16 ms·

Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

116 points by Corrado 6y ago

spankalee 6y ago
Districts themselves are the problem. They can be more "fair" than they are currently, but they can't overcome the fact that common interests and voting alignment are not exclusively geographic. Removing districts, or enlarging them so the borders barely matter, and implementing ranked choice voting and proportional representation is a far, far better solution.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  How is that working out for the Senate?
  - spankalee 6y ago
    Horribly. States borders are one of the worst districting systems imaginable, and the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Senate makes it a huge, and basically insurmountable, problem.
    - sudosteph 6y ago
      States aren't supposed to be districting systems though - they're meant to be independent governing bodies that work under a set of shared constraints for a shared repbublic. The entire point of the Sentate is to give a representation to the need of the state as its own entity - not as a representation to the people in the state. It wasn't even intended to be an elected body. It may feel unfair, but it's intentional, and it does help ensure overall stability of the nation. The entire philosophy behind the US, right down to the the name of the nation, revolves around the fact that states are the fundamental unit and they have long-term needs which are not always understood or valued by the people. The house of reps is for the the needs of the people, not the Senate. This is why the US is a democratic republic, not a pure democratic state.
      - spankalee 6y ago
        I know it's intentional, but it's unfair and broken. There's no valid reason for a WY resident to have 60x the voting power of a CA resident.
        totalZero 6y ago
        The reason is that WY would never become part of a federation where its partial sovereignty means nothing. Look up the Great Compromise.
        PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
        WY was created by the United States of America. It wasn't some pre-existing entity that opted to join the union.
        ndiscussion 6y ago
        That seems... like a creative way of putting it. Wyoming may not have existed as a state entity, but the people sure did. And they had their reasons for joining the federation - this is one of them.
        PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
        wikipedia: >The region acquired the name Wyoming by 1865, when Representative James Mitchell Ashley of Ohio introduced a bill to Congress to provide a "temporary government for the territory of Wyoming". > The region's population grew steadily after the Union Pacific Railroad reached the town of Cheyenne in 1867, and the federal government established the Wyoming Territory on July 25, 1868 > Once government-sponsored expeditions to the Yellowstone country began, reports by Colter and Bridger, previously believed to be apocryphal, were found to be true. That led to the creation of Yellowstone National Park, which became the world's first national park in 1872. Nearly all of Yellowstone National Park lies within the far northwestern borders of Wyoming. > In August 1886, the U.S. Army was given administration of the park > Democrats and Republicans alike in Wyoming Territory agreed by the late 1880s that it was time their territory became a state. Statehood was attractive to the territory’s businessmen and politicians, as it offered them much more local control over land and water issues https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/wyoming-statehood https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/wyoming-statehood > Gov. Warren called a special election for Nov. 5, 1889. The Constitution passed overwhelmingly by a vote of 6,272 in favor to 1,903 against. [ this at a time where the total population of the state was around 60,000 ] >Cheyenne businessman and rancher Francis E. Warren, was appointed to a second stint as territorial governor in 1889, replacing Moonlight. Warren strongly supported statehood. [...] (Territorial governors and other top officials were appointed by the president. ------ I don't find your view of Wyoming's history persuasive. The territories were created and managed by the US federal government, with every expectation that they would either become states or simply remain US-controlled territory. They were never independent pseudo-states, and if they remained a territory, they had even less control over their own destiny than if they became a state.
    - totalZero 6y ago
      The advantage of state borders is that they are static and precede many years of polity shift and demographic migration. Districts, on the other hand, are drawn to serve the drawer.
      - scarmig 6y ago
        States are also drawn to serve the drawer. Why do we have a North Dakota and a South Dakota? It's not because we had a North Dakota Territory and a South Dakota Territory; it was because they would enter the Union as solidly Republican states, cementing Republican dominance in the Senate and in the Presidency, and admitting two states instead of one doubles the effect. There's no particular reason to treat the current boundaries as holy writ.
        rayiner 6y ago
        There is a reason, which is that regardless of how and why states were created, they are legally sovereign entities with their own separate governments. A bunch of countries in the world were drawn on a map with boundaries set by the UN or the British. That doesn’t make them any less sovereign entities.
- walshemj 6y ago
  PR unfortuetly can give the extremes kingmaking powers which can go against the well being of the majority. The German greens forcing Angel Merkle into shutting nuclear energy early and having to use more ghastly lignite coal.
  - obelos 6y ago
    It depends on the voting system. Some methods like Proportional Approval Voting are less prone to this kind of gaming in PR/MMD settings: https://electionscience.org/problem-solution/ https://electionscience.org/problem-solution/
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    I think that similar "kingmaking" problems can exist in non-PR systems, but the effect is obscured by how unrepresentative the parties are. For example, instead of a small party forcing one unpopular policy on a coalition, you end up with a single large party that only 25% of the population voted for, running the government without any accountability (because of "safe" gerrymandered seats). Moreover, these large parties usually contain multiple competing wings, and so are effectively coalitions themselves, except their "coalition agreements" are done behind the scenes, and then internal party discipline mechanisms are used to force all the politicians in that party to follow the party line, even if that party line is set by a minority of a minority.
  - chalst 6y ago
    The Greens actually had little parliamentary influence then: the CDU could have counted on the support of their coalition partners, the pro-nuclear FDP, at the time. Merkel went with massive anti-nuclear sentiment post-Fukushima to pass legislation with over 80% Bundestag support to phase out nuclear power.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  What's really needed to fix this is to switch from first the post to range voting: https://rangevoting.org/ https://rangevoting.org/ Then where you draw the district lines doesn't matter nearly as much because no matter where you put them, the candidate that pleases more of the voters in their district has the advantage, which makes it hard to disenfranchise anybody. By removing spoilers from the equation you can have two highly similar candidates running against each other without splitting the vote and both losing, so a candidate that satisfies more of the district defeats one that disregards the concerns of 49% of the voters. It also makes it much harder to gerrymander for the advantage of a particular party because it would make third party candidates and independents viable, and shifting voters around would have hard to predict results on party balance. Moving some Democrats you "didn't need" from a Democratic district to one that used to go to the Republicans might make the first district go to the Libertarians and the second to the Greens.
  - ttyprintk 6y ago
    rangevoting.org also provides interesting redistricting boundaries: https://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html https://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html Colorado is an interesting case because it accidentally reveals a degenerate solution. Geography and population form boundaries in the denser areas, but not the sparser ones. See the special section on rangevoting.org and the follow-up link: http://bolson.org/dist/ http://bolson.org/dist/
- mcguire 6y ago
  At-large elections are also a good way to avoid having minorities elected to office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    That's at-large FPTP elections, which basically guarantee the statewide plurality gets all the seats. At-large STV, guaranteeing that a faction which got floor(1/n+1)+1 votes in a district with n seats (to make balloting manageable, you probably want 3≤n≤7) provide representation to significant minority interests regardless of geographical distribution.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      This may be clear, but: > guaranteeing that a faction which got floor(1/n+1)+1 votes in a district with n seats should be: > guaranteeing that a faction which got floor(1/n+1)+1 votes in a district with n seats gets a seat
  - spankalee 6y ago
    That's why you need proportional representation. Various minorities, not just racial, can form blocs that ensure a fair chance of representation.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  A voting system which leads to more proportional outcomes is probably the correct solution here, but there is a "hack" which could fix gerrymandering specifically (if implemented) without changing the ballots, the size of districts, or the counting process. The idea is to look, after an election, at the proportion of seats won by each party, and the proportion of votes won (in aggregate) by each party, and ask "Could these two sets of proportions be brought more into line by appointing a different winner in one of the districts?". If a change to some winner could improve the proportionality, then a rule would say that this change to the results should be imposed (on the district where the losing party came closest to winning). Of course, overriding the true result in a district would be hugely controversial, but the idea is that the rule would act as a deterrent and never need to be invoked, because the districts would be drawn in a proportional way to begin with.
- andrewla 6y ago
  You have to be very cautious with this approach. The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office, but an individual that you hold personally accountable for their political actions. Removing districts means that you are moving to statewide elections, and then it becomes a statewide office rather than a local office, which is not the intent. The better solution is to make the scarce resource less so; limit districts to 60k people (i.e. pre-Reapportionment Act levels) and expand the house of representatives correspondingly. Then this problem mostly becomes moot. The other problem, of having ~5000 people in the house of representatives, presents additional challenges, naturally, but the house has the power to set its rules so it can put more work on committees (which can have additional specialization levels) and less work on floors.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    > The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office The "intent"? Whose intent? Regardless, that's not how modern elections work. The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation. Candidates (on both sides!) who are known for exceptional constituent services are regularly voted out for faceless party hacks. When people do switch their votes, it's a consistent shift up and down the ballot. The days when representatives carefully pursued their local constituents' interest are long gone: consider how Californian Republican representatives voted to hike their own property owning constituents' taxes in 2017. It doesn't make sense to have local elections, because politics isn't local now.
    - andrewla 6y ago
      > The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation I mean, I guess I think this is a problem, rather than something that we should encode structurally into the system. I personally would prefer reforms that push back in the local direction. Right now there is a very small number of heterodox senators (Manchin, maybe Sanders, any others?) and a larger number of heterodox reps. To lower those barriers to make it more feasible for people to run for national office as a representative would be a vast improvement.
- specialist 6y ago
  PR seems like the ultimate end goal. Especially for assemblies. Ideally, eliminating districts. Because of path dependencies (the legal version of technical debt), we gotta start where we're at. So I support any and all reforms that move us in that direction. I've long advocated approval voting for executive and single member districts. But since I support any move away from FPTP, I support my friends working on RCV. (Don't let perfection be the enemy of good enough.) I'm newly curious about multimember districts. I don't really get the math (details) yet. I read that Illinois' state house had multimember districts and that it was more effective and less polarized today. And this reform might be an easier lift. I'm also newly curious about unicameral legislatures. Especially at the state level. Meaning no upper houses aka senates. Or maybe giving the senates different responsibilities. Like the lower house controls the budget and appropriations whereas the upper house does more meta stuff like democratic and governmental reforms. I like the notion of a fast changing lower house and a slower changing upper house. One of the stated intents of the US Senate. But without a more clear division of labor (balance of powers), it hasn't seemed to work out.
  - ttyprintk 6y ago
    Maybe less theoretically, the US Senate does fulfill a perspective on food security: cows are better represented than people.
ndiscussion 6y ago
These things are all just opinion - there is no such thing as a "fair" district. Or do you not really agree with this concept? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority Voting blocks are how they are... and these kinds of changes will have sweeping, unpredictable consequences. I find it humorous that people have a big enough ego to think that they could get it "right". More generally, what people consider "fair" voting policies are what benefit their political party.
- majormajor 6y ago
  You seem to be suggesting that tyranny of the minority would be no less preferable to tyranny of the majority, while it seems strictly worse: it still isn't properly representing everyone, but now the unrepresented population is larger... Don't let an improvement not being perfect prevent any improvements from happening.
  - manux 6y ago
    > Don't let an improvement not being perfect prevent any improvements from happening. I strongly agree. I often hear this type of argument and it appears to me as just another kind of Nirvana Fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
  - ndiscussion 6y ago
    Tyranny of the minority is a different problem, and I don't think it's a given that this will occur if you take away majority rule. Think historically - would you really want the tyranny of the majority in the 1960s? 1920s? It's my opinion that minorities deserve a place at the table.
    - tshaddox 6y ago
      This might be controversial, but how about no tyranny at all?
    - majormajor 6y ago
clircle 6y ago
The website is down, so I don't have much to say. But I will be very interested in how the authors define 'fairness' for this sort of problem. Algorithms are fair right guys? It can't be biased if it's just math. \s
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  I can't access the website either, but I'm really curious to see if their definition of fairness creates districts that violate the majority-minority rules in the Voting Rights Act
- totalZero 6y ago
  One advantage of a system like this can be the static nature of the objective function. If you set the rules up clearly beforehand (perhaps in a Constitutional amendment), then after a while the ebb and flow of two-party politics will balance out in the new reality (see Duverger's Law) and you no longer have to deal with gerrymandering.
clircle 6y ago
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20201129022227/http://autoredistrict.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201129022227/http://autoredist...
mywittyname 6y ago
This is a mostly great idea. The only thing I can't get behind is their mechanism for competitiveness. While it sounds like a feature that is desirable, I suspect that in reality, it serves to provide the minority candidates with disproportionately high influence. I feel like it introduces the same problem that the electorial college does, where a swing of 10,000 votes in one region can be used to negate 100,000 votes in another. I think a better target would be to optimize for for minimal difference in demographic between neighboring districts. That way districts act as kind of a gradient, where neighboring districts influence each other slightly, keeping each district closer to the overall political affiliation of the region.
sudosteph 6y ago
I'm a North Carolinian - so it's fair to say that "creative" redistricting has harmed my state a bit more than most. However, I disagree with fundamental precepts they are using because they do not take culture into account. The representative system works best when it's able to group people with similar interests and values and lets them elect someone who can share those interests. I do not think that valuing "compact" districts is necessarily helpful for that. The better approximation here should be to aim for grouping similar population densities together. For example, rural voters should have much larger districts, which are made up of mostly other rural voters and urban voters should have much smaller districts. Likewise, "minimal county splits" is not especially meaningful either. In NC, Charlotte is in Mecklenburg County - that county probably shouldn't get split. However, the population which lives edges of the counties which surround Mecklenburg (ie, southern Iredell, parts of Cabbarus county, Gaston county - are hugely impacted by Charlotte. Those counties have tons of growth from commuters to Charlotte and have very different needs depending on how close they are to Charlotte. These outer suburbs voters should be represented together, across county lines. And finally - I don't every district needs to be all that competitive. We shouldn't be pitting people with totally different needs against each other for representation just for the sake of it. It's a cool idea and interesting to see what a "fair" algorithm says - but the fundamentals here are critical.
- majormajor 6y ago
  > The representative system works best when it's able to group people with similar interests and values and lets them elect someone who can share those interests. This sounds plausible, but I've been doubting it the past few years. It seems like a big driver in polarization because the most extreme subset of those "shared values" groups can more easily take the driver seat.
  - sudosteph 6y ago
    I think there are cases where that happens - but I also think we can't underestimate how much reactionary sentiment has stoked this polarization outcome as well. Politicians have learned that "fear of the other guy" can be just as powerful of a motivator (if not more so) to get turnout. So they know that in some cases running an extreme "anti candidate" improves their chances of winning - if only because it energizes the base that is most afraid, and thus most likely to turn out. For this issue in particular, I think ranked choice could be a huge help.
chris123 6y ago
Pretty sure the politicians don't want it fair. Politicians don't do fair. It's the worst of humans that are attracted to politics and surviving politics, after all.
- specialist 6y ago
  Most every incumbent tries to pull the ladder up after themselves. That's why it's so ridiculous to have electeds in charge of redistricting, reforms, oversight. Even the appearance of a conflict of interest should be treated as a conflict of interest. No burden of proof required.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  The more you believe this, the more you guarantee its truth. If you want it to be otherwise, you have to believe that it can be. You have to believe that we can have political systems where people who actually care about issues, about people, about the welfare of other people, about justice, abdout the future can play a role. If you really don't believe that's possible ... I don't want to be you.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jrussino 6y ago
Whenever the topic of of redistricting/gerrymandering or voting comes up, I always like to recommend CGP Gray's series of videos on the subject: https://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom https://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom I think the "meta" issue of improving our political system is probably the most important political issue we should focus on for the long-term health of our society. Does anybody here have other good resources to recommend for learning about these issues, both from a theoretical standpoint as well as groups/organizations that are advocating for improvements in this area?
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  Another popular resource that is often shared is the explorable explanation "To Build A Better Ballot" by Nicky Case here: https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/ It's a great way to get to grips with some of the theory of different voting systems, and has some links at the bottom to various relevant groups.
ogre_codes 6y ago
Your average kindergartener could draw up districts which are more fair than the current ones. The problem has never been finding a fair way to do it. The problem is that the people in power aren't at all interested in doing it fairly.
phnofive 6y ago
Are geographic districts required by the Constitution? State and Federal laws certainly follow from this assumption, but could a state simply assign registered voters at random (per election, roughly in line with ballots being finalized) to each of its districts? Single-seated states already enjoy this luxury.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  It is good to know who your representative is and for a representative to be able to visit their district and have community meetings so they can (in theory) represent the interests of the people in that community. If the district is spread across the state like avocado on toast, you aren't really representing anyone.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    If you keep the group small enough per representative you can still hold community meetings. The internet adds more options for "central meeting places" even if the geography is absurdly large (say, a random sampling of Texas or Alaska) even if you can't find other ways to incentivize travel to in person meetings. That said though, when was the last time any representative in the US was concerned about in person community meetings? It's a beautiful ideal, but in practice it seems nonexistent. The status quo, especially when you look at the maps of how some districts have been gerrymandered to incredibly abstract shapes is already broken from the ideal. Maybe it's time to shift the ideal? We have the technology to try new things that aren't necessarily beholden to geography today, among other ideas.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      > The status quo, especially when you look at the maps of how some districts have been gerrymandered to incredibly abstract shapes is already broken from the ideal. This is something we can fix though. I know where our representative's office is. While I haven't gone to our representative for specific needs, I know people who have. Knowing our representative lives in our district and is local means I know he understands what our community is dealing with at least at some level. While there are a lot of things broken with the current representative model, being regional is not the problem. (The stupid way they designate the "regions" on the other hand is)
pessimizer 6y ago
I don't think that political parties or race should be included in redistricting plans, especially since I think that this could often accidentally result in optimally "cracking" or "packing" minority districts. Neither political parties nor races should be intentionally institutionalized. The defining characteristic of a district is that it is geographically contiguous. A defining specification for districts is that they have a roughly even population. With those constraints, what you would want to do is find physical commonalities (not abstract loyalties.) For example: water sources, proximity to commercial areas, types of housing stock, local weather patterns, local roads/accessibility, proximity to major land features/employers (like quarries, factories, lakes.) That's harder than doing this. A problem I have with with doing this by political parties is that the two parties aren't themselves part of government and shouldn't be. A real problem I have with making racial guarantees (other than the possibility of packing and cracking) is that it seems to be calculated through averaging "diversity" - meaning that a group with 6% representation would be guaranteed 6% voting power on the district level (assuming people vote purely based on racial allegiance.) "Diversity" is a red herring; it's remedy that is important. 6% can be ignored at the district level nearly as easily as it can be ignored at the individual level. You're not going to get remedy from redistricting, but districts that grow from material features of the places where people live will end up shaped by race anyway (due to the history of those places.)
- scarmig 6y ago
  Physical commonalities are easily gameable. You could divide a city into east-bank/west-bank, or upstream/downstream, or even near-bank/far-bank. Give me enough factors and write me a large enough check, and I can give you whatever kind of partisan results you want. I do find watershed democracy (legislative district boundaries defined by watershed) kind of an interesting thought experiment. At the very least it'd help to solve water politics.
  - jhardy54 6y ago
    Bioregionalism strikes again!
  - ttyprintk 6y ago
MengerSponge 6y ago
Any attempt to completely automate this process is destined to fail, for all the reasons given in this thread. Weighting factors matter, and it is naive to assume that nobody is going to attempt to subvert a nonpartisan board, when so much power is at stake. Don't despair! There's an alternative that generates an equitable outcome between two parties that are trying to screw their rivals: Cake Cutting. https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781v1 You've probably heard the basic version of how to fairly divide a piece of cake between two children. Have one of them cut it, then the other choose which piece to keep. The cutter guarantees the largest possible piece of cake by cutting the cake in half. This is the same idea, just extended: one party divides the state into districts, then the other chooses one district to "lock" and divides the remainder, then the process repeats.
- jedberg 6y ago
  But then you just further entrench the political parties.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    It doesn't have to entrench the political parties, depending on the system used. For example the people tasked with drawing each district could be selected from the general public by sortition, i.e. like jury duty. These people would be given access to every tool and expert help they need, and if they wanted to just rubber-stamp the suggestion of whichever party they support, then they would be free to do so. A slightly more deterministic process would be to generate a list of all parties (or independent candidates) who received more than 10% of the vote at the last election, and allow each of them to draw a number of districts in proportion to the share of the vote they received.
jedberg 6y ago
We really need to get the cube root rule passed.[0] Gerrymandering wouldn't really be useful if each district were smaller, and then we'd get Representatives that have a similar breakdown to the people they represent. For example in the US each representative would represent ~475K people instead of ~755K. So California would have 84 representatives instead of 53. It's a lot harder to gerrymander when the districts are much smaller. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_rule
- brianolson 6y ago
  I used to think smaller districts would be harder to gerrymander, but the 99 Wisconsin State Legislature districts (each none too big) can still be gerrymandered plenty to distort the balance of that body.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Interesting. I hadn't heard about that. I just read up on it, and it's crazy how well they gerrymandered. Look like in one election Democrats got 56% of the vote but only 28% of the seats.
- sagarm 6y ago
  More districts just means more opportunities to gerrymander. We need multi-member districts to achieve something closer to proportional votes and reduced polarization.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    This is a fascinating idea. Make the districts bigger but have each one elect two people. Which in California would basically be the two people who run in November since we have a jungle primary.
andromeduck 6y ago
Can we just gamify it via fair cake slicing algorithm and call it a day?
frankydp 6y ago
Is this seriously recommending institutional race based procedural gerrymandering?
rayiner 6y ago
For all of the talk about gerrymandering, it’s worth noting that it had almost no net effect this year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Re... Democrats won 50.8% of the House popular vote, and 51% of seats. Or in 2018: Democrats won 54% of seats and 53.4% of the vote. It had a modest effect in 2016: Democrats won 45% of seats but 48% of the vote.
- qndreoi 6y ago
  With gerrymandering, the ruling party will pack voters in districts by party. Instead of competitive districts, one party districts are formed, and more extreme candidates win primaries. That's how you end up with really objectionable people being elected instead of centrists, and compromise becomes near impossible.
rohan-ramchand 6y ago
This is really cool! I built something very similar for my undergraduate thesis: https://github.com/rohan/elbridge https://github.com/rohan/elbridge
cafard 6y ago
Isn't this a matter of political will rather than of algorithms? Iowa seems to have a good process: https://www.ncsl.org/research/redistricting/the-iowa-model-for-redistricting.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/redistricting/the-iowa-model-f...

116 points by Corrado 6y ago

Districts themselves are the problem. They can be more "fair" than they are currently, but they can't overcome the fact that common interests and voting alignment are not exclusively geographic. Removing districts, or enlarging them so the borders barely matter, and implementing ranked choice voting and proportional representation is a far, far better solution.

freeone3000 6y ago
How is that working out for the Senate?
- spankalee 6y ago
  Horribly. States borders are one of the worst districting systems imaginable, and the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Senate makes it a huge, and basically insurmountable, problem.
  - sudosteph 6y ago
    States aren't supposed to be districting systems though - they're meant to be independent governing bodies that work under a set of shared constraints for a shared repbublic. The entire point of the Sentate is to give a representation to the need of the state as its own entity - not as a representation to the people in the state. It wasn't even intended to be an elected body. It may feel unfair, but it's intentional, and it does help ensure overall stability of the nation. The entire philosophy behind the US, right down to the the name of the nation, revolves around the fact that states are the fundamental unit and they have long-term needs which are not always understood or valued by the people. The house of reps is for the the needs of the people, not the Senate. This is why the US is a democratic republic, not a pure democratic state.
    - spankalee 6y ago
      I know it's intentional, but it's unfair and broken. There's no valid reason for a WY resident to have 60x the voting power of a CA resident.
      - totalZero 6y ago
        The reason is that WY would never become part of a federation where its partial sovereignty means nothing. Look up the Great Compromise.
        PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
        WY was created by the United States of America. It wasn't some pre-existing entity that opted to join the union.
        ndiscussion 6y ago
        That seems... like a creative way of putting it. Wyoming may not have existed as a state entity, but the people sure did. And they had their reasons for joining the federation - this is one of them.
        PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
        wikipedia: >The region acquired the name Wyoming by 1865, when Representative James Mitchell Ashley of Ohio introduced a bill to Congress to provide a "temporary government for the territory of Wyoming". > The region's population grew steadily after the Union Pacific Railroad reached the town of Cheyenne in 1867, and the federal government established the Wyoming Territory on July 25, 1868 > Once government-sponsored expeditions to the Yellowstone country began, reports by Colter and Bridger, previously believed to be apocryphal, were found to be true. That led to the creation of Yellowstone National Park, which became the world's first national park in 1872. Nearly all of Yellowstone National Park lies within the far northwestern borders of Wyoming. > In August 1886, the U.S. Army was given administration of the park > Democrats and Republicans alike in Wyoming Territory agreed by the late 1880s that it was time their territory became a state. Statehood was attractive to the territory’s businessmen and politicians, as it offered them much more local control over land and water issues https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/wyoming-statehood https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/wyoming-statehood > Gov. Warren called a special election for Nov. 5, 1889. The Constitution passed overwhelmingly by a vote of 6,272 in favor to 1,903 against. [ this at a time where the total population of the state was around 60,000 ] >Cheyenne businessman and rancher Francis E. Warren, was appointed to a second stint as territorial governor in 1889, replacing Moonlight. Warren strongly supported statehood. [...] (Territorial governors and other top officials were appointed by the president. ------ I don't find your view of Wyoming's history persuasive. The territories were created and managed by the US federal government, with every expectation that they would either become states or simply remain US-controlled territory. They were never independent pseudo-states, and if they remained a territory, they had even less control over their own destiny than if they became a state.
  - totalZero 6y ago
    The advantage of state borders is that they are static and precede many years of polity shift and demographic migration. Districts, on the other hand, are drawn to serve the drawer.
    - scarmig 6y ago
      States are also drawn to serve the drawer. Why do we have a North Dakota and a South Dakota? It's not because we had a North Dakota Territory and a South Dakota Territory; it was because they would enter the Union as solidly Republican states, cementing Republican dominance in the Senate and in the Presidency, and admitting two states instead of one doubles the effect. There's no particular reason to treat the current boundaries as holy writ.
      - rayiner 6y ago
        There is a reason, which is that regardless of how and why states were created, they are legally sovereign entities with their own separate governments. A bunch of countries in the world were drawn on a map with boundaries set by the UN or the British. That doesn’t make them any less sovereign entities.
walshemj 6y ago
PR unfortuetly can give the extremes kingmaking powers which can go against the well being of the majority. The German greens forcing Angel Merkle into shutting nuclear energy early and having to use more ghastly lignite coal.
- obelos 6y ago
  It depends on the voting system. Some methods like Proportional Approval Voting are less prone to this kind of gaming in PR/MMD settings: https://electionscience.org/problem-solution/ https://electionscience.org/problem-solution/
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  I think that similar "kingmaking" problems can exist in non-PR systems, but the effect is obscured by how unrepresentative the parties are. For example, instead of a small party forcing one unpopular policy on a coalition, you end up with a single large party that only 25% of the population voted for, running the government without any accountability (because of "safe" gerrymandered seats). Moreover, these large parties usually contain multiple competing wings, and so are effectively coalitions themselves, except their "coalition agreements" are done behind the scenes, and then internal party discipline mechanisms are used to force all the politicians in that party to follow the party line, even if that party line is set by a minority of a minority.
- chalst 6y ago
  The Greens actually had little parliamentary influence then: the CDU could have counted on the support of their coalition partners, the pro-nuclear FDP, at the time. Merkel went with massive anti-nuclear sentiment post-Fukushima to pass legislation with over 80% Bundestag support to phase out nuclear power.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
What's really needed to fix this is to switch from first the post to range voting: https://rangevoting.org/ https://rangevoting.org/ Then where you draw the district lines doesn't matter nearly as much because no matter where you put them, the candidate that pleases more of the voters in their district has the advantage, which makes it hard to disenfranchise anybody. By removing spoilers from the equation you can have two highly similar candidates running against each other without splitting the vote and both losing, so a candidate that satisfies more of the district defeats one that disregards the concerns of 49% of the voters. It also makes it much harder to gerrymander for the advantage of a particular party because it would make third party candidates and independents viable, and shifting voters around would have hard to predict results on party balance. Moving some Democrats you "didn't need" from a Democratic district to one that used to go to the Republicans might make the first district go to the Libertarians and the second to the Greens.
- ttyprintk 6y ago
  rangevoting.org also provides interesting redistricting boundaries: https://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html https://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html Colorado is an interesting case because it accidentally reveals a degenerate solution. Geography and population form boundaries in the denser areas, but not the sparser ones. See the special section on rangevoting.org and the follow-up link: http://bolson.org/dist/ http://bolson.org/dist/
mcguire 6y ago
At-large elections are also a good way to avoid having minorities elected to office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  That's at-large FPTP elections, which basically guarantee the statewide plurality gets all the seats. At-large STV, guaranteeing that a faction which got floor(1/n+1)+1 votes in a district with n seats (to make balloting manageable, you probably want 3≤n≤7) provide representation to significant minority interests regardless of geographical distribution.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    This may be clear, but: > guaranteeing that a faction which got floor(1/n+1)+1 votes in a district with n seats should be: > guaranteeing that a faction which got floor(1/n+1)+1 votes in a district with n seats gets a seat
- spankalee 6y ago
  That's why you need proportional representation. Various minorities, not just racial, can form blocs that ensure a fair chance of representation.
dane-pgp 6y ago
A voting system which leads to more proportional outcomes is probably the correct solution here, but there is a "hack" which could fix gerrymandering specifically (if implemented) without changing the ballots, the size of districts, or the counting process. The idea is to look, after an election, at the proportion of seats won by each party, and the proportion of votes won (in aggregate) by each party, and ask "Could these two sets of proportions be brought more into line by appointing a different winner in one of the districts?". If a change to some winner could improve the proportionality, then a rule would say that this change to the results should be imposed (on the district where the losing party came closest to winning). Of course, overriding the true result in a district would be hugely controversial, but the idea is that the rule would act as a deterrent and never need to be invoked, because the districts would be drawn in a proportional way to begin with.
andrewla 6y ago
You have to be very cautious with this approach. The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office, but an individual that you hold personally accountable for their political actions. Removing districts means that you are moving to statewide elections, and then it becomes a statewide office rather than a local office, which is not the intent. The better solution is to make the scarce resource less so; limit districts to 60k people (i.e. pre-Reapportionment Act levels) and expand the house of representatives correspondingly. Then this problem mostly becomes moot. The other problem, of having ~5000 people in the house of representatives, presents additional challenges, naturally, but the house has the power to set its rules so it can put more work on committees (which can have additional specialization levels) and less work on floors.
- scarmig 6y ago
  > The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office The "intent"? Whose intent? Regardless, that's not how modern elections work. The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation. Candidates (on both sides!) who are known for exceptional constituent services are regularly voted out for faceless party hacks. When people do switch their votes, it's a consistent shift up and down the ballot. The days when representatives carefully pursued their local constituents' interest are long gone: consider how Californian Republican representatives voted to hike their own property owning constituents' taxes in 2017. It doesn't make sense to have local elections, because politics isn't local now.
  - andrewla 6y ago
    > The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation I mean, I guess I think this is a problem, rather than something that we should encode structurally into the system. I personally would prefer reforms that push back in the local direction. Right now there is a very small number of heterodox senators (Manchin, maybe Sanders, any others?) and a larger number of heterodox reps. To lower those barriers to make it more feasible for people to run for national office as a representative would be a vast improvement.
specialist 6y ago
PR seems like the ultimate end goal. Especially for assemblies. Ideally, eliminating districts. Because of path dependencies (the legal version of technical debt), we gotta start where we're at. So I support any and all reforms that move us in that direction. I've long advocated approval voting for executive and single member districts. But since I support any move away from FPTP, I support my friends working on RCV. (Don't let perfection be the enemy of good enough.) I'm newly curious about multimember districts. I don't really get the math (details) yet. I read that Illinois' state house had multimember districts and that it was more effective and less polarized today. And this reform might be an easier lift. I'm also newly curious about unicameral legislatures. Especially at the state level. Meaning no upper houses aka senates. Or maybe giving the senates different responsibilities. Like the lower house controls the budget and appropriations whereas the upper house does more meta stuff like democratic and governmental reforms. I like the notion of a fast changing lower house and a slower changing upper house. One of the stated intents of the US Senate. But without a more clear division of labor (balance of powers), it hasn't seemed to work out.
- ttyprintk 6y ago
  Maybe less theoretically, the US Senate does fulfill a perspective on food security: cows are better represented than people.

ndiscussion 6y ago

These things are all just opinion - there is no such thing as a "fair" district. Or do you not really agree with this concept? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority Voting blocks are how they are... and these kinds of changes will have sweeping, unpredictable consequences. I find it humorous that people have a big enough ego to think that they could get it "right". More generally, what people consider "fair" voting policies are what benefit their political party.

majormajor 6y ago
You seem to be suggesting that tyranny of the minority would be no less preferable to tyranny of the majority, while it seems strictly worse: it still isn't properly representing everyone, but now the unrepresented population is larger... Don't let an improvement not being perfect prevent any improvements from happening.
- manux 6y ago
  > Don't let an improvement not being perfect prevent any improvements from happening. I strongly agree. I often hear this type of argument and it appears to me as just another kind of Nirvana Fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
- ndiscussion 6y ago
  Tyranny of the minority is a different problem, and I don't think it's a given that this will occur if you take away majority rule. Think historically - would you really want the tyranny of the majority in the 1960s? 1920s? It's my opinion that minorities deserve a place at the table.
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    This might be controversial, but how about no tyranny at all?
  - majormajor 6y ago

clircle 6y ago

The website is down, so I don't have much to say. But I will be very interested in how the authors define 'fairness' for this sort of problem. Algorithms are fair right guys? It can't be biased if it's just math. \s

Rebelgecko 6y ago
I can't access the website either, but I'm really curious to see if their definition of fairness creates districts that violate the majority-minority rules in the Voting Rights Act
totalZero 6y ago
One advantage of a system like this can be the static nature of the objective function. If you set the rules up clearly beforehand (perhaps in a Constitutional amendment), then after a while the ebb and flow of two-party politics will balance out in the new reality (see Duverger's Law) and you no longer have to deal with gerrymandering.

clircle 6y ago

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20201129022227/http://autoredistrict.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201129022227/http://autoredist...

mywittyname 6y ago

This is a mostly great idea. The only thing I can't get behind is their mechanism for competitiveness. While it sounds like a feature that is desirable, I suspect that in reality, it serves to provide the minority candidates with disproportionately high influence. I feel like it introduces the same problem that the electorial college does, where a swing of 10,000 votes in one region can be used to negate 100,000 votes in another. I think a better target would be to optimize for for minimal difference in demographic between neighboring districts. That way districts act as kind of a gradient, where neighboring districts influence each other slightly, keeping each district closer to the overall political affiliation of the region.

sudosteph 6y ago

I'm a North Carolinian - so it's fair to say that "creative" redistricting has harmed my state a bit more than most. However, I disagree with fundamental precepts they are using because they do not take culture into account. The representative system works best when it's able to group people with similar interests and values and lets them elect someone who can share those interests. I do not think that valuing "compact" districts is necessarily helpful for that. The better approximation here should be to aim for grouping similar population densities together. For example, rural voters should have much larger districts, which are made up of mostly other rural voters and urban voters should have much smaller districts. Likewise, "minimal county splits" is not especially meaningful either. In NC, Charlotte is in Mecklenburg County - that county probably shouldn't get split. However, the population which lives edges of the counties which surround Mecklenburg (ie, southern Iredell, parts of Cabbarus county, Gaston county - are hugely impacted by Charlotte. Those counties have tons of growth from commuters to Charlotte and have very different needs depending on how close they are to Charlotte. These outer suburbs voters should be represented together, across county lines. And finally - I don't every district needs to be all that competitive. We shouldn't be pitting people with totally different needs against each other for representation just for the sake of it. It's a cool idea and interesting to see what a "fair" algorithm says - but the fundamentals here are critical.

majormajor 6y ago
> The representative system works best when it's able to group people with similar interests and values and lets them elect someone who can share those interests. This sounds plausible, but I've been doubting it the past few years. It seems like a big driver in polarization because the most extreme subset of those "shared values" groups can more easily take the driver seat.
- sudosteph 6y ago
  I think there are cases where that happens - but I also think we can't underestimate how much reactionary sentiment has stoked this polarization outcome as well. Politicians have learned that "fear of the other guy" can be just as powerful of a motivator (if not more so) to get turnout. So they know that in some cases running an extreme "anti candidate" improves their chances of winning - if only because it energizes the base that is most afraid, and thus most likely to turn out. For this issue in particular, I think ranked choice could be a huge help.

chris123 6y ago

Pretty sure the politicians don't want it fair. Politicians don't do fair. It's the worst of humans that are attracted to politics and surviving politics, after all.

specialist 6y ago
Most every incumbent tries to pull the ladder up after themselves. That's why it's so ridiculous to have electeds in charge of redistricting, reforms, oversight. Even the appearance of a conflict of interest should be treated as a conflict of interest. No burden of proof required.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
The more you believe this, the more you guarantee its truth. If you want it to be otherwise, you have to believe that it can be. You have to believe that we can have political systems where people who actually care about issues, about people, about the welfare of other people, about justice, abdout the future can play a role. If you really don't believe that's possible ... I don't want to be you.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jrussino 6y ago

Whenever the topic of of redistricting/gerrymandering or voting comes up, I always like to recommend CGP Gray's series of videos on the subject: https://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom https://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom I think the "meta" issue of improving our political system is probably the most important political issue we should focus on for the long-term health of our society. Does anybody here have other good resources to recommend for learning about these issues, both from a theoretical standpoint as well as groups/organizations that are advocating for improvements in this area?

dane-pgp 6y ago
Another popular resource that is often shared is the explorable explanation "To Build A Better Ballot" by Nicky Case here: https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/ It's a great way to get to grips with some of the theory of different voting systems, and has some links at the bottom to various relevant groups.

ogre_codes 6y ago

Your average kindergartener could draw up districts which are more fair than the current ones. The problem has never been finding a fair way to do it. The problem is that the people in power aren't at all interested in doing it fairly.

phnofive 6y ago

Are geographic districts required by the Constitution? State and Federal laws certainly follow from this assumption, but could a state simply assign registered voters at random (per election, roughly in line with ballots being finalized) to each of its districts? Single-seated states already enjoy this luxury.

ogre_codes 6y ago
It is good to know who your representative is and for a representative to be able to visit their district and have community meetings so they can (in theory) represent the interests of the people in that community. If the district is spread across the state like avocado on toast, you aren't really representing anyone.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  If you keep the group small enough per representative you can still hold community meetings. The internet adds more options for "central meeting places" even if the geography is absurdly large (say, a random sampling of Texas or Alaska) even if you can't find other ways to incentivize travel to in person meetings. That said though, when was the last time any representative in the US was concerned about in person community meetings? It's a beautiful ideal, but in practice it seems nonexistent. The status quo, especially when you look at the maps of how some districts have been gerrymandered to incredibly abstract shapes is already broken from the ideal. Maybe it's time to shift the ideal? We have the technology to try new things that aren't necessarily beholden to geography today, among other ideas.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > The status quo, especially when you look at the maps of how some districts have been gerrymandered to incredibly abstract shapes is already broken from the ideal. This is something we can fix though. I know where our representative's office is. While I haven't gone to our representative for specific needs, I know people who have. Knowing our representative lives in our district and is local means I know he understands what our community is dealing with at least at some level. While there are a lot of things broken with the current representative model, being regional is not the problem. (The stupid way they designate the "regions" on the other hand is)

pessimizer 6y ago

I don't think that political parties or race should be included in redistricting plans, especially since I think that this could often accidentally result in optimally "cracking" or "packing" minority districts. Neither political parties nor races should be intentionally institutionalized. The defining characteristic of a district is that it is geographically contiguous. A defining specification for districts is that they have a roughly even population. With those constraints, what you would want to do is find physical commonalities (not abstract loyalties.) For example: water sources, proximity to commercial areas, types of housing stock, local weather patterns, local roads/accessibility, proximity to major land features/employers (like quarries, factories, lakes.) That's harder than doing this. A problem I have with with doing this by political parties is that the two parties aren't themselves part of government and shouldn't be. A real problem I have with making racial guarantees (other than the possibility of packing and cracking) is that it seems to be calculated through averaging "diversity" - meaning that a group with 6% representation would be guaranteed 6% voting power on the district level (assuming people vote purely based on racial allegiance.) "Diversity" is a red herring; it's remedy that is important. 6% can be ignored at the district level nearly as easily as it can be ignored at the individual level. You're not going to get remedy from redistricting, but districts that grow from material features of the places where people live will end up shaped by race anyway (due to the history of those places.)

scarmig 6y ago
Physical commonalities are easily gameable. You could divide a city into east-bank/west-bank, or upstream/downstream, or even near-bank/far-bank. Give me enough factors and write me a large enough check, and I can give you whatever kind of partisan results you want. I do find watershed democracy (legislative district boundaries defined by watershed) kind of an interesting thought experiment. At the very least it'd help to solve water politics.
- jhardy54 6y ago
  Bioregionalism strikes again!
- ttyprintk 6y ago

MengerSponge 6y ago

Any attempt to completely automate this process is destined to fail, for all the reasons given in this thread. Weighting factors matter, and it is naive to assume that nobody is going to attempt to subvert a nonpartisan board, when so much power is at stake. Don't despair! There's an alternative that generates an equitable outcome between two parties that are trying to screw their rivals: Cake Cutting. https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781v1 You've probably heard the basic version of how to fairly divide a piece of cake between two children. Have one of them cut it, then the other choose which piece to keep. The cutter guarantees the largest possible piece of cake by cutting the cake in half. This is the same idea, just extended: one party divides the state into districts, then the other chooses one district to "lock" and divides the remainder, then the process repeats.

jedberg 6y ago
But then you just further entrench the political parties.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  It doesn't have to entrench the political parties, depending on the system used. For example the people tasked with drawing each district could be selected from the general public by sortition, i.e. like jury duty. These people would be given access to every tool and expert help they need, and if they wanted to just rubber-stamp the suggestion of whichever party they support, then they would be free to do so. A slightly more deterministic process would be to generate a list of all parties (or independent candidates) who received more than 10% of the vote at the last election, and allow each of them to draw a number of districts in proportion to the share of the vote they received.

jedberg 6y ago

We really need to get the cube root rule passed.[0] Gerrymandering wouldn't really be useful if each district were smaller, and then we'd get Representatives that have a similar breakdown to the people they represent. For example in the US each representative would represent ~475K people instead of ~755K. So California would have 84 representatives instead of 53. It's a lot harder to gerrymander when the districts are much smaller. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_rule

brianolson 6y ago
I used to think smaller districts would be harder to gerrymander, but the 99 Wisconsin State Legislature districts (each none too big) can still be gerrymandered plenty to distort the balance of that body.
- jedberg 6y ago
  Interesting. I hadn't heard about that. I just read up on it, and it's crazy how well they gerrymandered. Look like in one election Democrats got 56% of the vote but only 28% of the seats.
sagarm 6y ago
More districts just means more opportunities to gerrymander. We need multi-member districts to achieve something closer to proportional votes and reduced polarization.
- jedberg 6y ago
  This is a fascinating idea. Make the districts bigger but have each one elect two people. Which in California would basically be the two people who run in November since we have a jungle primary.

andromeduck 6y ago

Can we just gamify it via fair cake slicing algorithm and call it a day?

frankydp 6y ago

Is this seriously recommending institutional race based procedural gerrymandering?

rayiner 6y ago

For all of the talk about gerrymandering, it’s worth noting that it had almost no net effect this year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Re... Democrats won 50.8% of the House popular vote, and 51% of seats. Or in 2018: Democrats won 54% of seats and 53.4% of the vote. It had a modest effect in 2016: Democrats won 45% of seats but 48% of the vote.

qndreoi 6y ago
With gerrymandering, the ruling party will pack voters in districts by party. Instead of competitive districts, one party districts are formed, and more extreme candidates win primaries. That's how you end up with really objectionable people being elected instead of centrists, and compromise becomes near impossible.

rohan-ramchand 6y ago

This is really cool! I built something very similar for my undergraduate thesis: https://github.com/rohan/elbridge https://github.com/rohan/elbridge

cafard 6y ago

Isn't this a matter of political will rather than of algorithms? Iowa seems to have a good process: https://www.ncsl.org/research/redistricting/the-iowa-model-for-redistricting.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/redistricting/the-iowa-model-f...