8 ms·

An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

51 points by mathfan 9y ago

weeksie 9y ago
Totally. This is why in the more recent gerrymandering thread I was making such a big deal about the efficiency gap rather than geometry for detecting this stuff. Geometry is just a flawed heuristic for a multitude of reasons. That's why the efficiency gap is so exciting as a measure.
- sova 9y ago
  Looking at the paper, counting the number of "wasted votes" is actually the most solid metric it seems!
js2 9y ago
I'm confused about the example. First of all, it seems highly unlikely such a distribution of red and blue votes would occur. But more importantly, blue is a majority of every 3x3 square - why shouldn't it win every district?
- dragontamer 9y ago
  > why shouldn't it win every district? Because we are supposed to have a representative government. If there's 55% Blue voters and 45% Red Voters, you're supposed to ideally have 55% Blue representatives and 45% Red representatives. The example is a counterexample of this concept. Instead of 55% Blue / 45% Red split, the map as a whole becomes 100% blue. This is almost the very definition of "Tyranny of the Majority".
  - Retric 9y ago
    If votes are 80-20 then it's not necessarily possible or reasonable to draw 80 vs 20 winning districts.
    - dragontamer 9y ago
      Which states are 80-20 in America? Maryland is an example of a highly gerrymandered state (towards Democrats, although there are many Republican examples too). Maryland voted 60.5% Clinton / 35.3% Trump, which suggests that they have (roughly) 2 Democrats for every 1 Republican in the state. However, due to the significant gerrymandering in Maryland, there is ONE Republican and SEVEN Democrats in the House. That's certainly not fair towards Republicans who live in Maryland. EDIT: Apparently North Carolina is the Republican example to talk about, in case you want some "balance".
      - Retric 9y ago
        There are actually more extreme examples. Consider, Hillary Clinton got 90.9% of the DC vote Trump got 4.1%, I am not sure how you could slice up DC to get 10% Republican representation. In Maryland's case it might be able to make 2 districts Republican, but that's assuming a very concentrated geographic minority which may or may not actually exist. IMO, If we really want proportional representation then we should use a proportional system.
        dragontamer 9y ago
        DC is a single city and doesn't even have one representative in Congress (Okay, they nominally have one. But she's non-voting so.... that's not really useful). They're technically a US Territory and have no more power than say Puerto Rico. So once again, if you're talking about US Representatives and Voting Districts, it only makes sense to talk about well... Voting Districts. Name me one US State with 80/20 split and more than 1 US Representative. Ultimately, your hypothetical doesn't exist! --------- That's the cool thing about politics: its real. There's no need to make up hypotheticals when we can just draw from the real world. FYI: the discussion at hand is about US Representatives, and not about the Electoral College. Washington DC is therefore irrelevant, as it has no representatives. Washington DC does get 3 Electoral college votes, but that has nothing to do with Gerrymandering. There's a variety of states who have "Representatives At Large", such as Wyoming, which are basically immune to Gerrymandering. The population is so low that Wyoming only gets 1-Representative, so the entire State is the whole district. There's really no "fair" way to cut up a single Representative (its all or nothing), but that's mostly due to the very low population of these states. Basically, Gerrymandering can only be an issue in a state with more than 1 Representative.
- mathfan2 9y ago
  > blue is a majority of every 3x3 square Blue is indeed a slight majority of every "3x lattice"-aligned square. But if you take the top left square and shift one down and one right, you'll see that in fact red wins that 3x3 square decisively: 8 to 1. > why shouldn't it win every district? Maybe you think it should, but whoever drew the districts would run afoul of the newish gerrymandering measure the Supreme Court is considering.
- simonh 9y ago
  It seems to me that probably the outcome of an election should mainly be determined by the decisions of voters, not mainly by how the voting districts are drawn. Imagine that a few voters in each district change their minds, some from each party switch to the other. Even if the overall effect is a very slight swing towards red you could still end up with all the districts going to red. Or with the same swing but distributed differently you could still end up with blue winning (though not by as much), even though it had fewer total votes. So it's not about what should happen in any one particular snapshot. That's just a single example. It's about how well the outcome of a series of elections should reflect the wishes of voters as a whole. I'm not a big fan of proportional representation, it has often lead to small minorities gaining kingmaking powers, but I do believe that the objective of electoral districting should be to produce results that are likely to fairly represent the wishes of the electorate.
dragontamer 9y ago
So the question is if "Minimizing Efficiency Gap" is what we should be aiming for. Its a solid proposal, but I guess its up to the courts to decide if "Efficiency Gap" is a good metric. I guess I'll be interested in hearing the arguments as they come up.
- cousin_it 9y ago
  It seems to me that a system with zero efficiency gap would be equivalent to one big election with proportional representation. If that's what people really want, why talk about voting districts at all?
  - bloaf 9y ago
    If I had to guess, I would say that there is at least some benefit to having politics be local. That is, it may be better to ask people to choose between a small number of "local" candidates, rather than a large cohort of state-wide candidates.
  - djrogers 9y ago
    You're either thinking about this too broadly, or as a system filled with static entities. Within voting districts, politics is local - individuals can sway voters, voters can decide to show up/skip voting, etc. Also, the concept of a 'blue/red' district can be very blurry - there are many examples of 'blue' districts (districts with democrat congress reps, and a history of voting blue) that voted red in the last presidential election, and vice-versa for previous elections. Historically, Americans prefer to vote for people, not parties.
    - rjsw 9y ago
      Do people in the US have the same feeling for what area is 'local' as they did when districts were drawn up ?
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    Because certain issues are geographical in nature, especially at the local level. Should a new highway replace the housing development over there? Well, people who live close to that housing development might care one way or the other (Noise complaints, Ecological issues, Traffic Issues). People who live very far away from that center probably don't care at all. And the people who live in the housing development (who will be forced to move out), especially renters who probably won't be properly compensated, will care the most. The placement of schools, the budgets of police, the design of zoning regulations (in particular "Enterprise Zones" of lower taxes to encourage business development in some areas)... these all are innately local issues.
awjr 9y ago
I suspect Gerrymandering isn't uniquely a US problem. I do a lot of UK Census spatial analysis and the district centroids that are used create problems. In the article the 'ear muffs' shape would create a centroid for the voting district outside of the district, given that the shape of the district was designed to give a certain ethnic group a voice, whereas the process for creating districts in the UK are done usually on the idea of 'belonging' to a town/village/area and are decided and audited at a national 'neutral' level. The data scientist in me wants centroids around circles with fuzzy edges. If we could all agree that fuzzy circles is the way forward we could solve gerrymandering over night. The reality is though, that I create these amazing pieces of analysis then have to explain away why that district is odd, y'know, cos the shape is just weird. Locally they are redoing the district boundaries which is giving me an opportunity to submit my own district shapes that work better with Census data :D
- sova 9y ago
  Fuzzy circles! Great idea. That, or repeated boundary drawing that brute forced every possible district combination and gave a probabilistic result of elections based on where districts were drawn.
rndmize 9y ago
> Now suppose you are tasked with drawing 5 districts for this region. Or, we could go with proportional representation, make it a single district, and now we can reasonably expect to get 2-3 blue reps and 2-3 red ones, handling both the districting problem and efficiency/fairness problem in one go.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Yes. Much better.
- shadofx 9y ago
  How would that deal with popular independents? Would they get two seats if they pull 40% of the electorate?
  - erentz 9y ago
    Under an STV you're still voting for people. The independent with 40% of the vote would be elected and then a proportion of their unneeded votes would be transferred to the subsequent candidates on those voting papers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#Finding_the_winners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#Findi...
tveita 9y ago
It's strange that there's so much focus on district shapes, when any voting system with proportional representation would make gerrymandering pretty much ineffective. Every voting system has its flaws, but the US system seems to have particularly few advantages.
- waegawegawe 9y ago
  It's not really "strange." The chances of us ever going to a proportional system en masse are near zero. The chances of making extreme gerrymandering illegal are significantly better (the Supreme Court recently heard a case about it). Many people prefer to spend time thinking within the context of what is likely to happen. That's not to say we don't need folks who dream big, but we need more than just those folks.
  - waqf 9y ago
    I agree with the substance of what you say but I don't think it's wrong to invite everyone to have a general sense of the big picture. And by big-picture standards, because of the way the US is constituted, the questions that make their way to SCOTUS are usually pretty strange.
- notfromhere 9y ago
  stable oligarch control is pretty much the only advantage
  - sova 9y ago
    Tip my hat to you dear friend.
sova 9y ago
The Supreme Court (id est The Highest Court of the Land) is currently evaluating if they can rely on an algorithm to detect Constitutionality of district shapes. You're kidding, right? As a computational scientist this is concerning to put it mildly. Trying to ensure proportionality in representation... is that the intended goal? Is this even a meaningful pursuit in a bicameral system? The Supreme Court makes rulings that span time infinitely forward, meaning that all those different parties that have existed since the inception of the Union have dissolved and new ones have been formed since, but the rulings of the Supreme Court have not this luxury of death and recycling. Nay, a ruling by the court is very potent and quite a footprint on the legal plain. So there is no easy way to ensure that a district is Constitutionally Compliant, but we can definitely point out "unconstitutional districting" -- right? Do you agree?
- cmac2992 9y ago
  From my understanding, the Baker v Carr in 1962 decision enabled federal courts to intervene in and to decide redistricting. Back in the day redistricting was even crazier. You could just draw an arbitrary number of districts with arbitrary population sizes. That seems bad on the surface. With this system, election outcomes could potentially be entirely determined by how districts were gerrymandered. The efficiency standard seems like trick to get closer to proportional representation. All of this comes down to the 14th amendment being "one person one vote" rather than something like "all votes must have equal weight". A small language that has made things really complicated. IMO just switching to proportional representation is a much cleaner solution. But the efficiency standard seems like a decent solution to keeping races competitive and from being severely gerrymandered.
  - sova 9y ago
    Thanks for your words and insight. Yes, proportional voting would be great! Your state gets 5 house seats? Let's have priority-voting where a voter picks choices 1-5 for representation. Jane is first choice, then Miyoko, Sofia, Leben, and Pierre. Jane may not get all the "first place" votes but she could get enough to end up in one of the five house seats our state gets. Reading up on the 14th amendment, it does ensure that every male over 21 is able to vote (assuming they did not lose the right through crime, also a big issue today as a third of our populous is disenfranchised). It does not, however, say anything about how voting for reps is done at the state level, and I wonder if this becomes a States' matter as soon as we part from the 14th amendment. Pardon my gap-riddled knowledge of such important affairs
indubitable 9y ago
I think this indirectly hints at something much more fundamental: district based plurality does not make sense as an election system anymore. I think an eye opening example is to consider a hypothetical single state with 10 representatives. This state has a population, perfectly well distributed, of 35% democrat, 30% republican, 20% libertarian, and 15% green. And we draw our districts up with absolutely no bias whatsoever. What 'should' the election results be? I think any logical person would say about 3.5 democrats, 3 republicans, 2 libertarians, and about 1.5 greens. What we get in reality? 10 democrats as they win a plurality in each and every district. 0 gerrymandering, 35% of the support, 100% of the seats. To get our above example to have the logical results we want, you end up having to create really absurd districts that would completely dwarf any sort of gerrymandering of today. So then the question is quite obvious. Why don't we do at large proportional elections instead of district based plurality elections? If a state has 10 representatives then any party is guaranteed at least 1 seat if they get 10% support, 2 for 20%, and so on. In the past when politicians and the people were much closer, I think districts made a lot more sense. You were voting for somebody who you knew or were at worst split by the most minimal degrees of separation. But today this isn't true. The average congressional district is now up to 710,767 people [1] (as of 2010). In 1790, at the time of the first US census, the average district size was 37,082. Times have changed, but our electoral system has not. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_congressional_districts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_congress...
- bannus 9y ago
  For an improvement on the "1 seat for every 10% of the vote you get" system you mention, take a look at the system Cambridge, MA uses for their at-large city council election [1]. Citizens cast ranked-choice ballots, and through an iterative process each of the 9 councilors are elected if they receive over 10% of the vote. (Excess votes for winners and votes for candidates below a certain threshold are transferred in each iteration.) [1] http://www.fairvote.org/cambridge-massachusetts-elections-a-model-for-america http://www.fairvote.org/cambridge-massachusetts-elections-a-...
  - sova 9y ago
sova 9y ago
For reference, there is a NY Times article about the plague of redistricting and also a simple excel tool that someone made to make this very easy: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/magazine/the-new-front-in-the-gerrymandering-wars-democracy-vs-math.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/magazine/the-new-front-in... As a human who takes pride and joy in the Constitution and its tenets I find the crowbar-able gap space of redistricting an important valley of electoral attention that needs ample light of attention.
catpolice 9y ago
At this point I feel like it's worthwhile to remember to why we even have districts. We could, in principle, get rid of the districts and just have some kind of statewide scheme for electing representatives proportional to the outcome of a popular vote. The idea behind retaining districts, as far as I understand it, is that people in similar locales will often have very correlated interests (e.g. with regard to decisions that affect that area) and that choosing representatives from particular locales is supposed to guarantee that people in that area are represented (and make the representatives to some degree beholden to them). Ideally, we'd split the states into districts in a way that doesn't deviate from overall proportional representation very much, hence the idea of the efficiency gap. So gerrymandering can break that efficiency constraint. But the notion of geographic correlation of interests makes it such that the population is unlikely to be distributed in the kind of uniformly random way you need to get weirdly shaped, efficient districts, and conversely having weirdly shaped districts at all effectively assumes that geographic correlation of interests isn't an important factor. In other words: if we have to make weirdly shaped districts to maintain efficiency, then the assumptions that caused us to require districts in the first place probably fail and we should just ditch them.
- sova 9y ago
  Ideally: the Representative who is chosen for a district (the weird shapes we are talking about) _represents_ everyone of the populous of that district. That way in Congress, when someone asks "hey do your constituents want a factory next to that highway plus a bunch of taxbreaks?" the representative knows which way to vote, as s/he _represents_ the local people. The weird shapes, even if they increase "efficiency" don't actually account for locality much. It'd be better to use something like commuting maps to draw regions to ensure locality.
  - cr0sh 9y ago
    Not only that, usually the "representative" doesn't even live in or near the area they are representing (sure, they may have an address in the area, but that isn't difficult to do).
oh_sigh 9y ago
> Our paper proves that in some cases, it’s impossible to get a small efficiency gap without drawing bizarrely shaped districts. Italics mine. Is there any reason to believe that any real life situation would fall under their impossibility? The key is to get a system which is good enough to prevent gerrymandering for the world that exists, not for any possible world.
dqpb 9y ago
Gerrymandering is so ridiculous. Clearly geographic coordinates is the wrong data structure for systematically biasing votes for/against certain demographics. A voting system should be explicit about exactly which demographic criteria should carry weighted bias, what value that weight should be, and what it's purpose is. It should also be clear to each voter which demographic categories they fall under, what the final strength of their vote will be, and what the justification is for that outcome.
importantbrian 9y ago
I think the real answer to all of this is to restore a reasonable ratio of population to representatives. It is much more difficult to Gerrymander 133 districts than with 9. It will still happen but the possible advantage one party can get is much smaller. The constituents also get much better representation, because they are much closer to the person representing them. The representative is intimately familiar with their constituents concerns because they live in and around them. It also strips a lot of the money out of politics. Representatives don't have to spend all their time fundraising to raise war chests of millions of dollars. You can win an election in a 30,000 person district by knocking on doors and sending out inexpensive mailers. http://www.thirty-thousand.org/ http://www.thirty-thousand.org/
crb002 9y ago
There is also gerrymandering against independents and third parties. A fair metric minimizes average distance from a citizen to the centroid of their district. The lowest energy Voronoi diagram wins. Nobody gets screwed.

51 points by mathfan 9y ago

Totally. This is why in the more recent gerrymandering thread I was making such a big deal about the efficiency gap rather than geometry for detecting this stuff. Geometry is just a flawed heuristic for a multitude of reasons. That's why the efficiency gap is so exciting as a measure.

sova 9y ago
Looking at the paper, counting the number of "wasted votes" is actually the most solid metric it seems!

js2 9y ago

I'm confused about the example. First of all, it seems highly unlikely such a distribution of red and blue votes would occur. But more importantly, blue is a majority of every 3x3 square - why shouldn't it win every district?

dragontamer 9y ago
> why shouldn't it win every district? Because we are supposed to have a representative government. If there's 55% Blue voters and 45% Red Voters, you're supposed to ideally have 55% Blue representatives and 45% Red representatives. The example is a counterexample of this concept. Instead of 55% Blue / 45% Red split, the map as a whole becomes 100% blue. This is almost the very definition of "Tyranny of the Majority".
- Retric 9y ago
  If votes are 80-20 then it's not necessarily possible or reasonable to draw 80 vs 20 winning districts.
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    Which states are 80-20 in America? Maryland is an example of a highly gerrymandered state (towards Democrats, although there are many Republican examples too). Maryland voted 60.5% Clinton / 35.3% Trump, which suggests that they have (roughly) 2 Democrats for every 1 Republican in the state. However, due to the significant gerrymandering in Maryland, there is ONE Republican and SEVEN Democrats in the House. That's certainly not fair towards Republicans who live in Maryland. EDIT: Apparently North Carolina is the Republican example to talk about, in case you want some "balance".
    - Retric 9y ago
      There are actually more extreme examples. Consider, Hillary Clinton got 90.9% of the DC vote Trump got 4.1%, I am not sure how you could slice up DC to get 10% Republican representation. In Maryland's case it might be able to make 2 districts Republican, but that's assuming a very concentrated geographic minority which may or may not actually exist. IMO, If we really want proportional representation then we should use a proportional system.
      - dragontamer 9y ago
        DC is a single city and doesn't even have one representative in Congress (Okay, they nominally have one. But she's non-voting so.... that's not really useful). They're technically a US Territory and have no more power than say Puerto Rico. So once again, if you're talking about US Representatives and Voting Districts, it only makes sense to talk about well... Voting Districts. Name me one US State with 80/20 split and more than 1 US Representative. Ultimately, your hypothetical doesn't exist! --------- That's the cool thing about politics: its real. There's no need to make up hypotheticals when we can just draw from the real world. FYI: the discussion at hand is about US Representatives, and not about the Electoral College. Washington DC is therefore irrelevant, as it has no representatives. Washington DC does get 3 Electoral college votes, but that has nothing to do with Gerrymandering. There's a variety of states who have "Representatives At Large", such as Wyoming, which are basically immune to Gerrymandering. The population is so low that Wyoming only gets 1-Representative, so the entire State is the whole district. There's really no "fair" way to cut up a single Representative (its all or nothing), but that's mostly due to the very low population of these states. Basically, Gerrymandering can only be an issue in a state with more than 1 Representative.
mathfan2 9y ago
> blue is a majority of every 3x3 square Blue is indeed a slight majority of every "3x lattice"-aligned square. But if you take the top left square and shift one down and one right, you'll see that in fact red wins that 3x3 square decisively: 8 to 1. > why shouldn't it win every district? Maybe you think it should, but whoever drew the districts would run afoul of the newish gerrymandering measure the Supreme Court is considering.
simonh 9y ago
It seems to me that probably the outcome of an election should mainly be determined by the decisions of voters, not mainly by how the voting districts are drawn. Imagine that a few voters in each district change their minds, some from each party switch to the other. Even if the overall effect is a very slight swing towards red you could still end up with all the districts going to red. Or with the same swing but distributed differently you could still end up with blue winning (though not by as much), even though it had fewer total votes. So it's not about what should happen in any one particular snapshot. That's just a single example. It's about how well the outcome of a series of elections should reflect the wishes of voters as a whole. I'm not a big fan of proportional representation, it has often lead to small minorities gaining kingmaking powers, but I do believe that the objective of electoral districting should be to produce results that are likely to fairly represent the wishes of the electorate.

dragontamer 9y ago

So the question is if "Minimizing Efficiency Gap" is what we should be aiming for. Its a solid proposal, but I guess its up to the courts to decide if "Efficiency Gap" is a good metric. I guess I'll be interested in hearing the arguments as they come up.

cousin_it 9y ago
It seems to me that a system with zero efficiency gap would be equivalent to one big election with proportional representation. If that's what people really want, why talk about voting districts at all?
- bloaf 9y ago
  If I had to guess, I would say that there is at least some benefit to having politics be local. That is, it may be better to ask people to choose between a small number of "local" candidates, rather than a large cohort of state-wide candidates.
- djrogers 9y ago
  You're either thinking about this too broadly, or as a system filled with static entities. Within voting districts, politics is local - individuals can sway voters, voters can decide to show up/skip voting, etc. Also, the concept of a 'blue/red' district can be very blurry - there are many examples of 'blue' districts (districts with democrat congress reps, and a history of voting blue) that voted red in the last presidential election, and vice-versa for previous elections. Historically, Americans prefer to vote for people, not parties.
  - rjsw 9y ago
    Do people in the US have the same feeling for what area is 'local' as they did when districts were drawn up ?
- dragontamer 9y ago
  Because certain issues are geographical in nature, especially at the local level. Should a new highway replace the housing development over there? Well, people who live close to that housing development might care one way or the other (Noise complaints, Ecological issues, Traffic Issues). People who live very far away from that center probably don't care at all. And the people who live in the housing development (who will be forced to move out), especially renters who probably won't be properly compensated, will care the most. The placement of schools, the budgets of police, the design of zoning regulations (in particular "Enterprise Zones" of lower taxes to encourage business development in some areas)... these all are innately local issues.

awjr 9y ago

I suspect Gerrymandering isn't uniquely a US problem. I do a lot of UK Census spatial analysis and the district centroids that are used create problems. In the article the 'ear muffs' shape would create a centroid for the voting district outside of the district, given that the shape of the district was designed to give a certain ethnic group a voice, whereas the process for creating districts in the UK are done usually on the idea of 'belonging' to a town/village/area and are decided and audited at a national 'neutral' level. The data scientist in me wants centroids around circles with fuzzy edges. If we could all agree that fuzzy circles is the way forward we could solve gerrymandering over night. The reality is though, that I create these amazing pieces of analysis then have to explain away why that district is odd, y'know, cos the shape is just weird. Locally they are redoing the district boundaries which is giving me an opportunity to submit my own district shapes that work better with Census data :D

sova 9y ago
Fuzzy circles! Great idea. That, or repeated boundary drawing that brute forced every possible district combination and gave a probabilistic result of elections based on where districts were drawn.

rndmize 9y ago

> Now suppose you are tasked with drawing 5 districts for this region. Or, we could go with proportional representation, make it a single district, and now we can reasonably expect to get 2-3 blue reps and 2-3 red ones, handling both the districting problem and efficiency/fairness problem in one go.

maxxxxx 9y ago
Yes. Much better.
shadofx 9y ago
How would that deal with popular independents? Would they get two seats if they pull 40% of the electorate?
- erentz 9y ago
  Under an STV you're still voting for people. The independent with 40% of the vote would be elected and then a proportion of their unneeded votes would be transferred to the subsequent candidates on those voting papers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#Finding_the_winners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#Findi...

tveita 9y ago

It's strange that there's so much focus on district shapes, when any voting system with proportional representation would make gerrymandering pretty much ineffective. Every voting system has its flaws, but the US system seems to have particularly few advantages.

waegawegawe 9y ago
It's not really "strange." The chances of us ever going to a proportional system en masse are near zero. The chances of making extreme gerrymandering illegal are significantly better (the Supreme Court recently heard a case about it). Many people prefer to spend time thinking within the context of what is likely to happen. That's not to say we don't need folks who dream big, but we need more than just those folks.
- waqf 9y ago
  I agree with the substance of what you say but I don't think it's wrong to invite everyone to have a general sense of the big picture. And by big-picture standards, because of the way the US is constituted, the questions that make their way to SCOTUS are usually pretty strange.
notfromhere 9y ago
stable oligarch control is pretty much the only advantage
- sova 9y ago
  Tip my hat to you dear friend.

sova 9y ago

The Supreme Court (id est The Highest Court of the Land) is currently evaluating if they can rely on an algorithm to detect Constitutionality of district shapes. You're kidding, right? As a computational scientist this is concerning to put it mildly. Trying to ensure proportionality in representation... is that the intended goal? Is this even a meaningful pursuit in a bicameral system? The Supreme Court makes rulings that span time infinitely forward, meaning that all those different parties that have existed since the inception of the Union have dissolved and new ones have been formed since, but the rulings of the Supreme Court have not this luxury of death and recycling. Nay, a ruling by the court is very potent and quite a footprint on the legal plain. So there is no easy way to ensure that a district is Constitutionally Compliant, but we can definitely point out "unconstitutional districting" -- right? Do you agree?

cmac2992 9y ago
From my understanding, the Baker v Carr in 1962 decision enabled federal courts to intervene in and to decide redistricting. Back in the day redistricting was even crazier. You could just draw an arbitrary number of districts with arbitrary population sizes. That seems bad on the surface. With this system, election outcomes could potentially be entirely determined by how districts were gerrymandered. The efficiency standard seems like trick to get closer to proportional representation. All of this comes down to the 14th amendment being "one person one vote" rather than something like "all votes must have equal weight". A small language that has made things really complicated. IMO just switching to proportional representation is a much cleaner solution. But the efficiency standard seems like a decent solution to keeping races competitive and from being severely gerrymandered.
- sova 9y ago
  Thanks for your words and insight. Yes, proportional voting would be great! Your state gets 5 house seats? Let's have priority-voting where a voter picks choices 1-5 for representation. Jane is first choice, then Miyoko, Sofia, Leben, and Pierre. Jane may not get all the "first place" votes but she could get enough to end up in one of the five house seats our state gets. Reading up on the 14th amendment, it does ensure that every male over 21 is able to vote (assuming they did not lose the right through crime, also a big issue today as a third of our populous is disenfranchised). It does not, however, say anything about how voting for reps is done at the state level, and I wonder if this becomes a States' matter as soon as we part from the 14th amendment. Pardon my gap-riddled knowledge of such important affairs

indubitable 9y ago

I think this indirectly hints at something much more fundamental: district based plurality does not make sense as an election system anymore. I think an eye opening example is to consider a hypothetical single state with 10 representatives. This state has a population, perfectly well distributed, of 35% democrat, 30% republican, 20% libertarian, and 15% green. And we draw our districts up with absolutely no bias whatsoever. What 'should' the election results be? I think any logical person would say about 3.5 democrats, 3 republicans, 2 libertarians, and about 1.5 greens. What we get in reality? 10 democrats as they win a plurality in each and every district. 0 gerrymandering, 35% of the support, 100% of the seats. To get our above example to have the logical results we want, you end up having to create really absurd districts that would completely dwarf any sort of gerrymandering of today. So then the question is quite obvious. Why don't we do at large proportional elections instead of district based plurality elections? If a state has 10 representatives then any party is guaranteed at least 1 seat if they get 10% support, 2 for 20%, and so on. In the past when politicians and the people were much closer, I think districts made a lot more sense. You were voting for somebody who you knew or were at worst split by the most minimal degrees of separation. But today this isn't true. The average congressional district is now up to 710,767 people [1] (as of 2010). In 1790, at the time of the first US census, the average district size was 37,082. Times have changed, but our electoral system has not. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_congressional_districts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_congress...

bannus 9y ago
For an improvement on the "1 seat for every 10% of the vote you get" system you mention, take a look at the system Cambridge, MA uses for their at-large city council election [1]. Citizens cast ranked-choice ballots, and through an iterative process each of the 9 councilors are elected if they receive over 10% of the vote. (Excess votes for winners and votes for candidates below a certain threshold are transferred in each iteration.) [1] http://www.fairvote.org/cambridge-massachusetts-elections-a-model-for-america http://www.fairvote.org/cambridge-massachusetts-elections-a-...
- sova 9y ago

sova 9y ago

For reference, there is a NY Times article about the plague of redistricting and also a simple excel tool that someone made to make this very easy: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/magazine/the-new-front-in-the-gerrymandering-wars-democracy-vs-math.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/magazine/the-new-front-in... As a human who takes pride and joy in the Constitution and its tenets I find the crowbar-able gap space of redistricting an important valley of electoral attention that needs ample light of attention.

catpolice 9y ago

At this point I feel like it's worthwhile to remember to why we even have districts. We could, in principle, get rid of the districts and just have some kind of statewide scheme for electing representatives proportional to the outcome of a popular vote. The idea behind retaining districts, as far as I understand it, is that people in similar locales will often have very correlated interests (e.g. with regard to decisions that affect that area) and that choosing representatives from particular locales is supposed to guarantee that people in that area are represented (and make the representatives to some degree beholden to them). Ideally, we'd split the states into districts in a way that doesn't deviate from overall proportional representation very much, hence the idea of the efficiency gap. So gerrymandering can break that efficiency constraint. But the notion of geographic correlation of interests makes it such that the population is unlikely to be distributed in the kind of uniformly random way you need to get weirdly shaped, efficient districts, and conversely having weirdly shaped districts at all effectively assumes that geographic correlation of interests isn't an important factor. In other words: if we have to make weirdly shaped districts to maintain efficiency, then the assumptions that caused us to require districts in the first place probably fail and we should just ditch them.

sova 9y ago
Ideally: the Representative who is chosen for a district (the weird shapes we are talking about) _represents_ everyone of the populous of that district. That way in Congress, when someone asks "hey do your constituents want a factory next to that highway plus a bunch of taxbreaks?" the representative knows which way to vote, as s/he _represents_ the local people. The weird shapes, even if they increase "efficiency" don't actually account for locality much. It'd be better to use something like commuting maps to draw regions to ensure locality.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  Not only that, usually the "representative" doesn't even live in or near the area they are representing (sure, they may have an address in the area, but that isn't difficult to do).

oh_sigh 9y ago

> Our paper proves that in some cases, it’s impossible to get a small efficiency gap without drawing bizarrely shaped districts. Italics mine. Is there any reason to believe that any real life situation would fall under their impossibility? The key is to get a system which is good enough to prevent gerrymandering for the world that exists, not for any possible world.

dqpb 9y ago

Gerrymandering is so ridiculous. Clearly geographic coordinates is the wrong data structure for systematically biasing votes for/against certain demographics. A voting system should be explicit about exactly which demographic criteria should carry weighted bias, what value that weight should be, and what it's purpose is. It should also be clear to each voter which demographic categories they fall under, what the final strength of their vote will be, and what the justification is for that outcome.

importantbrian 9y ago

I think the real answer to all of this is to restore a reasonable ratio of population to representatives. It is much more difficult to Gerrymander 133 districts than with 9. It will still happen but the possible advantage one party can get is much smaller. The constituents also get much better representation, because they are much closer to the person representing them. The representative is intimately familiar with their constituents concerns because they live in and around them. It also strips a lot of the money out of politics. Representatives don't have to spend all their time fundraising to raise war chests of millions of dollars. You can win an election in a 30,000 person district by knocking on doors and sending out inexpensive mailers. http://www.thirty-thousand.org/ http://www.thirty-thousand.org/

crb002 9y ago

There is also gerrymandering against independents and third parties. A fair metric minimizes average distance from a citizen to the centroid of their district. The lowest energy Voronoi diagram wins. Nobody gets screwed.