7 ms·

It says tweet your reps. To be clear, you should probably contact your state rep about this (and send an email, not a tweet). They have the power to do somethin

It says tweet your reps. To be clear, you should probably contact your state rep about this (and send an email, not a tweet). They have the power to do something about it. This is very important, esp. in light the recent US Supreme Court decision on this subject[1]. Gerrymandering creates safe districts that make primaries hold increasingly more weight then general elections, which is leading, in a significant way, toward our increasingly hyper-partisan politics in the US. In some states this also heavily tilts the balance of power to one party over the other. The bottom line is this. Fairer redistricting will lead to more competitive races, which will lead to less partisan, saner politics with more compromise. (Oh dear god I hope!) Related: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/voters-are-stripping-partisan-redistricting-power-from-politicians-in-anti-gerrymandering-efforts/2018/11/07/2a239a5e-e1d9-11e8-b759-3d88a5ce9e19_story.html?utm_term=.209cfc5a9e3d https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/voters-are-stripping... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/politics/supreme-court-gerrymandering.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/politics/supreme-court...

jandrese 7y ago
Rep's response: Why would I want any of that?
tunesmith 7y ago
More competitive? Or more representative of the overall population? Because those two things are at odds. Say you have a state that is split 55/44, and has nine districts. Do you want nine districts each at 55/44, meaning 9-0? That's more competitive, but less representative of the state. Or do you want five districts for one, and four for the other? That's more representative of the state, but less competitive. Redistricting is hard. (I suspect my scenario is a false choice if you wrestle with the math enough, but I'm not sure. I prefer the Wisconsin test that we all thought Justice Kennedy would decide in favor of, but then he took the coward's way out, probably corrupt too.)
- legitster 7y ago
  This is SUPER important. People think redistricting is a panacea, but it actually sounds like a super tough nut to crack. Even states that have non-partisan districting enshrined in law are going through their own controversies and it doesn't (at first blush) appear to be solving anything. 99pi/538 did an excellent series on the topic I would recommend.
  - padobson 7y ago
    Came here to say something like this. Chief Justice Roberts' opinion[0] touches on the legislative evolution of the problem. The advent of districts was instituted by congress to encourage proportional representation - and it worked! Gerrymandering is actually an improvement over the older system that led to situations like GP is describing. Gerrymandering is not the problem, it's a symptom. The problem is first-past-the-post elections. Ranked-choice voting or some other proportional system isn't a panacea either, but it's much better than judges re-drawing political districts instead of elected representatives. [0]https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-422_9ol1.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-422_9ol1.pdf
    - djsumdog 7y ago
      I agree entirely. Ranked voting or preference with instant runoff (Australia) or MMP (New Zealand) are all much better at representing the population. They're not perfect of course. People in power will always try to adjust the system to benefit them and their supporters (read: The Dictators Handbook). Even in Australia where voting is mandatory, there is a top and bottom of the ballot and only the top is required (if a party doesn't have a certain percentage, that party is moved to the bottom).
  - mikeash 7y ago
    This seems like a “perfect is the enemy of the good” sort of thing. Yes, drawing good districts is really hard. Non-partisan redistricting doesn’t solve everything. But surely it’s a hell of a lot better than allowing whatever political party is in power in a particular year to draw districts to their own advantage, allowing them to rule long after they lose the support of the majority? You’ll sometimes end up with minority rule in any district based system, but at least it’ll be accidental rather than intentional and self-perpetuating.
- lsaferite 7y ago
  My understanding of Gerrymandering is to specifically have the outcome of 9-0 though. The natural distributions would make a natural outcome of 9-0 highly unlikely without rigging the district lines.
  - lozenge 7y ago
    Gerrymandering uses cracking and packing. Packing is giving your opponent 2 very safe districts (eg urban centre), and cracking is making it impossible for them to win the other 7 (eg making them 30% suburb, 70% rural).
  - endlessbeing 7y ago
    Actually, I think gerrymandering aims to have the result be more like 7-2 consistently, where 7 is the party with less actual representation. Gerrymandering aims to put all of the opponent's voters in the smallest number of districts possible, while spreading out your own base. The result is that the opponent wins fewer districts with over 90% of the vote where you win more districts with 55% or 60% of the vote.
    - c3534l 7y ago
      Non-representative outcomes is a symptom of Gerrymandering, ont the goal of it. The reason for gerrymandering a district varies, but overall it tends to preserve the status quo. Those in power can use it to disenfranchise a group of people, or they can use it to create safe districts for party leaders. Gerrymandering should be thought of as a tool. The illustrations popular online showing how gerrymandering can be used to produce paradoxical representation have done a lot to raise awarenss, but it's also made people confused about what it is. Gerrymandering is a tool, not a goal.
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    I think gerrymandering is typically willing to sacrifice a few districts to make the majority of districts less competitive
- tialaramex 7y ago
  If you worry about this, the reform you want is multi-member districts. Instead of voting for one representative people are picking several and the districts are bigger. This is how EU parliamentary elections work for example, a region gets say 5 slots and it needs to send 5 representatives to fill those slots, elected democratically but the EU doesn't tightly constrain the method used. There are a few ways you can do this, Jefferson developed one of them so that's got a nice pedigree. It is also a good way for any third party to start to get some attention. Getting 20% of votes together to have your candidate as the fifth member for a district with 2 Dems and 2 Republicans is going to be easier than finding a plurality of voters for a single rep when the two big parties are both saying that's a wasted vote.
  - crdrost 7y ago
    With that said, before you start writing your state legislature about “Multi-member districts TODAY!” you should also know that they have a very difficult history of being shot down by the Supreme Court. This was pointed out to me by a number of good folks on Politics.StackExchange[1]. But yes, the route to avoiding a second US Civil War is only incidentally through the “eliminating gerrymandering” nodes of the graph—the 50/50 saturation of the vote into two spineless political parties happens in both the House (gerrymandered to hell) and the Senate (not gerrymandered at all) and is a consequence of something more fundamental. States do need to switch to the proportional system, but there is a decent chance that the Supreme Court might destroy this out-of-hand, in which case a Constitutional amendment may well be necessary. [1] “Would Switching to a Proportionate House Require a Constitutional Amendment?” https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/42551/would-switching-to-a-proportionate-house-require-a-constitutional-amendment https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/42551/would-swi...
    - thechao 7y ago
      That response fails to distinguish between multi-member at large districts which are Real Bad^TM, and some form of ranked mechanism which are Real Good^TM. Multi-member ranked districts are both more representative and more competitive than our current system.
  - 7y ago
- clmckinley 7y ago
  The problem with this analogy is that the 55/44 split is not equally distributed across a state. In virtually every case there are pockets of one or the other. As long as you keep the goals of uniform, compact and consistent sizes they should do a much better job of getting closer to the 4/5 you are looking for or maybe a couple of safer and a couple of swing districts. What happens now is that the party in control (which in 2010 was largely R) packs and cracks to get an unnatural advantage (looking at you Wisconsin) My bigger question is when the political split is more like 80/20 case should the 20 be guaranteed representation?
  - runarberg 7y ago
    > My bigger question is when the political split is more like 80/20 case should the 20 be guaranteed representation? Yes they should. They should get around 20% of the representatives.
    - clmckinley 7y ago
      So then without making other more fundamental changes we would have to gerrymander. In fact a number of strange looking districts are gerrymandered with creating a majority minority district as the stated goal. I believe we need structural changes to really solve this problem but absent that, I think having a computer algorithm that has the following priorities in the following order: 1) Compact (ie smallest circumference) 2) Least number of axis points and smallest difference in the sides.(ie a square is the goal) 3) Least number of wasted votes (ie use the proposal from the supreme court case) 4) Least change from a previous district (maybe not for this first run)
      - runarberg 7y ago
        Why do we need a large number of small districts? It seems like a relic from an obsolete philosophy that people from a geographically separate areas need a different representation. But that is not how reality works. People want representation based on their class status, not geography. We have local governments to deal with local issues and it is silly to also divide federal representation based on geography. Alternatively I propose the state being a single district, with representatives directly partitioned based on the proportion of vote they get in the state. So if a state gets 10 representatives in congress, and a party gets 10% of the votes in that state. That party will get 1 representative in congress. --- Edit: And before this starts being called unrealistic, I believe all we would need is a constitutional amendment (even just in state constitutions) that states that every vote should count the same.
- on_and_off 7y ago
  Interesting how everything is only Democrats vs Republicans in the USA. It probably does not help the political climate that for most people it is just a binary choice.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    That's a consequence of first-past-the-post voting (Duverger's law), not gerrymandering.
    - on_and_off 7y ago
      I should have used quotes, I was answering specifically about the 55/45 part of gp text :)
- souterrain 7y ago
  I want at-large representatives for the entire state, based on general election polling rank. This is unlikely, of course, because it threatens the two-party hegemon.
pergadad 7y ago
Or you could drop the whole issue by turning to a representative democracy with proportional voting, where it's about policy not individuals raising money.
- kelnos 7y ago
  If we can't even get our Supreme Court to agree that gerrymandering is bad enough to believe that it should be involved, I'm pretty sure fundamentally changing how the entire government works is a bit unlikely, to put it mildly.
- meddlepal 7y ago
  Yes and the barrier to do that is so much higher than OP's suggestion. It's so high that it's nearly impossible. Idealism is great and all, but you gotta have a practical plan to achieve something.
  - EGreg 7y ago
    The barrier remains regardless of whether you contact your rep, or not. We may as well ask for both. Multi member districts is not a bad idea for the House of Representatives. Can be done on a local level. But there needs to be a constitutional amendment. Why not simply switch to a system where a state itself is a giant multi member district, like a parliamentary system?
    - meddlepal 7y ago
      > Why not simply switch to a system where a state itself is a giant multi member district, like a parliamentary system? Because this isn't software... you can't just "switch" to a different form of government like that.
      - defterGoose 7y ago
        ...and attitudes like this are largely why.
      - 7y ago
ehsankia 7y ago
The more interesting part is that we now have pretty good computational models to measure gerrymandering. IIRC correctly, there was two different models developed by different teams and they both actually found very similar results. One of the two basically ran a Monte Carlo simulation, exploring a subset of all possible configurations, and comparing the average results to that of the current configuration. The other one I believe used a more mathematical approach. Here's one of the papers: http://cho.pol.illinois.edu/wendy/papers/talismanic.pdf http://cho.pol.illinois.edu/wendy/papers/talismanic.pdf EDIT: Here's a Daily episode explaining it: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/podcasts/the-daily/gerrymander-wisconsin-supreme-court.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/podcasts/the-daily/gerrym...

jandrese 7y ago

Rep's response: Why would I want any of that?

tunesmith 7y ago

More competitive? Or more representative of the overall population? Because those two things are at odds. Say you have a state that is split 55/44, and has nine districts. Do you want nine districts each at 55/44, meaning 9-0? That's more competitive, but less representative of the state. Or do you want five districts for one, and four for the other? That's more representative of the state, but less competitive. Redistricting is hard. (I suspect my scenario is a false choice if you wrestle with the math enough, but I'm not sure. I prefer the Wisconsin test that we all thought Justice Kennedy would decide in favor of, but then he took the coward's way out, probably corrupt too.)

legitster 7y ago
This is SUPER important. People think redistricting is a panacea, but it actually sounds like a super tough nut to crack. Even states that have non-partisan districting enshrined in law are going through their own controversies and it doesn't (at first blush) appear to be solving anything. 99pi/538 did an excellent series on the topic I would recommend.
- padobson 7y ago
  Came here to say something like this. Chief Justice Roberts' opinion[0] touches on the legislative evolution of the problem. The advent of districts was instituted by congress to encourage proportional representation - and it worked! Gerrymandering is actually an improvement over the older system that led to situations like GP is describing. Gerrymandering is not the problem, it's a symptom. The problem is first-past-the-post elections. Ranked-choice voting or some other proportional system isn't a panacea either, but it's much better than judges re-drawing political districts instead of elected representatives. [0]https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-422_9ol1.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-422_9ol1.pdf
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    I agree entirely. Ranked voting or preference with instant runoff (Australia) or MMP (New Zealand) are all much better at representing the population. They're not perfect of course. People in power will always try to adjust the system to benefit them and their supporters (read: The Dictators Handbook). Even in Australia where voting is mandatory, there is a top and bottom of the ballot and only the top is required (if a party doesn't have a certain percentage, that party is moved to the bottom).
- mikeash 7y ago
  This seems like a “perfect is the enemy of the good” sort of thing. Yes, drawing good districts is really hard. Non-partisan redistricting doesn’t solve everything. But surely it’s a hell of a lot better than allowing whatever political party is in power in a particular year to draw districts to their own advantage, allowing them to rule long after they lose the support of the majority? You’ll sometimes end up with minority rule in any district based system, but at least it’ll be accidental rather than intentional and self-perpetuating.
lsaferite 7y ago
My understanding of Gerrymandering is to specifically have the outcome of 9-0 though. The natural distributions would make a natural outcome of 9-0 highly unlikely without rigging the district lines.
- lozenge 7y ago
  Gerrymandering uses cracking and packing. Packing is giving your opponent 2 very safe districts (eg urban centre), and cracking is making it impossible for them to win the other 7 (eg making them 30% suburb, 70% rural).
- endlessbeing 7y ago
  Actually, I think gerrymandering aims to have the result be more like 7-2 consistently, where 7 is the party with less actual representation. Gerrymandering aims to put all of the opponent's voters in the smallest number of districts possible, while spreading out your own base. The result is that the opponent wins fewer districts with over 90% of the vote where you win more districts with 55% or 60% of the vote.
  - c3534l 7y ago
    Non-representative outcomes is a symptom of Gerrymandering, ont the goal of it. The reason for gerrymandering a district varies, but overall it tends to preserve the status quo. Those in power can use it to disenfranchise a group of people, or they can use it to create safe districts for party leaders. Gerrymandering should be thought of as a tool. The illustrations popular online showing how gerrymandering can be used to produce paradoxical representation have done a lot to raise awarenss, but it's also made people confused about what it is. Gerrymandering is a tool, not a goal.
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  I think gerrymandering is typically willing to sacrifice a few districts to make the majority of districts less competitive
tialaramex 7y ago
If you worry about this, the reform you want is multi-member districts. Instead of voting for one representative people are picking several and the districts are bigger. This is how EU parliamentary elections work for example, a region gets say 5 slots and it needs to send 5 representatives to fill those slots, elected democratically but the EU doesn't tightly constrain the method used. There are a few ways you can do this, Jefferson developed one of them so that's got a nice pedigree. It is also a good way for any third party to start to get some attention. Getting 20% of votes together to have your candidate as the fifth member for a district with 2 Dems and 2 Republicans is going to be easier than finding a plurality of voters for a single rep when the two big parties are both saying that's a wasted vote.
- crdrost 7y ago
  With that said, before you start writing your state legislature about “Multi-member districts TODAY!” you should also know that they have a very difficult history of being shot down by the Supreme Court. This was pointed out to me by a number of good folks on Politics.StackExchange[1]. But yes, the route to avoiding a second US Civil War is only incidentally through the “eliminating gerrymandering” nodes of the graph—the 50/50 saturation of the vote into two spineless political parties happens in both the House (gerrymandered to hell) and the Senate (not gerrymandered at all) and is a consequence of something more fundamental. States do need to switch to the proportional system, but there is a decent chance that the Supreme Court might destroy this out-of-hand, in which case a Constitutional amendment may well be necessary. [1] “Would Switching to a Proportionate House Require a Constitutional Amendment?” https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/42551/would-switching-to-a-proportionate-house-require-a-constitutional-amendment https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/42551/would-swi...
  - thechao 7y ago
    That response fails to distinguish between multi-member at large districts which are Real Bad^TM, and some form of ranked mechanism which are Real Good^TM. Multi-member ranked districts are both more representative and more competitive than our current system.
- 7y ago
clmckinley 7y ago
The problem with this analogy is that the 55/44 split is not equally distributed across a state. In virtually every case there are pockets of one or the other. As long as you keep the goals of uniform, compact and consistent sizes they should do a much better job of getting closer to the 4/5 you are looking for or maybe a couple of safer and a couple of swing districts. What happens now is that the party in control (which in 2010 was largely R) packs and cracks to get an unnatural advantage (looking at you Wisconsin) My bigger question is when the political split is more like 80/20 case should the 20 be guaranteed representation?
- runarberg 7y ago
  > My bigger question is when the political split is more like 80/20 case should the 20 be guaranteed representation? Yes they should. They should get around 20% of the representatives.
  - clmckinley 7y ago
    So then without making other more fundamental changes we would have to gerrymander. In fact a number of strange looking districts are gerrymandered with creating a majority minority district as the stated goal. I believe we need structural changes to really solve this problem but absent that, I think having a computer algorithm that has the following priorities in the following order: 1) Compact (ie smallest circumference) 2) Least number of axis points and smallest difference in the sides.(ie a square is the goal) 3) Least number of wasted votes (ie use the proposal from the supreme court case) 4) Least change from a previous district (maybe not for this first run)
    - runarberg 7y ago
      Why do we need a large number of small districts? It seems like a relic from an obsolete philosophy that people from a geographically separate areas need a different representation. But that is not how reality works. People want representation based on their class status, not geography. We have local governments to deal with local issues and it is silly to also divide federal representation based on geography. Alternatively I propose the state being a single district, with representatives directly partitioned based on the proportion of vote they get in the state. So if a state gets 10 representatives in congress, and a party gets 10% of the votes in that state. That party will get 1 representative in congress. --- Edit: And before this starts being called unrealistic, I believe all we would need is a constitutional amendment (even just in state constitutions) that states that every vote should count the same.
on_and_off 7y ago
Interesting how everything is only Democrats vs Republicans in the USA. It probably does not help the political climate that for most people it is just a binary choice.
- tptacek 7y ago
  That's a consequence of first-past-the-post voting (Duverger's law), not gerrymandering.
  - on_and_off 7y ago
    I should have used quotes, I was answering specifically about the 55/45 part of gp text :)
souterrain 7y ago
I want at-large representatives for the entire state, based on general election polling rank. This is unlikely, of course, because it threatens the two-party hegemon.

pergadad 7y ago

Or you could drop the whole issue by turning to a representative democracy with proportional voting, where it's about policy not individuals raising money.

kelnos 7y ago
If we can't even get our Supreme Court to agree that gerrymandering is bad enough to believe that it should be involved, I'm pretty sure fundamentally changing how the entire government works is a bit unlikely, to put it mildly.
meddlepal 7y ago
Yes and the barrier to do that is so much higher than OP's suggestion. It's so high that it's nearly impossible. Idealism is great and all, but you gotta have a practical plan to achieve something.
- EGreg 7y ago
  The barrier remains regardless of whether you contact your rep, or not. We may as well ask for both. Multi member districts is not a bad idea for the House of Representatives. Can be done on a local level. But there needs to be a constitutional amendment. Why not simply switch to a system where a state itself is a giant multi member district, like a parliamentary system?
  - meddlepal 7y ago
    > Why not simply switch to a system where a state itself is a giant multi member district, like a parliamentary system? Because this isn't software... you can't just "switch" to a different form of government like that.
    - defterGoose 7y ago
      ...and attitudes like this are largely why.
    - 7y ago

ehsankia 7y ago

The more interesting part is that we now have pretty good computational models to measure gerrymandering. IIRC correctly, there was two different models developed by different teams and they both actually found very similar results. One of the two basically ran a Monte Carlo simulation, exploring a subset of all possible configurations, and comparing the average results to that of the current configuration. The other one I believe used a more mathematical approach. Here's one of the papers: http://cho.pol.illinois.edu/wendy/papers/talismanic.pdf http://cho.pol.illinois.edu/wendy/papers/talismanic.pdf EDIT: Here's a Daily episode explaining it: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/podcasts/the-daily/gerrymander-wisconsin-supreme-court.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/podcasts/the-daily/gerrym...