12 ms·

Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

125 points by mathfan 9y ago

garmaine 9y ago
Dammit. For some years now I have been pointing out to people who would listen that what we need are policy solutions rooted in mathematical analysis, my go to case being gerrymandering. It seemed quite obvious that we could use geometric smoothing to set district boundaries based on census data to remove people from the process and therefore gerrymandering. Guess I had an untested assumption which wasn’t true, which is humbling.
- mathfan2 9y ago
  One proposed implementation of your suggestion is the shortest split line algorithm: http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html The OP also uses split lines, but they are optimized for maximum partisan effect.
  - garmaine 9y ago
    Ah. So it’s a case of “we can sound like we’re doing geometric optimization, but really only partially optimize in an exploitable way”? Thanks for the summary. I’m at work and won’t be able to review he actual paper until later.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  Removing people from the process doesn't remove gerrymandering, it means that the gerrymandering will be done by analyzing the short and long-term (based on demographic trends) effects of different mathematical criteria, with partisan actors legislating the most advantageous criteria. You eliminate gerrymandering by eliminating single-member FPTP legislative districts in favor of multimeter districts with a system producing proportional results (Single Transferrable Vote or some similar candidate-centered method, or a party-list method, though I prefer the former.)
  - squiggleblaz 9y ago
    You don't eliminate gerrymandering in that way. You limit it. STV works best in limited magnitude districts (three or five seems to be preferred) or else the number of options becomes too difficult for humans to express a coherent useful and accurate set of preferences. Once you limit magnitude, you can draw your districts to benefit you. For instance, perhaps you'll discover a preference for two or four seaters in reasonably strong Democrat areas and three seaters in reasonably strong Republican areas. You need fifty percent plus one to get a majority of seats in an odd numbered district, but fifty percent plus one only gets you fifty percent of the seats in an even numbered district. I can imagine Americans spending huge amounts of political capital for years getting STV in, only to discover that one party still has a manufactured majority because they wasted votes efficiently. Its true that gerrymanders per se become harder and harder the higher the magnitude, but if your problem is you have a political system that is opposed to hearing the will of the people they're going to find a way to stuff their ears no matter what voting system you pick. (Aside: Open list PR is both candidate centred and party-list. You vote for Fred Nurk of the Purple Party. That helps the Purple Party win more seats, and it moves Fred Nurk up in the list. It seems to be the only tick-a-box election system which doesn't devolve into FPTP in a district magnitude of 1 so it might be appealing in the US, where several states only elect a single representative. e.g. You vote for Gregory Hsien of the Maroon Party, who stands in a group with Josephine Yusuf of the Red Party. The Red-Maroon group win one more vote than the Blue-Cyan group even though the Blue party got more votes than the Red party. Reds win because you voted for their ally, the Maroons.)
tantalor 9y ago
Article mentions the efficiency gap metric; here is another: "Assessing significance in a Markov chain without mixing" We present a new statistical test to detect that a presented state of a reversible Markov chain was not chosen from a stationary distribution... We illustrate the use of our test with a potential application to the rigorous detection of gerrymandering in Congressional districtings. https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02014 https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02014
deleted 9y ago
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mannykannot 9y ago
The framers of the US constitution were remarkably prescient about a number of things, but my guess is that they did not anticipate gerrymandering, or at least its effectiveness. I would be very interested to hear otherwise.
- NelsonMinar 9y ago
  Gerrymandering is a very old idea. The term itself was coined in 1810, and was in practice well before then. The 1788 election in Virginia was gerrymandered, the same year the Constitution was ratified. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-league-of/309084/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-lea... There's a significant difference in the modern era in that gerrymandering can be much more precise. The 2010 districts the Republicans drew in several states are very sophisticated works of statistics, GIS, and political science. I fear what machine learning techniques are going to do in 2020.
- sdeer 9y ago
  Actually one of the attendees at the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry was partially responsible for the first Gerrymandered voting districts and the concept is named for him (and the fact that one of the districts was depicted shaped like a Salamander in a cartoon.)
- Amorymeltzer 9y ago
  More likely, they did not anticipate that the country would be almost completely dominated by a (hyper)partisan, two-party system. Not only were established parties not in existence at the drafting, but the presidential election system immediately broke down under a two-party system.
- delecti 9y ago
  And if you're right (which I also suspect), I'd be curious what they would have tried to do to prevent it. Not because it's necessarily useful to solve today's problem, but because it'd be interesting to see.
- int_19h 9y ago
  They did not anticipate parties. Or rather they did, but they really didn't like them, and assumed that they would be able to prevent the political system from being dominated by them. And it takes parties to gerrymander. Also, I think it's partly because at the country's founding, most hot political issues had a clear large-scale geographic distribution, and so geographic districts were considered an adequate way to capture the overall mood.
gumby 9y ago
Redistricting commissions should recruit go players. There can be an amusing side-effect to aggressive gerrymandering. Let's say a state has a small majority of party A, but districts that are strongly partisan (let's say 80%) for A or B. You only need 50% to win your district -- that extra 30% is "wasted" and would be more valuable if those voters were pushed into one of B's districts. Which is one of the things partisan redistricters do. Now they have more districts with a comfortable 55% margin and an assured lock on more districts, right? Umm, well, now they've made it easier for the other side to capture districts too...and it happens. There's no magic way to avoid bizarre results (check out the wikipedia pages on the districting, and on voting methods, for some eye-opening problems), but something close to algorithmic probably ends up the least controversial and most comprehensible in the long run.
- Retric 9y ago
  It's not just about party, an unusually disliked candidate can tank most districts. In the end it's a very complex optimization problem with benefits in the short term measured vs the risk of losing redistricting power in 10 years etc. Even a slight bias can let you shift resources to more competitive races etc. PS: IMO it's really a scale problem. If districts give a ~3% advantage that's huge in aggregate, but races still feel competitive. However, we are currently in a situation where nobody bothers to run in many races and that does not promote democracy.
- mathfan2 9y ago
  > something close to algorithmic probably ends up the least controversial and most comprehensible in the long run One suggestion in this direction is the shortest split line algorithm: http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html (The OP also uses split lines, but they are optimized for maximum partisan effect rather than minimum length.)
openasocket 9y ago
OT, but there's another really interesting, related problem at the intersection of mathematics and politics, which is apportionment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...). The US House of Representatives has a certain number of seats (currently 435) and, based on the results of the census, those seats are assigned to the 50 states according to their populations. But the proportions don't always divide evenly, and you can't give a state 7.35 representative seats, so you need a method for determining the fairest division of representatives. And it turns out there is no optimal solution in the general case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_paradox). I point out this problem because it is one of the few times you will find Supreme Court cases and writings by the Founders on what algorithm to use. A bill changing the apportionment algorithm was subject to the very first presidential veto. The first proposed amendment to the Constitution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Am...) was on the subject of apportionment. When else will you find the highest levels of government debating the merits of algorithms and mathematics?
- taoistextremist 9y ago
  It's actually one topic I've grown to agree with my extremely conservative father on, that they should have never fixed the seats at 435. This was done long after the founding of the country (relative to the age of the country, that is), but if we had kept the original apportionment we'd have one of the largest legislatures in the world. It wouldn't solve the apportionment problem, but it would make the unfairness of any given solution much less consequential and also it would make gerrymandering harder (though still not impossible).
  - specialist 9y ago
    I think of it as a scale problem. A Representative's front office is basically a call center & triage operation. The embodiment of the Politics of Attention (squeaky wheel gets the grease). What's the ideal size for a constituency? To maximize responsiveness, accountability, effectiveness? 100k? 200k? 400k? I don't know, but I'd like to find out.
pmc1 9y ago
We desperately need to get away from the hyper-partisan, two party system. An Either-Or system was not what the framers had in mind and is damaging. While not the most popular position, I ALWAYS vote for the 3rd party candidate with reasonable policies for the sake of our country.
- MBCook 9y ago
  Even with only two real parties if things were drawn to maximize competitiveness then at least the parties would be forced to play towards the center instead of their more extreme bases. Not ideal but much better than what has been going on since the 2000s.
  - boomboomsubban 9y ago
    I don't see how it maximizes competitiveness. Even in a perfectly split district, the primary generally has to play towards the base, and it's easier to get more members of your base to vote than to convert someone from the other party. The bipartisan attempt to neutralize other parties helps with that, it's easier for a Republican to turn a Libertarian voter to their side than a Democrat voter.
    - MBCook 9y ago
      Competitiveness forces candidates to balance playing to the base with not alienating the other side, lest they turn out against you. In the current system the question is who can be the most conservative/liberal. There is little downside to pushing further because there are more votes there but few people you’ll drive away.
      - boomboomsubban 9y ago
        The check to that is more parties, where the most conservative/liberal has actual competition on being the most extreme. Your change to gerrymandering doesn't make pushing for the extremes a worse strategy. Even in a perfectly split district, roughly 25% vote Democrat, 25% Republican, and 50% don't vote. That 50% is a better target than any voters on the fence.
vpeters25 9y ago
I have been thinking on a "simple rule" that could mitigate gerrymandering: 1. No congressional district can span more than 1 partial city and/or county. This will force districts to be drawn to cover whole cities/counties and would stop ridiculous districts such as the Texas 34th which covers parts of at least 8 counties from the gulf coast up to San Antonio
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > No congressional district can span more than 1 partial city and/or county. State legislatures control the definition of administrative subdivisions of the state just as much as they do Congressional districts, so that rule does nothing. A state that is really committed to gerrymandering will just move city and county lines when it redistricts. A smarter but still corrupt state legislature that wants to gerrymander without disrupting functional local government will make “city” and “county” names of ceremonial subdivisions used for limited purposes, so that redrawing their lines doesn't have much practical effect, and adopt a different set of subdivisions with overlapping lines for most functional local government purposes (“urbanizations” and “parishes”, perhaps.)
- ihaveajob 9y ago
  This sounds like a good idea at first, but I'm sure you would run into issues of large disparity in the importance of each vote. Not that it doesn't happen right now, but this would exacerbate the problem by introducing a force granularity level (beside the state level).
eli 9y ago
Sadly it is a bit out of date (requires Flash), but there is a neat game/simulation where you can test out different redistricting strategies SimCity style: http://www.redistrictinggame.org/ http://www.redistrictinggame.org/ There are no easy answers. I believe the game makers advocate for independent non-partisan commissions who are restricted in how they're allowed to create maps.
- lambertsimnel 9y ago
  You might be interested in this web-based/mobile/PC game about gerrymandering from this year: https://chequered.ink/districts-game/ https://chequered.ink/districts-game/
seanalltogether 9y ago
I've been wanting to play with code for awhile to see how effective a "huddle" algorithm might be. The idea being that people with similar interests tend to huddle together into areas of a large city or regions of the state they feel match their lifestyle. I'm not sure exactly how it would work but I imagine some kind of flood fill where you start with a population center and grow outward from it. Those should fill up quickly and by the end you should have large rural districts to finish off the state.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Effective at what? One potential goal of gerrymandering is packing your opponents into as few districts as possible. Which is ultimately the problem with algorithmic approaches; "fair" isn't an objective measure.
  - specialist 9y ago
    I'm warming up to the idea of voter efficiency. And the various form of elections are absolutely more or less fair, eg FPTP vs Approval Voting.
  - smelterdemon 9y ago
    Efficiency gap is a decent objective metric of fairness.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      It's not an algorithm for drawing districts though, it's a score computed for a given plan. And it depends on selecting binary sides. How do you objectively deal with a popular moderate?
- specialist 9y ago
  Huddle? Like the phyles in Stephenson's Diamond Age? I'm very political, partisan. I'm seeing first hand the rise of interest group organizing as the political parties continue to decline. This sea change is making me very optimistic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyle The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado http://a.co/gQ7VIS7 http://a.co/gQ7VIS7
TSiege 9y ago
Districting has time and time again proven to be a cat and mouse endeavor. Someone is always going to be able to create models to game the system one way or another. The real solution is abandoning districting for proportional representation like a true democracy. This Vox opinion piece is a great explainer, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/11/16453512/gerrymandering-proportional-representation https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/11/16453512/...
- openasocket 9y ago
  "proportional representation" is a generic term for a wide variety of possible representational systems. And each system has their own advantages and disadvantages. Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but can mean quite a lot in very large states. Other solutions use districts, but have multiple representatives per district, and have a method for apportioning those representatives. These are still vulnerable to gerrymandering, though its effectiveness is less pronounced as the number of representatives per district increases. But apportionment can be complicated. Some of these methods change the way voting works so that you vote for a political party rather than a specific candidate, which comes with a bunch of advantages and disadvantages. All to say that, while different methods for representation should absolutely be considered and discussed, it's important to remember that none of these are a panacea, and we should be upfront about the nuances and disadvantages of every option.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > All to say that, while different methods for representation should absolutely be considered and discussed, it's important to remember that none of these are a panacea Well, other than that more proportional results, by whatever means, seem consistently across modern democracies to provide government with which the people are more satisfied, and also provide a higher dimensionality to the range of political ideas and debate. (See Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy.) Every options has positive and negative traits, but single-member FPTP districts are about the worst, on balance. Well, worst would be that plus having districts that don't even try to have similar population, so that the results are even less proportional than you'd expect with FPTP in single-member districts.
niftich 9y ago
I'm reading the paper, but the example on the webpage is pretty contrived. Yes, the resulting "nice looking" districts are mathematically simple to specify, but narrow triangle-shaped wedges won't pass the smell test for most people. Or any triangles! The world underneath is full of other facts on the ground, like municipal boundaries, county lines, and the like. Districts that deviate too far from these other entities -- entities that are already being used for governance and administration -- then clearly some trickery is going on to deliberately cherry-pick people for some reason. Tying districts to more closely resemble existing administration boundaries won't magically solve this issue -- packing, cracking, nonsensical groupings are still a danger -- but it's a sensible baseline expectation that can be used to build on. When applied together with nonpartisan redistricting, perceived compactness, and efficiency gap metric, as the article notes, it can produce reasonable results.
- mathfan2 9y ago
  > the example on the webpage is pretty contrived That's true, but the point of the demonstration is simply that the snaky, salamander-looking shapes are not necessary. There's every reason to believe that you can achieve stunning examples of partisan gerrymandering under various "nice shape" criteria. You are correct that the "n-1 split lines" is simply very easy to state mathematically.
- OliverJones 9y ago
  > clearly some trickery is going on to deliberately cherry-pick people for some reason. Yah think? Read David Daley's book Ratf*cked. http://www.worldcat.org/title/ratfucked-the-true-story-behind-the-secret-plan-to-steal-americas-democracy/oclc/951464799 http://www.worldcat.org/title/ratfucked-the-true-story-behin...
froindt 9y ago
For some more content on gerrymandering, I suggest FiveThirtyEight's "The Gerrymandering Project". Episode 1 goes through the two major ways gerrymandering gets applied, and also discusses that just because a district has a weird shape doesn't necessarily mean it is gerrymandered. And because I've never seen a social media post about gerrymandering favoring democrats, I'd like to add the efficiency gap chart from [2]. 8/26 states listed on the efficiency gap chart here are listed as favoring democrats. I fully recognize right now gerrymandering favors republicans significantly, however I'd like to note in some areas democrats are favored. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/ [2] https://www.azavea.com/blog/2017/07/19/gerrymandered-states-ranked-efficiency-gap-seat-advantage/ https://www.azavea.com/blog/2017/07/19/gerrymandered-states-...
phjesusthatguy3 9y ago
Michigan Radio reported this morning[0] that some group turned in a petition with more than 400,000 signatures for getting how in-state districts are drawn revampted. [0]http://michiganradio.org/post/redistricting-drive-step-closer-2018-ballot http://michiganradio.org/post/redistricting-drive-step-close...
CivBase 9y ago
Gerrymandering is a problem because we have a poor voting system. I'm not sure if a single transferrable vote (STV) is the best system, but it would significantly reduce the benefit of gerrymandering (and probably result in better candidates from both parties). CGP Grey did a great video on STV: https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI
- taoistextremist 9y ago
  I don't think STV presents any function that would really prevent gerrymandering. The only thing it might do is allow entry of third parties, but even that's not guaranteed. But a party could still design districts that they'd always have a shot at the second round in every district while other parties don't. What could potentially help is to have a legislative body not determined by geography, possibly some kind of proportional party system (the downside being you need to make parties a formal part of the system, but they'll always be present anyways), that must ratify redistricting proposals and can challenge currently drawn districts.
  - lambertsimnel 9y ago
    "STV" actually refers to at least two related systems. You seem to be commenting on the single-winner form (also called "Instant Runoff Voting" in the United States). The multi-winner form is a form of proportional representation and as such would provide substantial protection from gerrymandering. The Australian terms "majority-preferential" and "quota-preferential" help make the difference (and the connection) clear.
    - squiggleblaz 9y ago
      I think the concern is that you could still, in principle, draw districts that gave you lots of seats, because they're relatively small. STV isn't proportional by design. You want as many of their votes as possible to wind up in the fourth of three quotas, and as many of yours as possible to end up in the three quotas that win seats. For instance, it may be that Us in some state just suddenly start winning two out of three seats in most districts. Make sure the two seat districts go in areas where They have a bit more than fifty percent but not a full two quotas so they split one apiece. The goal is still to waste as many of Their votes as possible to get fifty percent plus one seats. PR is no panacea. To avoid gerrymandering, you need an adequately high district magnitude. After all, majority-preferential is just quota-preferential with a magnitude of 1. And FPTP is just List PR with a magnitude of 1.
OliverJones 9y ago
In an two-stage election system, rigging the districts to make the second stage irrelevant to the outcome, well, makes the first stage relevant to the outcome. When the first stage elections are contested among isolated ideological subsets of the electorate their results tend to extreme positions. What I'm saying is this: it is inevitable that the REDMAP project that yielded the kinds of district-level results shown in this article will continue to generate more and more extremist election results. Ryan and McConnell, and the whole US federal house of representatives, have bought and paid for their dysfunction with this systematic gerrymandering. The situation isn't going to improve as long as this holds. Pouring money into contesting the general elections in these districts is entirely a waste. It enriches nobody but robocall and television companies, and doesn't affect the outcome.
- specialist 9y ago
  Agree with your analysis, sentiment. It's still necessary to contest every race. Because of down ballot races. Moving the needle 5 points in a statewide race can mean winning a lot of local elections. Ditto putting initiatives on the ballot, which motivate your base to turn out.
- int_19h 9y ago
  I very much agree with this. What gerrymandering (and partisan voter suppression) does, is reduce the number of competitive districts in the country. Next year, the expected number of competitive House districts is 23 to 38 - out of 450! So, in over 400 districts, primaries are the only thing that matters. On the other hand, primaries attract more motivated voters than the general. And those motivated voters tend to be motivated by their ideological positions - in other words, they're more extremist. From the perspective of candidates in the primary, they have to pander to those more extreme voters to get to the general - but they have no incentive to pander to the center, because even the more centrist members of their own party will vote for them over the opposition candidate anyway. This also sets up a positive feedback loop, where even less ideologically radical voters, forced to vote for more and more extreme candidates of their party in the general, adopt at least some of the positions of those extreme candidates over time (making it easier to cast such a vote). Which in turn makes primaries more extreme, and shifts the overall party platform in that same direction. We've already seen Republicans walk down that road, and where it got them. Now Democrats are going through the same process (Indivisible etc). It looks like we're undergoing the last political realignment possible in the current system, and at the end of it, we'll have two "ideologically pure" parties, with most voters going for straight party ticket, and with most legislative votes going down party lines. At which point the system is going to deadlock, because it pretty much requires some compromise to function properly.
curun1r 9y ago
While I'm as angry as anyone about the way that districts have been gerrymandered in the US, it also bugs me when I see critiques about gerrymandering that try to provoke outrage by showing the shapes of the districts and implying that districts should be square or otherwise simplistically shaped when viewed aerially. Humans don't fly, so the aerial view seems irrelevant and disingenuous to me. It reminds me somewhat of a program on The History Channel called "How the States Got Their Shapes." And one of the really interesting parts was how states in the eastern part of the country had their lines drawn before the railroads and most in the west after the railroads. And so you see many more rivers, mountains and other natural features affecting state borders back east and a lot more straight border lines in the west. There's a very good reason (the Potomac) why Maryland's border looks the way it does, but if you just showed people the shape and told them it was a congressional district, it wouldn't be hard to convince them it was the result of gerrymandering. I wonder whether there's a better way to visualize voting districts, perhaps using Google Maps transit data to visualize public transport/drive times to polling stations. There would still be the issue of deciding where to place polling stations, but it seems like once that's been decided, a district's shape should be derived from including all addresses that are most easily able to travel to those polling places. This would naturally create odd shapes, especially along freeways, bus/train lines and such. But making it as easy as possible for people to vote seems, to me, more important than having a simple shape.
- deleted 9y ago
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skj 9y ago
Here's an idea: 1. decide how many congresspeople there should be 2. allow anyone to run 3. allow anyone to vote for anyone 4. once someone has #voters/#congresspeople, they become a congressperson 5. no one else can vote for that person So, you're not actually competing against another person. You're competing get enough people to say "this person represents me".
- tzs 9y ago
  Interesting idea. It has a some troubling flaws, though. First, in order to make the lockout in #5 work it would seem that the votes need to be tallied in real time as they are cast. This could be addressed in a couple of ways. (A) Allow votes of the form: Vote for candidate C1 If C1 is locked out, vote for C2 If C2 is locked out, vote for C3 ... That would allow processing votes in batches, ordered by time stamp. (B) Instead of a lockout, allow a candidate to receive more votes than the #voters/#congresspeople threshold. Each voter starts with a weighted vote with weight 1, and provides a list of alternative candidates similar to from (A). If C1 gets a total weighted vote above the election threshold, choose t such that if each voters weight is multiplied by t the total for C1 will exactly equal the threshold. For each C1 voter, split their vote giving t of it to C1, and 1-t of it to their C2. Iterate through this until it converges. (I think it must converge, but offhand do not have a proof). Second, you need to know the number of voters in advance to set the threshold. Note that you need the actual number of people who will vote, not just the number of eligible voters, because if you use the later you will be setting the threshold too high. Third, if the number of people running is large, it is quite possible nobody reaches the election threshold. You need a procedure to whittle down the number of candidates.
  - squiggleblaz 9y ago
    Congratulations, you've just devised the single transferable vote used in Ireland, Malta and Australia. Assuming that "the procedure to whittle down the number of candidates" is "exclude the worst-performing candidate and continue to their C2".
- drdeca 9y ago
  Intriguing. Could a person have their vote assigned to more than one person if none of them have won yet? (Probably with some sort of ranking to resolve any ambiguities as to who their vote goes to) I'm not sure if that would be the optimal threshold for number of votes needed. Here is an idea for a small modification: First, have all the voters vote on the number of congresspeople to have, and then pick the median (if there is an even number of votes, and the middle two are different, pick between the two at random). Then, after the result of the first vote has been decided, have everyone vote on the vote threshold (making sure that they are informed of what the voters/seats number), and again, take the median of the votes (and again, if a tie between 2 values, pick between the two at random. Don't average them.). Then do what you said, with the chosen number of seats and the chosen vote threshold. There are no doubt some downsides to this method. I don't yet have enough understanding of them to fully recommend it, but it seems worth looking into!
greyfox 9y ago
Does anyone know why gerrymandering only includes Democrat and Republican parties? Surely some states like New Mexico who, at the time, had a third party Governor must have had districts that voted in majority for third party candidates.
realcoopernurse 9y ago
Here's a relatively new PR method developed by a grad student at Harvard. It's an interesting twist on STV that avoids the ballot complexity. https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-explained-129e65cbb625 https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-explained-129... I agree with others on this thread that the only solution to gerrymandering is some form of PR. PLACE voting is interesting because it doesn't require a change in the ballot and retains the notion of geographic districts.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  Not requiring a change of ballots when you are doing very different things with them is, IMO, a negative traits because it creates a false familiarity. When you are changing how ballots work, this should be unavoidably obvious, even to people who spent the time the change was being debated in a coma or Antarctic research expedition. Also, STV in small (~5 member) districts gets much improved proportionality from the status quo, keeps geographic districts, and increases the proportion of people with someone representing both their ideology and district simultaneously.
  - Sniffnoy 9y ago
    > Not requiring a change of ballots when you are doing very different things with them is, IMO, a negative traits because it creates a false familiarity. I don't think that's something you can really do with voting systems, though. Lots of voting systems are based around the same input assumptions, i.e., people are submitting a rank-order of preferences. And nothing's saying you'd have to switch to PLACE from STV rather than from FPTP. Regardless I think it doesn't make a lot of sense to associate ordinal ballots with STV specifically rather than just, well, what they are, which is a rank-order of preferences, that will get used somehow.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > I don't think that's something you can really do with voting systems You can sometimes, you can't others. > Lots of voting systems are based around the same input assumptions, i.e., people are submitting a rank-order of preferences But FPTP is not based on that input, so changing from FPTP to a more proportional system (many of which rely on that kind of input) provided a clear opportunity to have a clean break without false familiarity. > And nothing's saying you'd have to switch to PLACE from STV rather than from FPTP. The false familiarity is FPTP -> PLACE.

125 points by mathfan 9y ago

Dammit. For some years now I have been pointing out to people who would listen that what we need are policy solutions rooted in mathematical analysis, my go to case being gerrymandering. It seemed quite obvious that we could use geometric smoothing to set district boundaries based on census data to remove people from the process and therefore gerrymandering. Guess I had an untested assumption which wasn’t true, which is humbling.

mathfan2 9y ago
One proposed implementation of your suggestion is the shortest split line algorithm: http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html The OP also uses split lines, but they are optimized for maximum partisan effect.
- garmaine 9y ago
  Ah. So it’s a case of “we can sound like we’re doing geometric optimization, but really only partially optimize in an exploitable way”? Thanks for the summary. I’m at work and won’t be able to review he actual paper until later.
dragonwriter 9y ago
Removing people from the process doesn't remove gerrymandering, it means that the gerrymandering will be done by analyzing the short and long-term (based on demographic trends) effects of different mathematical criteria, with partisan actors legislating the most advantageous criteria. You eliminate gerrymandering by eliminating single-member FPTP legislative districts in favor of multimeter districts with a system producing proportional results (Single Transferrable Vote or some similar candidate-centered method, or a party-list method, though I prefer the former.)
- squiggleblaz 9y ago
  You don't eliminate gerrymandering in that way. You limit it. STV works best in limited magnitude districts (three or five seems to be preferred) or else the number of options becomes too difficult for humans to express a coherent useful and accurate set of preferences. Once you limit magnitude, you can draw your districts to benefit you. For instance, perhaps you'll discover a preference for two or four seaters in reasonably strong Democrat areas and three seaters in reasonably strong Republican areas. You need fifty percent plus one to get a majority of seats in an odd numbered district, but fifty percent plus one only gets you fifty percent of the seats in an even numbered district. I can imagine Americans spending huge amounts of political capital for years getting STV in, only to discover that one party still has a manufactured majority because they wasted votes efficiently. Its true that gerrymanders per se become harder and harder the higher the magnitude, but if your problem is you have a political system that is opposed to hearing the will of the people they're going to find a way to stuff their ears no matter what voting system you pick. (Aside: Open list PR is both candidate centred and party-list. You vote for Fred Nurk of the Purple Party. That helps the Purple Party win more seats, and it moves Fred Nurk up in the list. It seems to be the only tick-a-box election system which doesn't devolve into FPTP in a district magnitude of 1 so it might be appealing in the US, where several states only elect a single representative. e.g. You vote for Gregory Hsien of the Maroon Party, who stands in a group with Josephine Yusuf of the Red Party. The Red-Maroon group win one more vote than the Blue-Cyan group even though the Blue party got more votes than the Red party. Reds win because you voted for their ally, the Maroons.)

tantalor 9y ago

Article mentions the efficiency gap metric; here is another: "Assessing significance in a Markov chain without mixing" We present a new statistical test to detect that a presented state of a reversible Markov chain was not chosen from a stationary distribution... We illustrate the use of our test with a potential application to the rigorous detection of gerrymandering in Congressional districtings. https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02014 https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02014

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mannykannot 9y ago

The framers of the US constitution were remarkably prescient about a number of things, but my guess is that they did not anticipate gerrymandering, or at least its effectiveness. I would be very interested to hear otherwise.

NelsonMinar 9y ago
Gerrymandering is a very old idea. The term itself was coined in 1810, and was in practice well before then. The 1788 election in Virginia was gerrymandered, the same year the Constitution was ratified. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-league-of/309084/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-lea... There's a significant difference in the modern era in that gerrymandering can be much more precise. The 2010 districts the Republicans drew in several states are very sophisticated works of statistics, GIS, and political science. I fear what machine learning techniques are going to do in 2020.
sdeer 9y ago
Actually one of the attendees at the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry was partially responsible for the first Gerrymandered voting districts and the concept is named for him (and the fact that one of the districts was depicted shaped like a Salamander in a cartoon.)
Amorymeltzer 9y ago
More likely, they did not anticipate that the country would be almost completely dominated by a (hyper)partisan, two-party system. Not only were established parties not in existence at the drafting, but the presidential election system immediately broke down under a two-party system.
delecti 9y ago
And if you're right (which I also suspect), I'd be curious what they would have tried to do to prevent it. Not because it's necessarily useful to solve today's problem, but because it'd be interesting to see.
int_19h 9y ago
They did not anticipate parties. Or rather they did, but they really didn't like them, and assumed that they would be able to prevent the political system from being dominated by them. And it takes parties to gerrymander. Also, I think it's partly because at the country's founding, most hot political issues had a clear large-scale geographic distribution, and so geographic districts were considered an adequate way to capture the overall mood.

gumby 9y ago

Redistricting commissions should recruit go players. There can be an amusing side-effect to aggressive gerrymandering. Let's say a state has a small majority of party A, but districts that are strongly partisan (let's say 80%) for A or B. You only need 50% to win your district -- that extra 30% is "wasted" and would be more valuable if those voters were pushed into one of B's districts. Which is one of the things partisan redistricters do. Now they have more districts with a comfortable 55% margin and an assured lock on more districts, right? Umm, well, now they've made it easier for the other side to capture districts too...and it happens. There's no magic way to avoid bizarre results (check out the wikipedia pages on the districting, and on voting methods, for some eye-opening problems), but something close to algorithmic probably ends up the least controversial and most comprehensible in the long run.

Retric 9y ago
It's not just about party, an unusually disliked candidate can tank most districts. In the end it's a very complex optimization problem with benefits in the short term measured vs the risk of losing redistricting power in 10 years etc. Even a slight bias can let you shift resources to more competitive races etc. PS: IMO it's really a scale problem. If districts give a ~3% advantage that's huge in aggregate, but races still feel competitive. However, we are currently in a situation where nobody bothers to run in many races and that does not promote democracy.
mathfan2 9y ago
> something close to algorithmic probably ends up the least controversial and most comprehensible in the long run One suggestion in this direction is the shortest split line algorithm: http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html (The OP also uses split lines, but they are optimized for maximum partisan effect rather than minimum length.)

openasocket 9y ago

OT, but there's another really interesting, related problem at the intersection of mathematics and politics, which is apportionment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...). The US House of Representatives has a certain number of seats (currently 435) and, based on the results of the census, those seats are assigned to the 50 states according to their populations. But the proportions don't always divide evenly, and you can't give a state 7.35 representative seats, so you need a method for determining the fairest division of representatives. And it turns out there is no optimal solution in the general case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_paradox). I point out this problem because it is one of the few times you will find Supreme Court cases and writings by the Founders on what algorithm to use. A bill changing the apportionment algorithm was subject to the very first presidential veto. The first proposed amendment to the Constitution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Am...) was on the subject of apportionment. When else will you find the highest levels of government debating the merits of algorithms and mathematics?

taoistextremist 9y ago
It's actually one topic I've grown to agree with my extremely conservative father on, that they should have never fixed the seats at 435. This was done long after the founding of the country (relative to the age of the country, that is), but if we had kept the original apportionment we'd have one of the largest legislatures in the world. It wouldn't solve the apportionment problem, but it would make the unfairness of any given solution much less consequential and also it would make gerrymandering harder (though still not impossible).
- specialist 9y ago
  I think of it as a scale problem. A Representative's front office is basically a call center & triage operation. The embodiment of the Politics of Attention (squeaky wheel gets the grease). What's the ideal size for a constituency? To maximize responsiveness, accountability, effectiveness? 100k? 200k? 400k? I don't know, but I'd like to find out.

pmc1 9y ago

We desperately need to get away from the hyper-partisan, two party system. An Either-Or system was not what the framers had in mind and is damaging. While not the most popular position, I ALWAYS vote for the 3rd party candidate with reasonable policies for the sake of our country.

MBCook 9y ago
Even with only two real parties if things were drawn to maximize competitiveness then at least the parties would be forced to play towards the center instead of their more extreme bases. Not ideal but much better than what has been going on since the 2000s.
- boomboomsubban 9y ago
  I don't see how it maximizes competitiveness. Even in a perfectly split district, the primary generally has to play towards the base, and it's easier to get more members of your base to vote than to convert someone from the other party. The bipartisan attempt to neutralize other parties helps with that, it's easier for a Republican to turn a Libertarian voter to their side than a Democrat voter.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    Competitiveness forces candidates to balance playing to the base with not alienating the other side, lest they turn out against you. In the current system the question is who can be the most conservative/liberal. There is little downside to pushing further because there are more votes there but few people you’ll drive away.
    - boomboomsubban 9y ago
      The check to that is more parties, where the most conservative/liberal has actual competition on being the most extreme. Your change to gerrymandering doesn't make pushing for the extremes a worse strategy. Even in a perfectly split district, roughly 25% vote Democrat, 25% Republican, and 50% don't vote. That 50% is a better target than any voters on the fence.

vpeters25 9y ago

I have been thinking on a "simple rule" that could mitigate gerrymandering: 1. No congressional district can span more than 1 partial city and/or county. This will force districts to be drawn to cover whole cities/counties and would stop ridiculous districts such as the Texas 34th which covers parts of at least 8 counties from the gulf coast up to San Antonio

dragonwriter 9y ago
> No congressional district can span more than 1 partial city and/or county. State legislatures control the definition of administrative subdivisions of the state just as much as they do Congressional districts, so that rule does nothing. A state that is really committed to gerrymandering will just move city and county lines when it redistricts. A smarter but still corrupt state legislature that wants to gerrymander without disrupting functional local government will make “city” and “county” names of ceremonial subdivisions used for limited purposes, so that redrawing their lines doesn't have much practical effect, and adopt a different set of subdivisions with overlapping lines for most functional local government purposes (“urbanizations” and “parishes”, perhaps.)
ihaveajob 9y ago
This sounds like a good idea at first, but I'm sure you would run into issues of large disparity in the importance of each vote. Not that it doesn't happen right now, but this would exacerbate the problem by introducing a force granularity level (beside the state level).

eli 9y ago

Sadly it is a bit out of date (requires Flash), but there is a neat game/simulation where you can test out different redistricting strategies SimCity style: http://www.redistrictinggame.org/ http://www.redistrictinggame.org/ There are no easy answers. I believe the game makers advocate for independent non-partisan commissions who are restricted in how they're allowed to create maps.

lambertsimnel 9y ago
You might be interested in this web-based/mobile/PC game about gerrymandering from this year: https://chequered.ink/districts-game/ https://chequered.ink/districts-game/

seanalltogether 9y ago

I've been wanting to play with code for awhile to see how effective a "huddle" algorithm might be. The idea being that people with similar interests tend to huddle together into areas of a large city or regions of the state they feel match their lifestyle. I'm not sure exactly how it would work but I imagine some kind of flood fill where you start with a population center and grow outward from it. Those should fill up quickly and by the end you should have large rural districts to finish off the state.

maxerickson 9y ago
Effective at what? One potential goal of gerrymandering is packing your opponents into as few districts as possible. Which is ultimately the problem with algorithmic approaches; "fair" isn't an objective measure.
- specialist 9y ago
  I'm warming up to the idea of voter efficiency. And the various form of elections are absolutely more or less fair, eg FPTP vs Approval Voting.
- smelterdemon 9y ago
  Efficiency gap is a decent objective metric of fairness.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    It's not an algorithm for drawing districts though, it's a score computed for a given plan. And it depends on selecting binary sides. How do you objectively deal with a popular moderate?
specialist 9y ago
Huddle? Like the phyles in Stephenson's Diamond Age? I'm very political, partisan. I'm seeing first hand the rise of interest group organizing as the political parties continue to decline. This sea change is making me very optimistic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyle The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado http://a.co/gQ7VIS7 http://a.co/gQ7VIS7

TSiege 9y ago

Districting has time and time again proven to be a cat and mouse endeavor. Someone is always going to be able to create models to game the system one way or another. The real solution is abandoning districting for proportional representation like a true democracy. This Vox opinion piece is a great explainer, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/11/16453512/gerrymandering-proportional-representation https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/11/16453512/...

openasocket 9y ago
"proportional representation" is a generic term for a wide variety of possible representational systems. And each system has their own advantages and disadvantages. Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but can mean quite a lot in very large states. Other solutions use districts, but have multiple representatives per district, and have a method for apportioning those representatives. These are still vulnerable to gerrymandering, though its effectiveness is less pronounced as the number of representatives per district increases. But apportionment can be complicated. Some of these methods change the way voting works so that you vote for a political party rather than a specific candidate, which comes with a bunch of advantages and disadvantages. All to say that, while different methods for representation should absolutely be considered and discussed, it's important to remember that none of these are a panacea, and we should be upfront about the nuances and disadvantages of every option.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > All to say that, while different methods for representation should absolutely be considered and discussed, it's important to remember that none of these are a panacea Well, other than that more proportional results, by whatever means, seem consistently across modern democracies to provide government with which the people are more satisfied, and also provide a higher dimensionality to the range of political ideas and debate. (See Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy.) Every options has positive and negative traits, but single-member FPTP districts are about the worst, on balance. Well, worst would be that plus having districts that don't even try to have similar population, so that the results are even less proportional than you'd expect with FPTP in single-member districts.

niftich 9y ago

I'm reading the paper, but the example on the webpage is pretty contrived. Yes, the resulting "nice looking" districts are mathematically simple to specify, but narrow triangle-shaped wedges won't pass the smell test for most people. Or any triangles! The world underneath is full of other facts on the ground, like municipal boundaries, county lines, and the like. Districts that deviate too far from these other entities -- entities that are already being used for governance and administration -- then clearly some trickery is going on to deliberately cherry-pick people for some reason. Tying districts to more closely resemble existing administration boundaries won't magically solve this issue -- packing, cracking, nonsensical groupings are still a danger -- but it's a sensible baseline expectation that can be used to build on. When applied together with nonpartisan redistricting, perceived compactness, and efficiency gap metric, as the article notes, it can produce reasonable results.

mathfan2 9y ago
> the example on the webpage is pretty contrived That's true, but the point of the demonstration is simply that the snaky, salamander-looking shapes are not necessary. There's every reason to believe that you can achieve stunning examples of partisan gerrymandering under various "nice shape" criteria. You are correct that the "n-1 split lines" is simply very easy to state mathematically.
OliverJones 9y ago
> clearly some trickery is going on to deliberately cherry-pick people for some reason. Yah think? Read David Daley's book Ratf*cked. http://www.worldcat.org/title/ratfucked-the-true-story-behind-the-secret-plan-to-steal-americas-democracy/oclc/951464799 http://www.worldcat.org/title/ratfucked-the-true-story-behin...

froindt 9y ago

For some more content on gerrymandering, I suggest FiveThirtyEight's "The Gerrymandering Project". Episode 1 goes through the two major ways gerrymandering gets applied, and also discusses that just because a district has a weird shape doesn't necessarily mean it is gerrymandered. And because I've never seen a social media post about gerrymandering favoring democrats, I'd like to add the efficiency gap chart from [2]. 8/26 states listed on the efficiency gap chart here are listed as favoring democrats. I fully recognize right now gerrymandering favors republicans significantly, however I'd like to note in some areas democrats are favored. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/ [2] https://www.azavea.com/blog/2017/07/19/gerrymandered-states-ranked-efficiency-gap-seat-advantage/ https://www.azavea.com/blog/2017/07/19/gerrymandered-states-...

phjesusthatguy3 9y ago

Michigan Radio reported this morning[0] that some group turned in a petition with more than 400,000 signatures for getting how in-state districts are drawn revampted. [0]http://michiganradio.org/post/redistricting-drive-step-closer-2018-ballot http://michiganradio.org/post/redistricting-drive-step-close...

CivBase 9y ago

Gerrymandering is a problem because we have a poor voting system. I'm not sure if a single transferrable vote (STV) is the best system, but it would significantly reduce the benefit of gerrymandering (and probably result in better candidates from both parties). CGP Grey did a great video on STV: https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI

taoistextremist 9y ago
I don't think STV presents any function that would really prevent gerrymandering. The only thing it might do is allow entry of third parties, but even that's not guaranteed. But a party could still design districts that they'd always have a shot at the second round in every district while other parties don't. What could potentially help is to have a legislative body not determined by geography, possibly some kind of proportional party system (the downside being you need to make parties a formal part of the system, but they'll always be present anyways), that must ratify redistricting proposals and can challenge currently drawn districts.
- lambertsimnel 9y ago
  "STV" actually refers to at least two related systems. You seem to be commenting on the single-winner form (also called "Instant Runoff Voting" in the United States). The multi-winner form is a form of proportional representation and as such would provide substantial protection from gerrymandering. The Australian terms "majority-preferential" and "quota-preferential" help make the difference (and the connection) clear.
  - squiggleblaz 9y ago
    I think the concern is that you could still, in principle, draw districts that gave you lots of seats, because they're relatively small. STV isn't proportional by design. You want as many of their votes as possible to wind up in the fourth of three quotas, and as many of yours as possible to end up in the three quotas that win seats. For instance, it may be that Us in some state just suddenly start winning two out of three seats in most districts. Make sure the two seat districts go in areas where They have a bit more than fifty percent but not a full two quotas so they split one apiece. The goal is still to waste as many of Their votes as possible to get fifty percent plus one seats. PR is no panacea. To avoid gerrymandering, you need an adequately high district magnitude. After all, majority-preferential is just quota-preferential with a magnitude of 1. And FPTP is just List PR with a magnitude of 1.

OliverJones 9y ago

In an two-stage election system, rigging the districts to make the second stage irrelevant to the outcome, well, makes the first stage relevant to the outcome. When the first stage elections are contested among isolated ideological subsets of the electorate their results tend to extreme positions. What I'm saying is this: it is inevitable that the REDMAP project that yielded the kinds of district-level results shown in this article will continue to generate more and more extremist election results. Ryan and McConnell, and the whole US federal house of representatives, have bought and paid for their dysfunction with this systematic gerrymandering. The situation isn't going to improve as long as this holds. Pouring money into contesting the general elections in these districts is entirely a waste. It enriches nobody but robocall and television companies, and doesn't affect the outcome.

specialist 9y ago
Agree with your analysis, sentiment. It's still necessary to contest every race. Because of down ballot races. Moving the needle 5 points in a statewide race can mean winning a lot of local elections. Ditto putting initiatives on the ballot, which motivate your base to turn out.
int_19h 9y ago
I very much agree with this. What gerrymandering (and partisan voter suppression) does, is reduce the number of competitive districts in the country. Next year, the expected number of competitive House districts is 23 to 38 - out of 450! So, in over 400 districts, primaries are the only thing that matters. On the other hand, primaries attract more motivated voters than the general. And those motivated voters tend to be motivated by their ideological positions - in other words, they're more extremist. From the perspective of candidates in the primary, they have to pander to those more extreme voters to get to the general - but they have no incentive to pander to the center, because even the more centrist members of their own party will vote for them over the opposition candidate anyway. This also sets up a positive feedback loop, where even less ideologically radical voters, forced to vote for more and more extreme candidates of their party in the general, adopt at least some of the positions of those extreme candidates over time (making it easier to cast such a vote). Which in turn makes primaries more extreme, and shifts the overall party platform in that same direction. We've already seen Republicans walk down that road, and where it got them. Now Democrats are going through the same process (Indivisible etc). It looks like we're undergoing the last political realignment possible in the current system, and at the end of it, we'll have two "ideologically pure" parties, with most voters going for straight party ticket, and with most legislative votes going down party lines. At which point the system is going to deadlock, because it pretty much requires some compromise to function properly.

curun1r 9y ago

While I'm as angry as anyone about the way that districts have been gerrymandered in the US, it also bugs me when I see critiques about gerrymandering that try to provoke outrage by showing the shapes of the districts and implying that districts should be square or otherwise simplistically shaped when viewed aerially. Humans don't fly, so the aerial view seems irrelevant and disingenuous to me. It reminds me somewhat of a program on The History Channel called "How the States Got Their Shapes." And one of the really interesting parts was how states in the eastern part of the country had their lines drawn before the railroads and most in the west after the railroads. And so you see many more rivers, mountains and other natural features affecting state borders back east and a lot more straight border lines in the west. There's a very good reason (the Potomac) why Maryland's border looks the way it does, but if you just showed people the shape and told them it was a congressional district, it wouldn't be hard to convince them it was the result of gerrymandering. I wonder whether there's a better way to visualize voting districts, perhaps using Google Maps transit data to visualize public transport/drive times to polling stations. There would still be the issue of deciding where to place polling stations, but it seems like once that's been decided, a district's shape should be derived from including all addresses that are most easily able to travel to those polling places. This would naturally create odd shapes, especially along freeways, bus/train lines and such. But making it as easy as possible for people to vote seems, to me, more important than having a simple shape.

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skj 9y ago

Here's an idea: 1. decide how many congresspeople there should be 2. allow anyone to run 3. allow anyone to vote for anyone 4. once someone has #voters/#congresspeople, they become a congressperson 5. no one else can vote for that person So, you're not actually competing against another person. You're competing get enough people to say "this person represents me".

tzs 9y ago
Interesting idea. It has a some troubling flaws, though. First, in order to make the lockout in #5 work it would seem that the votes need to be tallied in real time as they are cast. This could be addressed in a couple of ways. (A) Allow votes of the form: Vote for candidate C1 If C1 is locked out, vote for C2 If C2 is locked out, vote for C3 ... That would allow processing votes in batches, ordered by time stamp. (B) Instead of a lockout, allow a candidate to receive more votes than the #voters/#congresspeople threshold. Each voter starts with a weighted vote with weight 1, and provides a list of alternative candidates similar to from (A). If C1 gets a total weighted vote above the election threshold, choose t such that if each voters weight is multiplied by t the total for C1 will exactly equal the threshold. For each C1 voter, split their vote giving t of it to C1, and 1-t of it to their C2. Iterate through this until it converges. (I think it must converge, but offhand do not have a proof). Second, you need to know the number of voters in advance to set the threshold. Note that you need the actual number of people who will vote, not just the number of eligible voters, because if you use the later you will be setting the threshold too high. Third, if the number of people running is large, it is quite possible nobody reaches the election threshold. You need a procedure to whittle down the number of candidates.
- squiggleblaz 9y ago
  Congratulations, you've just devised the single transferable vote used in Ireland, Malta and Australia. Assuming that "the procedure to whittle down the number of candidates" is "exclude the worst-performing candidate and continue to their C2".
drdeca 9y ago
Intriguing. Could a person have their vote assigned to more than one person if none of them have won yet? (Probably with some sort of ranking to resolve any ambiguities as to who their vote goes to) I'm not sure if that would be the optimal threshold for number of votes needed. Here is an idea for a small modification: First, have all the voters vote on the number of congresspeople to have, and then pick the median (if there is an even number of votes, and the middle two are different, pick between the two at random). Then, after the result of the first vote has been decided, have everyone vote on the vote threshold (making sure that they are informed of what the voters/seats number), and again, take the median of the votes (and again, if a tie between 2 values, pick between the two at random. Don't average them.). Then do what you said, with the chosen number of seats and the chosen vote threshold. There are no doubt some downsides to this method. I don't yet have enough understanding of them to fully recommend it, but it seems worth looking into!

greyfox 9y ago

Does anyone know why gerrymandering only includes Democrat and Republican parties? Surely some states like New Mexico who, at the time, had a third party Governor must have had districts that voted in majority for third party candidates.

realcoopernurse 9y ago

Here's a relatively new PR method developed by a grad student at Harvard. It's an interesting twist on STV that avoids the ballot complexity. https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-explained-129e65cbb625 https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-explained-129... I agree with others on this thread that the only solution to gerrymandering is some form of PR. PLACE voting is interesting because it doesn't require a change in the ballot and retains the notion of geographic districts.

dragonwriter 9y ago
Not requiring a change of ballots when you are doing very different things with them is, IMO, a negative traits because it creates a false familiarity. When you are changing how ballots work, this should be unavoidably obvious, even to people who spent the time the change was being debated in a coma or Antarctic research expedition. Also, STV in small (~5 member) districts gets much improved proportionality from the status quo, keeps geographic districts, and increases the proportion of people with someone representing both their ideology and district simultaneously.
- Sniffnoy 9y ago
  > Not requiring a change of ballots when you are doing very different things with them is, IMO, a negative traits because it creates a false familiarity. I don't think that's something you can really do with voting systems, though. Lots of voting systems are based around the same input assumptions, i.e., people are submitting a rank-order of preferences. And nothing's saying you'd have to switch to PLACE from STV rather than from FPTP. Regardless I think it doesn't make a lot of sense to associate ordinal ballots with STV specifically rather than just, well, what they are, which is a rank-order of preferences, that will get used somehow.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > I don't think that's something you can really do with voting systems You can sometimes, you can't others. > Lots of voting systems are based around the same input assumptions, i.e., people are submitting a rank-order of preferences But FPTP is not based on that input, so changing from FPTP to a more proportional system (many of which rely on that kind of input) provided a clear opportunity to have a clean break without false familiarity. > And nothing's saying you'd have to switch to PLACE from STV rather than from FPTP. The false familiarity is FPTP -> PLACE.