conspiracy here
- vanattab 9y ago
  Bullshit states? What is that? Is that just a state that does not constantly vote the way you would prefer?
  - guelo 9y ago
    Tiny states that were created specifically to gain conservative senators.
  - sukilot 9y ago
    Wyoming is a low population that gets 3.6 as much voting power per capita as California. Parent should have included Vermont alongside Wyoming for partisan balance, though. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2012/11/presidential_election_a_map_showing_the_vote_power_of_all_50_states.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_w...
j_s 9y ago
Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with Geometry | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252 (Feb 2017) What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751953 (Jul 2017) Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group – Tufts University | http://sites.tufts.edu/gerrymandr/ http://sites.tufts.edu/gerrymandr/ 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... (re-post of mailing list link) edit: To be clear, I don't have a pony in this race; I just believe the info and opportunity is important and may reach members of its intended audience here. The July article dug into the reasoning behind the efficiency gap and pursuit of mathematical models: > The efficiency gap is an elegant way to quantify the extent of partisan gerrymandering. But more than that is needed to win a case. The challenged plan must also be more biased than other maps, inconsistent with the state’s spatial patterns, and durable in its effects. And these elements can only be established by additional studies. Another HN user shared a higher-level summary I will try to TL;DR here: > paulmd: SCOTUS turns based on which side of the bed Kennedy wakes up on (on most issues). [...] mathematicians heard [Kennedy might be open to striking gerrymandering down] And now the court cases are working their way back up to SCOTUS, only with the academic models that Kennedy has indicated he wants. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753909
- trendia 9y ago
  Thanks for posting this. The efficiency gap completely ignores geometry.
  - jpfed 9y ago
    But why consider geometry itself to be important? Isn't geometry a mere proxy for something else that's desirable? My own suspicion is this: that districting is an act of partitioning the social graph. The weights of this graph are not necessarily "who socializes with who" but rather "to what extent do these people share common interests". It is not necessarily the case that regions characterized by people of common interests will be shaped in ways that we can express easy geometric criteria for.
rayiner 9y ago
I don't think I agree with the author's characterization of Justice Alito's questions. The transcript is here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2017/16-1161_bpm1.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr.... The first quote comes from page 61-62: > JUSTICE ALITO: You paint a very dire picture about gerrymandering and its effects, but I was struck by something in the seminal article by your expert, Mr. McGhee, and he says there, "I show that the effects of party control on bias are small and decay rapidly, suggesting that redistricting is at best a blunt tool for promoting partisan interests." The author edits out the italicized portion, but that's probably what Justice Alito was focused on. The second point is addressed at pages 42-44. Justice Alito states: > And then a year later you bring this suit and you say: There it is, that is the constitutional standard. It's been finally - after 200 years, it's been finally discovered in this paper by a young researcher, who concludes in the end -- this is the end of his paper -- after saying symmetry and responsiveness have shown to be -- looked to be inappropriate, "The measure I have offered here, relative wasted votes, is arguably" - arguably -- "a more valid and flexible measure of -- of partisan -- of partisan gerrymandering." > Now, is this -- is this the time for us to jump into this? Has there been a great body of scholarship that has tested this efficiency gap? It's full of questions. The author's response misses the point. Law is not science. It iterates, but it's not free to change the rule every year to get incrementally better results. What's at stake in this case is nothing less than peoples' right to self determination. Both on the side of each person's vote counting fairly and equally, but also on the side of elected, sovereign state governments being permitted to run their elections without undue federal meddling. It's one thing to say that this standard is better than what's come before. But that's not what the Justices care about. They want a rule they can carve into stone and leave in place for decades if not centuries hence. I happen to think that the Supreme Court should affirm the district court's invalidation of Wisconsin's redistricting plan. But Justice Alito was asking questions that needed to be asked.
- wpietri 9y ago
  Regarding the "small and decays rapidly" bit, it appears that, at best, Alito didn't know what he was talking about: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fake-news-comes-to-the-supreme-court/2017/10/03/3a17f86c-a87b-11e7-92d1-58c702d2d975_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fake-news-comes-to-t...
_petronius 9y ago
I find it really interesting that there's no political will in the US to create a non-partisan body like the UK's Boundary commissions in the US. Even if just for congressional districting, it would be a huge improvement over the current state of affairs. (I get that the US is huge, and in general there is a tendency to delegate these sorts of things to states for various reasons both political and practical, but it would seem to be a a straightforward if not easy solution to this issue.)
- emodendroket 9y ago
  The party in power gets to set the districts which then keep them in power, so from a purely self-interested perspective such a thing would enjoy support mostly from people in no position to implement it.
  - sukilot 9y ago
    Most states have a system for citizen initiatives, though.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      I am not super hip to every state's politics but from what I have seen in Massachusetts ballot measures seem more like "strong suggestions."
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  Districting is left to the States, so it would have to be a State thing. That said, California does have such a commission for setting districts. Given that most of the state legislators were upset at their results, and that they ended up having incumbents have to go against one another, I think they did a decent job.
- r00fus 9y ago
  There is at a state level - see how California moved to non-partisan primaries (jungle primaries) and non-partisan redistricting board. The party in power (Democrats) agreed to this several years ago despite being the majority. The result ended up being that they got a subsequent supermajority, because I guess CA is really progressive/liberal in aggregate.
emodendroket 9y ago
Maybe I'm way off-base here, but I find it highly unlikely that Samuel Alito is going to rule in favor of reining in gerrymanders regardless of what he reads, and it seems much more likely that this is post-hoc reasoning on his part.
phailhaus 9y ago
The efficiency gap is calculated by taking the number of net wasted votes and dividing it by the number of total votes. Every vote for a losing party in a district is wasted, as is every vote for the winning party over 50% + 1. This metric was very convincing to me until I noticed one thing: if a district election is split 75%-25%, then it seems that the net wasted votes is 0. But a state where every district is split 75-25 is clearly heavily gerrymandered! Am I missing something?
- smeyer 9y ago
  I don't think you're understanding the calculation correctly. If a district election is 75-25, then the wasted votes is 24 (75 minus the 51 required to win). I believe the computation of net wasted votes comes from looking across several districts. Here's an example from another article: >Suppose, for example, that a state has five districts with 100 voters each, and two parties, Party A and Party B. Suppose also that Party A wins four of the seats 53 to 47, and Party B wins one of them 85 to 15. Then in each of the four seats that Party A wins, it has 2 surplus votes (53 minus the 51 needed to win), and Party B has 47 lost votes. And in the lone district that Party A loses, it has 15 lost votes, and Party B has 34 surplus votes (85 minus the 51 needed to win). In sum, Party A wastes 23 votes and Party B wastes 222 votes. Subtracting one figure from the other and dividing by the 500 votes cast produces an efficiency gap of 40 percent in Party A’s favor. https://newrepublic.com/article/118534/gerrymandering-efficiency-gap-better-way-measure-gerrymandering https://newrepublic.com/article/118534/gerrymandering-effici...
  - snarf21 9y ago
    He is saying, if you could gerrymanderer every district at 75-25 the gap would be 0 even though it would be likely that couldn't happen without being heavily gerrymandered. I think all districts being 75-25 is not really possible based on how communities grow and group together socially and economically.
    - smeyer 9y ago
      But if every district is 75-25, neither party is gaining a net advantage. If you have 10 districts and split them into 5 that are 51-49 and 5 that are 49-51 or if you split them into 5 that are 75-25 and 5 that are 25-75, you have 5 representatives from each party either way. The point of the gap is to distinguish between cases like this (where districts are designed to lump together people of a similar part) from examples of packing and cracking used to give one party an advantage.
txmx2000 9y ago
I’d like to help everyone parse this: The effects of gerrymandering were very small = My party was winning The effects of gerrymandering were great = My party was losing
indubitable 9y ago
I never understand why at large proportional voting systems are never even considered. Even without gerrymandering, district based plurality elections are an extremely flawed system. Imagine we have a perfectly well distributed state - 35% democrat, 30% republican, 20% libertarian, 15% green. And we draw up perfectly fair lines for our 10 representatives. And this state now has their election. What any person would rationally expect would be about 3.5 democratic representatives, 3 republican representatives, 2 libertarian representatives, and about 1.5 green representatives. Instead we get 100% democratic representatives as they get a plurality of votes in each district. 35% of the support, no gerrymandering whatsoever, and 100% of the seats. I don't see how anybody can find this system defensible, let alone desirable. And this is even more true now a days where geographic vicinity to a representative doesn't really mean much of anything. In the times these laws were drawn up good chunks of the population would have known their representatives personally, or at worst have a very minimal number of degrees of separation. So there would be some good argument for having geographically close representatives. In today's society we're very disconnected from our representatives, physically and metaphorically. There's no intimacy between constituent, so much as we can even be considered constituents anymore, and representative. They're simply the person we send our letters to and whom gets to respond with focus tested form letters.
- brianolson 9y ago
  All it takes is an amendment to a state constitution to change how one of the houses of its legislature is elected. Sounds lovely. Can even do this by direct democracy ballot initiative in a handful of states, let's do it!
  - vanattab 9y ago
    This is simply not true. The us constitution demands geographical representation of the House. State constitutions can not change this only us constitutional amendment can. Edit: After rereading the parent again I think he might be talking about the state house not us house.
    - 9y ago

180 points by clarkevans 9y ago

I think the author may be getting a bit too defensive of his work here - not that he doesn't have a right to defend it, but he may be seeing attacks on it where they don't really exist. It's exceedingly common for Supreme Court justices to ask controversial questions they think/know others will have, regardless of their own opinions - many times you will see them ask questions or dig in to areas that are in direct contrast to their leanings. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, these are Supreme Court Justices; their opinions become law, and they have a responsibility to understand both sides on an argument. Second, they understand that it's best for the court and the country if controversial/questionable things are brought up and addressed in session rather than debated endlessly after their decisions are issued. In short, don't read too much in to what questions the justices ask, or what aspects of a case they question...

relaunched 9y ago
Having one's work discussed by the supreme court is pretty incredible. It might just be a way to continue the conversation and raise awareness of what is undoubtedly a pretty obscure subject, that you've dedicated a significant part of your life to. In that respect, "there were some misconceptions" seems to be the link-bait, white washed with integrity and civility.
djtriptych 9y ago
This is sort of a silly argument. While the average/composite justice might ask devil's advocate questions, most the coverage of this issue is also taking into account the individual personalities and histories of the folks asking the questions. So, it means something different if Justice Ginsburg asks a question vs Justice Roberts. In the age of Trump, I think it's far more dangerous to assume politicians and judges don't really mean what they say, than for this author to vigorously defend his work and opinion. Having read the article, it's clear that Alito represented a fundamental misunderstanding of the author's research. It would be irresponsible for him not to respond and clarify.
- eradicatethots 9y ago
  Probably it’s the job of whoever he was asking to correct him, not he himself?
  - djtriptych 9y ago
    lol this username.
stevenwoo 9y ago
On examination of the evidence, the motive for a questioning supreme court justice is leaning to supporting the other side. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-justice-kennedys-silence-means-for-the-future-of-gerrymandering/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-justice-kennedys-s...
- jessriedel 9y ago
  It's a surprisingly modest lean: > That data shows that Kennedy is no different from the rest of the court: You don’t want to be on the receiving end of his questions. When Kennedy votes for the respondent (which would be the Wisconsin Democrats, in this case) he directs 93.3 words to them (57.5 percent of his speech). When he votes against the respondent, he directs 102.0 words to them (61.1 percent of his speech).
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    I was chose lean instead of favor purposefully! But Kennedy's zero/all the words ratio for this case may tip his hand.
    - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
      > Historically, he directed zero words toward the party he went on to vote for 272 times, out of 1,022 cases in this data set. He directed zero words toward the party he wound up voting against only 177 times. So about a 60%-40% split when he has zero words. It does look like he is leaning in favor of the Wisconsin Democrats, but still far from a sure thing.
    - jessriedel 9y ago
      Yep, I wasn't suggesting your summary was inaccurate. I just found it really interesting and wanted to share.
Tasboo 9y ago
The questions a justice asks can often be an indication of where they stand on an issue. It's a way for them to tell the other justices their beliefs. If Alito is spouting off misleading or incorrect facts, then this person should feel compelled to defend their work.
- sukilot 9y ago
  That's true for the statements justices make, not the questions. The two appear together in oral arguments
  - marnett 9y ago
    That's not necessarily true. Justices most certainly ask questions they may personally not need clarifying on in order to plant the question in their colleagues' mind. Oral argument , historically and currently, is still an arena for Justices to share opinions and try to influence one another.
dcow 9y ago
This is, in a nutshell, both why I love hackernews and what's so frustrating about discussing a topic these days. It's impossible to explore something you may totally disagree with without people generally reducing that exploration to a proxy for your worldview and consequently making character judgements or finding a way to get offended to the point where the identity politics card gets played and you get labeled a bigot for some conclusion you never supported but was obviously present in the undercurrents of your questions. The Supreme Court judges aren't special in that respect. Anyone should be allowed to question and explore a topic without having to issue trigger warnings or generally be expected to manage the "visceral" response their questions might evoke from a bystander observing the discussion or even the participants. The way you handle input into your personal biological process is your responsibility not mine. And society does not exist to protect you from malicious input, although you are free to choose networks where the chances frequency of receiving such input is relatively low.
- cbhl 9y ago
  This is tricky because there are lots of people who "ask questions" just to avoid admitting that they are a bigot. If you are genuinely seeking new information, great! But you should do your homework first, which includes finding the right person to ask the question to.
  - KekDemaga 9y ago
    > This is tricky because there are lots of people who "ask questions" just to avoid admitting that they are a bigot. I am confused on how this would work in practice. What kinds of questions do you propose these bigoted people are asking?
    - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
      Loaded ones, eg: "Why should I pay for taxes to support single mothers just so black men don't have to pay child support?" Now, I think we should still encourage them to ask those kinds of questions, because I believe in an open and liberal society and that the best reaction to poor thinking is to address it directly, that the answer to speech I don't like is more speech. But it's pretty easy for some really racist opinions about others to hide behind questions like that. Of course, there are also some uncomfortable truths in those questions which cause us to silence them, such as -- "Are the disparaties we see in racial groups purely the effect of lingering racial bias, or is there a modern cultural component that happens to align with racial groups and perpetuates the inequality?" (And in this case -- the more general, is there a disparity in the fatherhood rates that correlates with racial grouping?) Ed: I think the people downvoting proved someone upthread's point -- I literally provided an example I've heard of such a question and got downvoted for providing facts to a discussion.
maxxxxx 9y ago
The same happens often when you report something to top management. I have been in meetings where the top guys took something I wrote and drew the totally wrong conclusions without me having the opportunity to clarify. It can be frustrating but i guess that's how hierarchical organizations work.
lern_too_spel 9y ago
It becomes an issue if the justice writes this misunderstanding of the research into their opinion. I think the researcher is merely trying to get their story out ahead of that possibility, just in case.
illumin8 9y ago
The problem is that a supreme court justice, Samuel Alito, with a conservative agenda, is cherry-picking older papers that relied on research from 1970-1990, before partisan gerrymandering really picked up steam, and using that to try and muddle the waters. Supreme court justices are supposed to be impartial - this is why the statue of justice has a blindfold on. It's frankly abhorrent that we have such partisan hacks in this role.

erentz 9y ago

In this era, the whole idea of having many small winner take all districts is the problem. Gerrymandering is small by comparison and removing gerrymandering won’t result in much change. The solution is to moved to STV and expanding the size of districts to elect 3 to 5 representatives instead.

stevenwoo 9y ago
In this particular case in Wisconsin it was so egregious that the idea that gerrymandering as exploited here wouldn't make a difference is ludicrous. How would you answer Sotomayor's question? http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/10/sonia_sotomayor_s_simple_devastating_question_in_gill_v_whitford.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...
- erentz 9y ago
  My answer would obviously be there is none. You may have misread my comment as some defense of Gerrymandering when clearly it isn't. Gerrymandering is a byproduct of a broken concept: having tiny little districts in a world where people live in one, work in another, eat lunch in a different district, visit their parents in a fourth district, etc. This made sense 200 years ago, but not today. And any fix to Gerrymandering doesn't overall make a dent in the problem of fair representation. My counter-question might be something like: "Could you tell me what difference fixing these individual cases of Gerrymandering would make to outcomes across our congress as a whole over the past 20 years? What helps our democracy more, fixing the technical problem of gerrymandering but not improving representation, or removing the technical feasibility of gerrymandering to exist and so doing provide a fix to the problem of representation?"
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    I can agree that First Past the Post is suboptimal. I can also believe that we must improve the current system until First Past the Post is replaced, which might be never in the United States and certainly going to be a difficult state by state issue. The leap from the First Past the Post to STV seems insurmountable in the face of how hard the GOP is clinging to power with voter disenfranchisement with the same old tricks of hurdles to voters of color along with this 2010 50 state strategy that led to the extreme gerrymandering. (Having the Democrats be incompetent enough to have the GOP loudly proclaim their strategy in the editorial page of the New York Times pre election and still not react is another issue.)

trendia 9y ago

The efficiency gap fails to guarantee or even optimize compactness, yet many gerrymandered districts are "thin slices" or strange shapes. (one simple defition of compactness is the ratio of perimeter^2/area) What the author fails to do is explain why the efficiency gap is better than district compactness. If they are used together, then in what way are the two measures weighted? If not, why should we pick efficiency over compactness? It should seem obvious that these two methods would result in different districts, but which mwthod to use is more a matter of personal values than objectivity.

weeksie 9y ago
That's because compactness doesn't actually tell you anything about unfair voting, demographics, party representation, etc. . . . A district can be shaped like a busted IUD and still be perfectly fair and that's precisely why the efficiency gap is so much better at identifying gerrymandered districts. The gap shows the percentage of wasted votes, which is pretty much all that matters.
PhineasRex 9y ago
The efficiency gap is just a measure of the actual effect of gerrymandering in an election, it doesn't say anything about how to draw a district for future elections. Compactness tells us nothing about the effects of gerrymandering. Less compact districts correlate with more gerrymandering but that doesn't tell us whether that gerrymandering was effective. Compactness could be a useful tool to limit the effects of gerrymandering when drawing districts.
ClayShentrup 9y ago
Here's a solution. https://youtu.be/kUS9uvYyn3A https://youtu.be/kUS9uvYyn3A

guelo 9y ago

Republicans used their state-level gains from the Obama backlash in 2010 to implement extreme gerrymandering and capture Congress for a decade. But now that Democrats are set to gain from a Trump backlash leading up to the 2020 census all of a sudden there's a lot of movement to neutralize gerrymandering nationwide. I'm probably seeing conspiracy theories where there are none, but conservatives have always played a much better strategical long game working the refs, so to speak, to maintain power. Starting with the national-level gerrymandering from the 19th century where we ended up with bullshit states like Wyoming that permanently tip the scales in their favor.

wpietri 9y ago
I was skeptical at the claims of extreme gerrymandering, but it really is shocking. E.g., this rendering of Wisconsin from 2008-2012: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Wisconsin-gerrymandering-rtr-img.png http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/... In 2008, Republicans had 44% of the votes and 47% of the seats. In 2012, they had 47% of the votes and 61% of the seats.
davidcbc 9y ago
The movement to neutralize gerrymandering isn't coming from the Republicans so I don't think there is a conspiracy here
vanattab 9y ago
Bullshit states? What is that? Is that just a state that does not constantly vote the way you would prefer?
- guelo 9y ago
  Tiny states that were created specifically to gain conservative senators.
- sukilot 9y ago
  Wyoming is a low population that gets 3.6 as much voting power per capita as California. Parent should have included Vermont alongside Wyoming for partisan balance, though. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2012/11/presidential_election_a_map_showing_the_vote_power_of_all_50_states.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_w...

j_s 9y ago

Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with Geometry | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252 (Feb 2017) What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751953 (Jul 2017) Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group – Tufts University | http://sites.tufts.edu/gerrymandr/ http://sites.tufts.edu/gerrymandr/ 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... (re-post of mailing list link) edit: To be clear, I don't have a pony in this race; I just believe the info and opportunity is important and may reach members of its intended audience here. The July article dug into the reasoning behind the efficiency gap and pursuit of mathematical models: > The efficiency gap is an elegant way to quantify the extent of partisan gerrymandering. But more than that is needed to win a case. The challenged plan must also be more biased than other maps, inconsistent with the state’s spatial patterns, and durable in its effects. And these elements can only be established by additional studies. Another HN user shared a higher-level summary I will try to TL;DR here: > paulmd: SCOTUS turns based on which side of the bed Kennedy wakes up on (on most issues). [...] mathematicians heard [Kennedy might be open to striking gerrymandering down] And now the court cases are working their way back up to SCOTUS, only with the academic models that Kennedy has indicated he wants. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753909

trendia 9y ago
Thanks for posting this. The efficiency gap completely ignores geometry.
- jpfed 9y ago
  But why consider geometry itself to be important? Isn't geometry a mere proxy for something else that's desirable? My own suspicion is this: that districting is an act of partitioning the social graph. The weights of this graph are not necessarily "who socializes with who" but rather "to what extent do these people share common interests". It is not necessarily the case that regions characterized by people of common interests will be shaped in ways that we can express easy geometric criteria for.

rayiner 9y ago

I don't think I agree with the author's characterization of Justice Alito's questions. The transcript is here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2017/16-1161_bpm1.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr.... The first quote comes from page 61-62: > JUSTICE ALITO: You paint a very dire picture about gerrymandering and its effects, but I was struck by something in the seminal article by your expert, Mr. McGhee, and he says there, "I show that the effects of party control on bias are small and decay rapidly, suggesting that redistricting is at best a blunt tool for promoting partisan interests." The author edits out the italicized portion, but that's probably what Justice Alito was focused on. The second point is addressed at pages 42-44. Justice Alito states: > And then a year later you bring this suit and you say: There it is, that is the constitutional standard. It's been finally - after 200 years, it's been finally discovered in this paper by a young researcher, who concludes in the end -- this is the end of his paper -- after saying symmetry and responsiveness have shown to be -- looked to be inappropriate, "The measure I have offered here, relative wasted votes, is arguably" - arguably -- "a more valid and flexible measure of -- of partisan -- of partisan gerrymandering." > Now, is this -- is this the time for us to jump into this? Has there been a great body of scholarship that has tested this efficiency gap? It's full of questions. The author's response misses the point. Law is not science. It iterates, but it's not free to change the rule every year to get incrementally better results. What's at stake in this case is nothing less than peoples' right to self determination. Both on the side of each person's vote counting fairly and equally, but also on the side of elected, sovereign state governments being permitted to run their elections without undue federal meddling. It's one thing to say that this standard is better than what's come before. But that's not what the Justices care about. They want a rule they can carve into stone and leave in place for decades if not centuries hence. I happen to think that the Supreme Court should affirm the district court's invalidation of Wisconsin's redistricting plan. But Justice Alito was asking questions that needed to be asked.

wpietri 9y ago
Regarding the "small and decays rapidly" bit, it appears that, at best, Alito didn't know what he was talking about: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fake-news-comes-to-the-supreme-court/2017/10/03/3a17f86c-a87b-11e7-92d1-58c702d2d975_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fake-news-comes-to-t...

_petronius 9y ago

I find it really interesting that there's no political will in the US to create a non-partisan body like the UK's Boundary commissions in the US. Even if just for congressional districting, it would be a huge improvement over the current state of affairs. (I get that the US is huge, and in general there is a tendency to delegate these sorts of things to states for various reasons both political and practical, but it would seem to be a a straightforward if not easy solution to this issue.)

emodendroket 9y ago
The party in power gets to set the districts which then keep them in power, so from a purely self-interested perspective such a thing would enjoy support mostly from people in no position to implement it.
- sukilot 9y ago
  Most states have a system for citizen initiatives, though.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I am not super hip to every state's politics but from what I have seen in Massachusetts ballot measures seem more like "strong suggestions."
s73ver_ 9y ago
Districting is left to the States, so it would have to be a State thing. That said, California does have such a commission for setting districts. Given that most of the state legislators were upset at their results, and that they ended up having incumbents have to go against one another, I think they did a decent job.
r00fus 9y ago
There is at a state level - see how California moved to non-partisan primaries (jungle primaries) and non-partisan redistricting board. The party in power (Democrats) agreed to this several years ago despite being the majority. The result ended up being that they got a subsequent supermajority, because I guess CA is really progressive/liberal in aggregate.

emodendroket 9y ago

Maybe I'm way off-base here, but I find it highly unlikely that Samuel Alito is going to rule in favor of reining in gerrymanders regardless of what he reads, and it seems much more likely that this is post-hoc reasoning on his part.

phailhaus 9y ago

The efficiency gap is calculated by taking the number of net wasted votes and dividing it by the number of total votes. Every vote for a losing party in a district is wasted, as is every vote for the winning party over 50% + 1. This metric was very convincing to me until I noticed one thing: if a district election is split 75%-25%, then it seems that the net wasted votes is 0. But a state where every district is split 75-25 is clearly heavily gerrymandered! Am I missing something?

smeyer 9y ago
I don't think you're understanding the calculation correctly. If a district election is 75-25, then the wasted votes is 24 (75 minus the 51 required to win). I believe the computation of net wasted votes comes from looking across several districts. Here's an example from another article: >Suppose, for example, that a state has five districts with 100 voters each, and two parties, Party A and Party B. Suppose also that Party A wins four of the seats 53 to 47, and Party B wins one of them 85 to 15. Then in each of the four seats that Party A wins, it has 2 surplus votes (53 minus the 51 needed to win), and Party B has 47 lost votes. And in the lone district that Party A loses, it has 15 lost votes, and Party B has 34 surplus votes (85 minus the 51 needed to win). In sum, Party A wastes 23 votes and Party B wastes 222 votes. Subtracting one figure from the other and dividing by the 500 votes cast produces an efficiency gap of 40 percent in Party A’s favor. https://newrepublic.com/article/118534/gerrymandering-efficiency-gap-better-way-measure-gerrymandering https://newrepublic.com/article/118534/gerrymandering-effici...
- snarf21 9y ago
  He is saying, if you could gerrymanderer every district at 75-25 the gap would be 0 even though it would be likely that couldn't happen without being heavily gerrymandered. I think all districts being 75-25 is not really possible based on how communities grow and group together socially and economically.
  - smeyer 9y ago
    But if every district is 75-25, neither party is gaining a net advantage. If you have 10 districts and split them into 5 that are 51-49 and 5 that are 49-51 or if you split them into 5 that are 75-25 and 5 that are 25-75, you have 5 representatives from each party either way. The point of the gap is to distinguish between cases like this (where districts are designed to lump together people of a similar part) from examples of packing and cracking used to give one party an advantage.

txmx2000 9y ago

I’d like to help everyone parse this: The effects of gerrymandering were very small = My party was winning The effects of gerrymandering were great = My party was losing

indubitable 9y ago

I never understand why at large proportional voting systems are never even considered. Even without gerrymandering, district based plurality elections are an extremely flawed system. Imagine we have a perfectly well distributed state - 35% democrat, 30% republican, 20% libertarian, 15% green. And we draw up perfectly fair lines for our 10 representatives. And this state now has their election. What any person would rationally expect would be about 3.5 democratic representatives, 3 republican representatives, 2 libertarian representatives, and about 1.5 green representatives. Instead we get 100% democratic representatives as they get a plurality of votes in each district. 35% of the support, no gerrymandering whatsoever, and 100% of the seats. I don't see how anybody can find this system defensible, let alone desirable. And this is even more true now a days where geographic vicinity to a representative doesn't really mean much of anything. In the times these laws were drawn up good chunks of the population would have known their representatives personally, or at worst have a very minimal number of degrees of separation. So there would be some good argument for having geographically close representatives. In today's society we're very disconnected from our representatives, physically and metaphorically. There's no intimacy between constituent, so much as we can even be considered constituents anymore, and representative. They're simply the person we send our letters to and whom gets to respond with focus tested form letters.

brianolson 9y ago
All it takes is an amendment to a state constitution to change how one of the houses of its legislature is elected. Sounds lovely. Can even do this by direct democracy ballot initiative in a handful of states, let's do it!
- vanattab 9y ago
  This is simply not true. The us constitution demands geographical representation of the House. State constitutions can not change this only us constitutional amendment can. Edit: After rereading the parent again I think he might be talking about the state house not us house.
  - 9y ago