7 ms·

The solution to gerrymandering is probably social, not mathematical, because the goals we want to pursue in district-drawing aren't strictly mathematical.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
It bothers me that two arguments are commonly advanced for the idea that gerrymandering is a menace: 1. It lets politicians create districts that will vote for them no matter what. 2. It lets politicians waste opposition votes by putting them into districts that will, overall, just barely vote the other way. The problem is that these two visions of "the problem" directly oppose each other. #1 says that the problem is districts that vote an 80/20 split. #2 says the problem is districts that vote a 51/49 split.
- aaronblohowiak 6y ago
  They aren’t necessarily in opposition to each other, though. Imagine having three districts of 60/40 instead of two districts of 90/10 and one of 0/100. In this way, the party in charge has effectively erased the substantial portion of the population that would support the opposition!
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    What do you think the policy effects are in each case? In your second scenario, you have three politicians in two parties who are all basically unconstrained. In the first scenario, you have three politicians who all nominally belong to the same party, but their behavior is constrained much more sharply by the closeness of their districts.
- willturman 6y ago
  These don't seem to contradict. It's entirely possible to carve up a rural area into sure-thing 60/40 districts, while carving up cities to be 55/45 while leaving a handful of 5/95 districts to the other party.
- morei 6y ago
  No, they complement each other. What do you do with the 'excess' vote after creating a 51/49 district? You combine the excess from N 51/49 districts into a single district that is 20/80. That way you have N districts that fairly reliably vote for you, and a single districts that extremely reliably votes against you.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    They oppose each other. You're doing a better job the more of the vote you have in a district of type 1, and you're doing a better job the less of the vote you have in a district of type 2. Contradictions don't get any more direct than that. To the extent that a politician is benefiting himself in style #1, he's hurting himself in style #2, and vice versa.
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      The people you're replying to aren't realizing your mistake, and you're not reading their replies. You're doing a worse job the more of your vote you have in a district of Type 1. You're creating districts of Type 1 for the other side. Every vote over 51% is a wasted vote, and there's never a reason you would shove all of your voters into one district if you were in control of districting. > To the extent that a politician is benefiting himself in style #1 There's no possible benefit to a politician in winning a district 80/20 rather than 60/40. edit: If 6 people want to vote for me, and 6 want to vote for you, I want to put 3 of your voters in one district, and have three more identical districts each with 2 of my voters and 1 of yours. The first district is what you're referring to as Type 1, and the other three are what you're referring to as Type 2. If you can find a more ideal districting arrangement for my party, I'd like to hear it.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > The people you're replying to aren't realizing your mistake, and you're not reading their replies. No, you're just not bothering to read my comment. I'll repeat it. There are two (2) arguments commonly advanced toward the idea that gerrymandering is bad. In summary, they are: 1. Creating safe seats; 2. Nullifying opposition votes. More of one means less of the other.
- andrewem 6y ago
  The core problem is the ability to leverage approximately 50% of votes into winning far more than 50% of seats.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    Which suggests that a simplistic "solution" to gerrymandering is that, after the total vote share of the best-performing party is calculated (call it V%), and their share of seats is also calculated (S%), the second-best-performing party should be able to propose a change in district winners that reduces the gap between V% and S%. (And so on for the other parties competing). Of course that would be outrageously unfair, with politicians choosing which districts they win rather than voters choosing the politicians to represent them, and yet that is somehow an improvement over the current system of gerrymandering. A slightly less extreme option would be for the districts that get flipped to be decided by where a given party came closest to winning (the "best near-winner" system used in Baden-Württemberg), but really the aim of this system is to remove all incentive to gerrymander in the first place, so this result flipping rule would never have to be applied.
    - aaronblohowiak 6y ago
      This is how the German system works. Not unfair at all. You cast two votes: one for a person, one for a party. At the end of the day the party percentages have to roughly line up (with a minimum percent for any representative at all.) This system has some very nice balancing properties in that you can vote for the person you want to represent you in the present race as well as the party you most strongly identify with.
      - dane-pgp 6y ago
        My understanding is that the German system is Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP) [0] which usually involves having a list of top-up candidates who don't belong to any specific district. The Baden-Württemberg system is a clever way around this, although it does lead to some districts being represented by multiple representatives. Having more representatives than districts seems like it would be an overly-ambitious cultural shift in the US, whereas my proposal keeps the familiar 1:1 correspondence, even if there is gerrymandering. It also doesn't change the ballot papers or counting process; and, if gerrymandering is successfully disincentivised, the process works exactly the same as under the existing system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
- pessimizer 6y ago
  I think it's because you're off on #1. If you're going to create a district that will overwhelmingly vote for one party, you want it to vote for the other side. All votes over 51% are wasted. It's called "stacking." It's complemented by "cracking," where you break up a unit that would vote for the other side and add them to multiple districts where the other side will only get 40%. The "cracked" districts will vote for you no matter what, but certainly not at 80/20. You're looking for 51% + a safety factor of 10-20%.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  You don't need to hypothesize. Look at Wisconsin. A bunch of fairly Republican districts and a few heavily Democratic districts means that it's quite easy to produce an overwhelming R majority in the State House. The fairly R districts are not sure wins, but they don't have to be. > Republicans won 57 percent of the vote in contested races in 2016 and won 43 of 50 seats. In 2018, Republicans won the same percentage of the vote in contested races — but won 56 of 63 seats. > That’s how gerrymandering works. Even the fact that so many more Democratic seats are uncontested is by design: By making certain districts heavily Democratic, many others can be more easily made slightly Republican. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/04/several-layers-republican-power-grabbing-wisconsin/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/04/several-l... This stuff works, it's easy to see the effects in heavily gerrymandered states.
  - ars 6y ago
    > A bunch of fairly Republican districts and a few heavily Democratic districts Something I just realized is that it will always be that way! Democrats do better in cities (in general heavily democratic), while Republicans do better in rural areas (typicaly Republican, but not in a dense way like a city would be). So if you divide districts naturally by geography they will always appear gerrymandered in Republicans favor.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      That's why democracies generally divide districts by population. Geography is largely irrelevant. This was actually a deliberate choice in order to skew the electoral advantage into landed men.
      - ars 6y ago
        > That's why democracies generally divide districts by population. Geography is largely irrelevant. That's kind of my point: No it is not. Districts are meant to be contiguous geographical areas. Even if you adjust the geographical size of each district to have similar population sizes (which was your point), my point still stands: Because of the geographical nature of districts, cities will always have a larger Democratic percentage, and it will always look like Republicans have gerrymandered things.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  They don't necessarily contradict - one could create a couple of 80/20 districts for the political boss of the region and 51/49 (or 60/40 to be safer) for the rest of the region. Also, I've mostly heard the second argument made, not the first. A large party's leadership should probably lean in that direction anyway, not caring as much about the individual official.
- tunesmith 6y ago
  Another way of looking at it: You have nine districts. Overall popular vote in the state is 55-44. Should the districts be awarded 5-4? Or should each have a 55-44 split?
  - kens 6y ago
    Gerrymandering can be much worse than that. The unpopular party could win 8 districts and leave one for the more popular party. Math: Assume 900 people, so 495 voting for the popular party and 405 for the unpopular party. Put 100 popular voters in district 1. Split the remaining equally (395 popular, 405 unpopular). All districts except the first will be won 51%-49% by the unpopular party. (This is the "pack and crack" gerrymandering strategy, packing the party into some districts and cracking them across the other.)
    - tunesmith 6y ago
      I agree. I'm more just pointing out that it's non-obvious what "fair" even is. Although I do like the standard that was suggested in the Wisconsin case, the one that Kennedy chickened out on before he retired. Sorry, I forget the details - something about minimizing wasted votes.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      The thing about pack and crack is that if you try to do something most people think is fair (“preserving the integrity of communities of common interest”), you find that in areas with a urban core and suburban peripheries you end up naturally with pack-and-crack favoring Republicans because Democrats are often hyperconcetrated in the urban areas with Republicans holding a relatively narrow majority in the suburbs. Of course, if you adopt something like STV in small (say ~5 seat) multimember districts, the opportunity for altering representation by how you draw district lines goes way down, and you still retain individual candidate accountability to the general electorate (unlike in party-list proportional schemes). The problem isn't “how do you draw lines fairly in single-member, FPTP districts”. The problem is single-member, FPTP districts.
      - 6y ago
- p1necone 6y ago
  You're getting it slightly wrong/backwards. When gerrymandering you want to: 1. Create districts that will overwhelmingly vote for the other guy. and 2. Create districts that will just barely vote for you. Because it doesn't matter if you win a district by 1% or by 49% you can take a population that overall is 50/50, or even prefers the other guy and create a lot of districts that will vote for you by a small margin, and only a handful of districts that will vote for the other guy but by a really big margin. There's actually an android puzzle game that does a great job of communicating how it works: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.studioBlimp.Gerrymanader&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.studioBlim...
kens 6y ago
The journal Science just published an article on gerrymandering with a similar argument. It's appealing to mathematically "solve" gerrymandering, but "The most important decisions in devising an electoral map are grounded in philosophical or political judgments about which the technology is irrelevant. It is nonsensical to completely transform a debate over philosophical values into a mathematical exercise." The article has a nice diagram showing how gerrymandering works as well as a discussion of the various conflicting goals. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6508/1179 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6508/1179
lightlyused 6y ago
I always thought the solution to gerrymandering would be to use rank choice voting across the state and the top vote getters would be the ones who are elected. Than you create the districts that they represent. After all land doesn't vote.
sudosysgen 6y ago
The best solution to gerrymandering is to make it instantly mostly irrelevant, by using the popular vote and ranked-choice voting. And indeed, that's mostly a social solution in it's implementation.
- daveFNbuck 6y ago
  Gerrymandering is about how you break up people into districts. Those districts elect their representatives by popular vote, so popular voting for these representatives doesn't fix gerrymandering. Statewide votes are mostly done by popular vote, so they're not affected by gerrymandering. Nationwide votes like the one for president are not done by popular vote, but they're also not done by district, so gerrymandering doesn't affect them.
throrthaway 6y ago
The actual solution to gerrymandering is to discard the whole silly idea of 'district' and vote proportionally, just many countries do and are not the worse off for it. What about the rural states, you say? Well they still get to manage their own, internal affairs with their own legislature, governors, etc. But as far as state-level decisions are concerned, their weight should be exactly equal to that of their population representation.

thaumasiotes 6y ago

It bothers me that two arguments are commonly advanced for the idea that gerrymandering is a menace: 1. It lets politicians create districts that will vote for them no matter what. 2. It lets politicians waste opposition votes by putting them into districts that will, overall, just barely vote the other way. The problem is that these two visions of "the problem" directly oppose each other. #1 says that the problem is districts that vote an 80/20 split. #2 says the problem is districts that vote a 51/49 split.

aaronblohowiak 6y ago
They aren’t necessarily in opposition to each other, though. Imagine having three districts of 60/40 instead of two districts of 90/10 and one of 0/100. In this way, the party in charge has effectively erased the substantial portion of the population that would support the opposition!
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  What do you think the policy effects are in each case? In your second scenario, you have three politicians in two parties who are all basically unconstrained. In the first scenario, you have three politicians who all nominally belong to the same party, but their behavior is constrained much more sharply by the closeness of their districts.
willturman 6y ago
These don't seem to contradict. It's entirely possible to carve up a rural area into sure-thing 60/40 districts, while carving up cities to be 55/45 while leaving a handful of 5/95 districts to the other party.
morei 6y ago
No, they complement each other. What do you do with the 'excess' vote after creating a 51/49 district? You combine the excess from N 51/49 districts into a single district that is 20/80. That way you have N districts that fairly reliably vote for you, and a single districts that extremely reliably votes against you.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  They oppose each other. You're doing a better job the more of the vote you have in a district of type 1, and you're doing a better job the less of the vote you have in a district of type 2. Contradictions don't get any more direct than that. To the extent that a politician is benefiting himself in style #1, he's hurting himself in style #2, and vice versa.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    The people you're replying to aren't realizing your mistake, and you're not reading their replies. You're doing a worse job the more of your vote you have in a district of Type 1. You're creating districts of Type 1 for the other side. Every vote over 51% is a wasted vote, and there's never a reason you would shove all of your voters into one district if you were in control of districting. > To the extent that a politician is benefiting himself in style #1 There's no possible benefit to a politician in winning a district 80/20 rather than 60/40. edit: If 6 people want to vote for me, and 6 want to vote for you, I want to put 3 of your voters in one district, and have three more identical districts each with 2 of my voters and 1 of yours. The first district is what you're referring to as Type 1, and the other three are what you're referring to as Type 2. If you can find a more ideal districting arrangement for my party, I'd like to hear it.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > The people you're replying to aren't realizing your mistake, and you're not reading their replies. No, you're just not bothering to read my comment. I'll repeat it. There are two (2) arguments commonly advanced toward the idea that gerrymandering is bad. In summary, they are: 1. Creating safe seats; 2. Nullifying opposition votes. More of one means less of the other.
andrewem 6y ago
The core problem is the ability to leverage approximately 50% of votes into winning far more than 50% of seats.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  Which suggests that a simplistic "solution" to gerrymandering is that, after the total vote share of the best-performing party is calculated (call it V%), and their share of seats is also calculated (S%), the second-best-performing party should be able to propose a change in district winners that reduces the gap between V% and S%. (And so on for the other parties competing). Of course that would be outrageously unfair, with politicians choosing which districts they win rather than voters choosing the politicians to represent them, and yet that is somehow an improvement over the current system of gerrymandering. A slightly less extreme option would be for the districts that get flipped to be decided by where a given party came closest to winning (the "best near-winner" system used in Baden-Württemberg), but really the aim of this system is to remove all incentive to gerrymander in the first place, so this result flipping rule would never have to be applied.
  - aaronblohowiak 6y ago
    This is how the German system works. Not unfair at all. You cast two votes: one for a person, one for a party. At the end of the day the party percentages have to roughly line up (with a minimum percent for any representative at all.) This system has some very nice balancing properties in that you can vote for the person you want to represent you in the present race as well as the party you most strongly identify with.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      My understanding is that the German system is Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP) [0] which usually involves having a list of top-up candidates who don't belong to any specific district. The Baden-Württemberg system is a clever way around this, although it does lead to some districts being represented by multiple representatives. Having more representatives than districts seems like it would be an overly-ambitious cultural shift in the US, whereas my proposal keeps the familiar 1:1 correspondence, even if there is gerrymandering. It also doesn't change the ballot papers or counting process; and, if gerrymandering is successfully disincentivised, the process works exactly the same as under the existing system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
pessimizer 6y ago
I think it's because you're off on #1. If you're going to create a district that will overwhelmingly vote for one party, you want it to vote for the other side. All votes over 51% are wasted. It's called "stacking." It's complemented by "cracking," where you break up a unit that would vote for the other side and add them to multiple districts where the other side will only get 40%. The "cracked" districts will vote for you no matter what, but certainly not at 80/20. You're looking for 51% + a safety factor of 10-20%.
roywiggins 6y ago
You don't need to hypothesize. Look at Wisconsin. A bunch of fairly Republican districts and a few heavily Democratic districts means that it's quite easy to produce an overwhelming R majority in the State House. The fairly R districts are not sure wins, but they don't have to be. > Republicans won 57 percent of the vote in contested races in 2016 and won 43 of 50 seats. In 2018, Republicans won the same percentage of the vote in contested races — but won 56 of 63 seats. > That’s how gerrymandering works. Even the fact that so many more Democratic seats are uncontested is by design: By making certain districts heavily Democratic, many others can be more easily made slightly Republican. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/04/several-layers-republican-power-grabbing-wisconsin/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/04/several-l... This stuff works, it's easy to see the effects in heavily gerrymandered states.
- ars 6y ago
  > A bunch of fairly Republican districts and a few heavily Democratic districts Something I just realized is that it will always be that way! Democrats do better in cities (in general heavily democratic), while Republicans do better in rural areas (typicaly Republican, but not in a dense way like a city would be). So if you divide districts naturally by geography they will always appear gerrymandered in Republicans favor.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    That's why democracies generally divide districts by population. Geography is largely irrelevant. This was actually a deliberate choice in order to skew the electoral advantage into landed men.
    - ars 6y ago
      > That's why democracies generally divide districts by population. Geography is largely irrelevant. That's kind of my point: No it is not. Districts are meant to be contiguous geographical areas. Even if you adjust the geographical size of each district to have similar population sizes (which was your point), my point still stands: Because of the geographical nature of districts, cities will always have a larger Democratic percentage, and it will always look like Republicans have gerrymandered things.
einpoklum 6y ago
They don't necessarily contradict - one could create a couple of 80/20 districts for the political boss of the region and 51/49 (or 60/40 to be safer) for the rest of the region. Also, I've mostly heard the second argument made, not the first. A large party's leadership should probably lean in that direction anyway, not caring as much about the individual official.
tunesmith 6y ago
Another way of looking at it: You have nine districts. Overall popular vote in the state is 55-44. Should the districts be awarded 5-4? Or should each have a 55-44 split?
- kens 6y ago
  Gerrymandering can be much worse than that. The unpopular party could win 8 districts and leave one for the more popular party. Math: Assume 900 people, so 495 voting for the popular party and 405 for the unpopular party. Put 100 popular voters in district 1. Split the remaining equally (395 popular, 405 unpopular). All districts except the first will be won 51%-49% by the unpopular party. (This is the "pack and crack" gerrymandering strategy, packing the party into some districts and cracking them across the other.)
  - tunesmith 6y ago
    I agree. I'm more just pointing out that it's non-obvious what "fair" even is. Although I do like the standard that was suggested in the Wisconsin case, the one that Kennedy chickened out on before he retired. Sorry, I forget the details - something about minimizing wasted votes.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    The thing about pack and crack is that if you try to do something most people think is fair (“preserving the integrity of communities of common interest”), you find that in areas with a urban core and suburban peripheries you end up naturally with pack-and-crack favoring Republicans because Democrats are often hyperconcetrated in the urban areas with Republicans holding a relatively narrow majority in the suburbs. Of course, if you adopt something like STV in small (say ~5 seat) multimember districts, the opportunity for altering representation by how you draw district lines goes way down, and you still retain individual candidate accountability to the general electorate (unlike in party-list proportional schemes). The problem isn't “how do you draw lines fairly in single-member, FPTP districts”. The problem is single-member, FPTP districts.
    - 6y ago
p1necone 6y ago
You're getting it slightly wrong/backwards. When gerrymandering you want to: 1. Create districts that will overwhelmingly vote for the other guy. and 2. Create districts that will just barely vote for you. Because it doesn't matter if you win a district by 1% or by 49% you can take a population that overall is 50/50, or even prefers the other guy and create a lot of districts that will vote for you by a small margin, and only a handful of districts that will vote for the other guy but by a really big margin. There's actually an android puzzle game that does a great job of communicating how it works: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.studioBlimp.Gerrymanader&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.studioBlim...

kens 6y ago

The journal Science just published an article on gerrymandering with a similar argument. It's appealing to mathematically "solve" gerrymandering, but "The most important decisions in devising an electoral map are grounded in philosophical or political judgments about which the technology is irrelevant. It is nonsensical to completely transform a debate over philosophical values into a mathematical exercise." The article has a nice diagram showing how gerrymandering works as well as a discussion of the various conflicting goals. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6508/1179 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6508/1179

lightlyused 6y ago

I always thought the solution to gerrymandering would be to use rank choice voting across the state and the top vote getters would be the ones who are elected. Than you create the districts that they represent. After all land doesn't vote.

sudosysgen 6y ago

The best solution to gerrymandering is to make it instantly mostly irrelevant, by using the popular vote and ranked-choice voting. And indeed, that's mostly a social solution in it's implementation.

daveFNbuck 6y ago
Gerrymandering is about how you break up people into districts. Those districts elect their representatives by popular vote, so popular voting for these representatives doesn't fix gerrymandering. Statewide votes are mostly done by popular vote, so they're not affected by gerrymandering. Nationwide votes like the one for president are not done by popular vote, but they're also not done by district, so gerrymandering doesn't affect them.

throrthaway 6y ago

The actual solution to gerrymandering is to discard the whole silly idea of 'district' and vote proportionally, just many countries do and are not the worse off for it. What about the rural states, you say? Well they still get to manage their own, internal affairs with their own legislature, governors, etc. But as far as state-level decisions are concerned, their weight should be exactly equal to that of their population representation.