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One article I read said that there is a 30% Republican voter base that is covered by 76% of the congressional maps. They redrew the maps so they would have 10
by matt_s 9y ago
One article I read said that there is a 30% Republican voter base that is covered by 76% of the congressional maps. They redrew the maps so they would have 10 seats and Dems would have 3. In the past I've read the Democrats have done similar things.
As a software engineer, isn't there some way to draw maps which balance out demographics programmatically? While taking into consideration population, rural, suburban, urban areas, etc. Shouldn't there be a national policy/process that is followed?
It would make some sense to abolish recording what party people affiliate with. It really serves no purpose. Let people vote in both parties primaries.
- derwiki 9y agoSoftware would be relatively easy, enacting the policy difficult. Who would want to relinquish their power to a computer?
- wybiral 9y agoAnd the concerns of bias in the algorithm could still be there. As would the fear of hacking. Neither seem as big of an issue as flat-out intentional gerrymandering and could be mitigated by open review process. But it's unprecedented which makes it hard to enact without a lot of momentum.
- shove 9y agoIt's very true that in the past the Dems have behaved similarly. I used to agree (also a software engineer) that this is a puzzle that ought to be solveable with weighted voronoi diagrams or somesuch but then I read: https://peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/10/17/the-problem-of-defining-gerrymandering-and-what-can-be-done/ https://peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/10/17/the-problem-of-d...
- samch 9y agoI think the current analytical mechanism to achieve balance is by measuring the “efficiency gap.” https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=http://scholar.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=12542&context=journal_articles https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...
- jzylstra 9y agoThe recent coverage of considerations of the efficiency gap by the Supreme Court would be available here. The illustrative graphs provide a bit quicker of an introduction to the measure. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/courts-law/gerrymander/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/courts...
- jrauser 9y agoAccording to http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2017/08/22/analysis-large-efficiency-gap-new-legislative-maps-give-republicans-enormous-edge/#sthash.bJx6bwYA.dpbs http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2017/08/22/analysis-large-eff..., NC's efficiency gap is around -11, while anything in excess of +/- 7 is considered a very large gap, so by the efficiency gap metric NC's map is definitely extreme.
- pvg 9y agoThe Supreme Court will hear a case precisely about that https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/01/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-supreme-courts-big-gerrymandering-case/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/0... Fivethirtyeight.com people have written a lot about it (including why you can't simply write a program and go home, just like you can't for most political questions). They also have an ongoing podcast series that talks about the issue in great detail 'The Gerrymandering Project'.
- maxerickson 9y agoFirst define what goals are "fair" or "balanced".
- wybiral 9y agoProportionate representation.
- maxerickson 9y agoProportionate along what lines? Voter parties? The interest voters express preferences for by voting? The interests voters idealize (they may vote pragmatically within existing rules)? Etc., etc. A purely algorithmic solution needs to encode preferences and how to balance them, so they need to be defined quite precisely.
- cabalamat 9y agoProportionate by whatever groups the voters self-select. If there are 13 seats then any group of 1/13th of the voters that votes for the same candidate should get that cantitate election.
- maxerickson 9y agoThat's not a district plan, it's a different way of apportioning representation. Hence my confusion.
- RightMillennial 9y agoNot that I disagree, but at what level do you establish proportional representation? At the state, county, city/town/municipality, somewhere in between? Currently, I think the boundaries are drawn ad-hoc but loosely defined by population, geography, and demographics that benefit who ever is in charge of the pen.
- landonxjames 9y agoSome fancy application of Voronoi Diagrams[1] seems like it would make sense to me. [1] https://sites.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/uw_1034.pdf https://sites.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/uw_1034.pdf
- electricslpnsld 9y ago> As a software engineer, isn't there some way to draw maps which balance out demographics programmatically? There are mathematicians who study gerrymandering and election maps [1,2]. [1] https://sites.tufts.edu/gerrymandr/ https://sites.tufts.edu/gerrymandr/ [2] https://phys.org/news/2017-08-math-experts-brainpower-gerrymandering.html https://phys.org/news/2017-08-math-experts-brainpower-gerrym...
- noahl 9y agoInterestingly, a university in North Carolina is working on this exact problem, right now. Guess how they got interested in it :). https://services.math.duke.edu/projects/gerrymandering/ https://services.math.duke.edu/projects/gerrymandering/
- odonnellryan 9y agoHow would the software work? You want to put communities together. Ideally, you don't want your community to be split in the middle because of a congressional line. Not saying that isn't happening now, it is. But software doesn't solve that issue. So we created this great problem: congressional lines. Then we try and fix it. Representation is hard. Why not do away with the problem entirely? Remove this type of representation. Radical, yes, but what does congress do anyway? ;)
- goialoq 9y ago> you don't want your community to be split in the middle because of a congressional line. why does this matter? congresspeople vote on national issues, not local issues.
- odonnellryan 9y agoOk then why have these lines at all? That is my argument.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoIndependent non-partisan redistricting commissions solve this problem easily. But only a few states (Washington, California among the bigger ones) are brave enough to go through with it.
- Amezarak 9y agoThere are very few independent, non-partisan human beings. Simply changing who does the redistricting and the means bu which they are chosen to do so doesn't solve the problem, because the people who are interested in and chosen to do the task are always going to have political views. Even having bipartisan commisions doesn't solve the problem. Parties will work together to secure incumbents. It basically comes down to a who watches the watchers issue.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoNo, it actually works. When California went through with it, the “other side” actually gained seats. It takes the drama out of redistricting, and districts are of a much regular shape. Of course, isn’t perfect, but a sucks way less solution is much better than a sucks way more one.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> It takes the drama out of redistricting, The California process may produce better results on average by some measure (and is emphatically more transparent) compared to legislative redistricting, but it emphatically vastly increased the drama associated with redistricting.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoHow so? Californians seem really happy with it, all things considered.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
- dbatten 9y agoData Scientist with a Master of Public Administration degree here (don't ask). My proposal for solving this has always been to frame it as an optimization problem. You have a certain number of census tracts (essentially, neighborhoods) with known populations and geographic areas. You know you need to divide the state into X congressional districts. You should simply assign census tracts to districts such that 1) you end up with X districts, 2) each district's total population is within a Y% tolerance of state population / X, 3) you minimize the average of the lengths of the district borders (to force maximum geographic compactness). Given available data from the Census, some mucking around in PostGIS or ESRI, and a state-of-the-art commercial solver like Gurobi, there's absolutely no reason this couldn't be done. It'd also be trivial to add on requirements for balancing demographics or political affiliation within certain tolerances as well.
- ttul 9y agoAs it is in most countries...
- dbatten 9y agoIs it? I'm admittedly fairly ignorant on how other countries run their election systems, but... geographic representation seems uncommon (lots of parliamentary systems) and sophisticated solutions to drawing districts within countries that have geographic representation would have to be even more rare.
- sangnoir 9y agoI am familiar with Parliamentary systems of 5 countries (Britain & former colonies) and they are mostly geographic, to my knowledge. Each Members of Parliament is voted in by voters residing within a geographic region/ward.
- dbatten 9y agoInteresting... looks like a lot of countries with parliamentary systems use proportional instead of geographic representation... but not the UK or Canada. Today I learned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#List_of_countries_using_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#Li...
- frandroid 9y agoIt doesn't even have to be a complex mathematical equation. Gerrymandering is a particularly acute American problem which isn't present in most other industrial democracies, because in most cases, an independent commission is picked to define district boundaries, and they are mostly guided by common sense and fairness, which seems to work well enough. The problem the U.S. has is to leave this task to people who have an inherent conflict of interest in the outcome of the process.
- FireBeyond 9y agoIt's certainly not an issue recently, but the UK used to have lots of issues with it, see rotten and pocket boroughs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs).
- stordoff 9y agoThat's in some sense the opposite problem - constituency boundaries _didn't_ change so became manipulable, rather than the boundaries being deliberately drawn to introduce bias.
- WorldMaker 9y agoMaybe it's time to stop using geography? Geography was an important consideration in the horse/trail era where if you were stumping around trying to get people to vote for you, how far you had to travel mattered. Plus, before skyscrapers and other sorts high density developments geography had an okay correlation with population density, but that is no longer the case anymore. There are often far more people in a single block in a city than on an entire knob out in the knobs, or an entire mountain in mountainous areas, etc. You can't easily "circle" just a floor or three of a single building on a 2D map with any accuracy, but to balance population density fairly you may have to consider problems like that. With TV, radio, the internet, skyscrapers, and urban density, maybe we need a whole new solution for representative democracy than where physically you collect your snail mail? I don't have any good theories on what should replace geography, but I do think geography is a problem we could eliminate by ignoring that variable.
- logfromblammo 9y agoMost problems are constrained by the facts that it costs resources to move things, and that you can't trust people to play fair when they can get ahead by cheating. The latter makes us establish physical security around election polling sites, and the former requires that we spent money to move people, machines, and consumables into and out of those sites. As such, those costs require that political districts consider geography as a practical, money-saving measure, especially roads and buildings. You have to print N blank ballots and send them to the polling stations, and then send back any unused blanks, and the local issues on ballots for adjacent districts might be different. In order to eliminate geography, you would need a system that has good data security without requiring physical security for the whole network. And an integral part of that would be a foolproof and uncheatable online identification system. Good luck with that.
- pqh 9y agoAdditionally, geography does matter for the group for similar reasons. Proximity constrains economics and policy.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
- bzbarsky 9y ago> In the past I've read the Democrats have done similar things. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland's_3rd_congressional_district https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland's_3rd_congressional_d... for an example... > isn't there some way to draw maps which balance out demographics programmatically We can't even agree on what "balance" means. In particular, people want both majority-minority districts and party-balanced districts, which is a pretty tough constraint in practice.
- fallingfrog 9y agoIronically enough, the software seems to already exist, but right now (according to the article) it's being used perversely to draw the districts in the least fair way possible.
- dqpb 9y agoKeep in mind the whole point of these districts is to bias in favor of a demographic. If you want to automate that then you also have to explicitly define the biases. If you don't want biases then get rid of the districts.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> As a software engineer, isn't there some way to draw maps which balance out demographics programmatically? Once you define which of the many competing priorities for districting (aside from naked partisan advantage and disenfranchising particular races, which we can assume are agreed not to be acceptable priorities) to optimize and how to weight them against each other this becomes easy. Of course, the people with illegitimate goals can easily game out which combination of the notionally legitimate goals maximizes their actual illegitimate ones, and advocate for that as the standard.
- nicolaskruchten 9y agoI used to share your reasoning that a straightforward technical solution must exist but this article really opened my eyes to the various tradeoffs involved in districting and how finding a balance is indeed a political not a technical problem: "Gerrymandering isn't evil" https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/could-gerrymandering-be-good-for-democracy-119581 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/could-gerrym...