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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 precep

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.
maxerickson 6y ago
Competitive districts select representative candidates. Safer districts select the candidate aligned with the majority party (competitive primaries are less common than competitive elections). Michigan has term limits. The notional goal is to avoid people that become lifetime representatives; much of the actual outcome is that policy expertise is concentrated in lobbying groups, and well liked, effective legislators are forced out. More rules end up making it easier to work the system.
- sudosteph 6y ago
  I don't think your first sentence necessarily holds true - at least it doesn't lately. We just don't see powerful "blue dog democrats" and moderate republicans holding the keys any more. While moderate candidates have more independent appeal - it's voter turnout that wins elections, even in competitve districts. Appealing to emotions, especially appealing to fear has been extremely successful at getting turnout for particular voters (ie, anti-abortion voters for example). Maybe that will calm down or moderates will turn out more and end this trend (as they did with Biden) - but even competitive races can turn out extreme candidates. Another possibility to consider, is that what we call "competitive districts" are really just "moderate districts" to begin with. Places the population isn't particularly threatened by or well-served by either party. In that case, it makes sense that they would be both more competitive, and more moderate.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Sure, it isn't an absolute effect, I could have phrased that better. I think it's pretty clearly a directional effect that safer districts pick their representatives in the primary (which often have a candidate backed by the institutional power structure).
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      But that just reflects the fact that a given party has overwhelming support in those districts. It doesn't mean that the result is unrepresentative. So Phila. and NYC pick their mayors in the Democratic Party primary. The result isn't unrepresentative - there was no question that the mayor was going to be a Democrat.
jandrese 6y ago
I'm not sure I agree with this. It seems to create a lot of safe seats but with just one single token representative for the entire group who doesn't have enough power to get an agenda passed. If those voters were spread across all of the state's representatives then they would have to care what the group thinks, but when they're all crammed into a single token rep they can be more easily ignored.
- sudosteph 6y ago
  That sounds bad, but it's really not. First of all, sometimes groups should be ignored. For example, the pig farming agriculture industry of NC is causing huge environmental destruction. If the rest of the state doesn't like the precedent it sets to let these companies contaminate our water supply - then we shouldn't have to all compromise our values just because people in that industry want special treatment and command a lot of money / swing votes in multiple districts. Secondly, it incentivizes disticts to elect representatives who are good at coaltion building and who are capable of compromising and winning over allies to actually get stuff done.
  - ablerman 6y ago
    Who gets to decide which groups "should be ignored". The pig farmers certainly don't agree. The whole point of competitive districts is that the groups who should be ignored will be eliminated by competition. Your whole premise seems to set up all districts with functional lifetime appointments rather than elections.
    - sudosteph 6y ago
      In competitive districts, politicians are far more dependent on campaign funding. Competitive elections are extremely expensive. So the group that gets ignored is just the group that has the least money to throw at candidates. It's the average person that always loses in that case. That's not fair either. I would certainly prefer term limits, but if a population thinks their representative does a good job representing their needs - why shouldn't they get re-elected? Nobody is stopping them from having a competitive primary. Remember, AOC only got elected because her district was so non-competitive for republicans, that the establishment didn't bother channeling massive money into the primary for the incumbent. So this setup would actually make it easier for non-establishment candidates to sneak in, and even incentivize the other party to run a non-traditional candidate to compete (ie, like how dems used to win with blue dog democrats in rural areas).
tshaddox 6y ago
This sounds nice, but who gets to choose what attributes of populations are the right ones to group together into districts? You suggest grouping by population density, which certainly makes sense for grouping together certain political interests (like zoning). And yet by doing that, you've essentially maximally fragmented people by gender, which is another attribute that makes sense for grouping together certain political interests. That's an extreme example of course, and I'm not suggesting to instead create single-gender districts, but I hope it illustrates my point.
- cabalamat 6y ago
  > but who gets to choose what attributes of populations are the right ones to group together into districts? Let the voters decide. Allow them to group themselves into self-selecting affinity groups, i.e. have proportional representation.
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    How would that work with representative democracy? With direct democracy that's pretty straightfoward: one could vote with conservationists on land policies, libertarians on drug policies, progressives on welfare policies, etc. instead of having to vote for a representative who probably disagrees wildly with at least one of those views.
    - cabalamat 6y ago
      > How would that work with representative democracy? With PR there would be a larger number of viable parties, for example in the last Dutch election, 13 parties got elected. > instead of having to vote for a representative who probably disagrees wildly with at least one of those views With 13 parties you'd probably be able to find one which is reasonably close to your own views.
      - tshaddox 6y ago
        Having a larger number of viable parties doesn’t seem like it would help that much when your district is huge and gets one representative elected with FPTP.
WorldMaker 6y ago
A lot of that gets to the question of what are we optimizing our k-clusters for? The idea of geography-based representation spurs from the ideal that a representative should be able to "shake hands" with everyone they represent, right? That a townhall with one's representative might be isomorphic with one's "neighborhood meeting"? In those cases things like "compact" serve a purpose in going back towards that "neighborhood" ideal (which arguably has never existed in US practice). But it's 2021 and is geography and the "neighborhood" ideal still useful for us in selecting representatives? When was the last time you shook hands with your representative? When was the last time you had a neighborhood meeting where the representative just swung by for an impromptu townhall? Maybe we should find a better optimization for our k-means clustering that isn't geography because gerrymandering seems to imply that we'll never fix geographic clustering? With tools like TV and the internet, geography may not even matter like it did to 18th century Americans. A Zoom call isn't a handshake, of course, but we have more tools for virtual shared interest groups than ever before and don't necessarily need to remain tied to the vagaries of geography. I don't necessarily have good answers for what those metrics/optimizations could be/should look like beyond geography. All I know is that it would be hard to impossible to find good ones under the current two party system and as with most things, the blame for a lot of our problems continues to be directly on the two party system.
- arrosenberg 6y ago
  The important thing about geography is that cultures tend to develop along with it. That matters a little less today than in the past, but someone in Fresno is still going to have more in common with someone from Los Angeles than someone from Louisiana. We also already have systems of representation along other lines that feed into geographically-representative government - consumer groups, interest groups, lobbyists, etc.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    > someone in Fresno is still going to have more in common with someone from Los Angeles than someone from Louisiana I question this. Someone from San Francisco is likely to have much more in common with someone from Portland or even NYC or London than they would someone from Bakersfield or Shasta. You can see that in lots of different areas, from migration patterns to election results to what they do on Sunday morning to which media people consume.
wffurr 6y ago
A maximally representative district would be a large multi-representative district that elects 5 representative using ranked choice or approval voting. Then you get the property of representation you're looking for without having to draw fine-grained arbitrary distinctions on a map. https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation#what_is_fair_voting https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation#what_is_fair_vo...
- jdmichal 6y ago
  I assume you mean that all the candidates run against each other simultaneously, and the top 5 all win a seat? I don't think that has the properties you are claiming. At least not with approval voting. Let's spherical cow this for a second and say that 51% of the population would like candidates from the Foo party, and 49% would like candidates from the Bar party. What prevents the 51% from electing five Foo candidates? When a "fair" split would be three Foo candidates and two Bar candidates. In Approval voting, one would expect five Foo candidates with 51% votes, and five Bar candidates with 49% vote. Ranked choice might fix this, but the actual results would depend entirely on the vote resolution mechanism.
  - wffurr 6y ago
    The idea you are looking for is Single Transferable Vote aka STV: https://www.fairvote.org/rcv#how_rcv_works https://www.fairvote.org/rcv#how_rcv_works
    - Forbo 6y ago
      I'm a fan of STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) though I'm not sure the details on how that looks with multiple positions up for grabs. https://www.starvoting.us/ https://www.starvoting.us/
    - jdmichal 6y ago
      I'm familiar with the concepts. http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ Instant runoff is listed as Hare, and it has some very... interesting results. I don't think it fixes any of the issues people have with first-to-the-post voting, and sometimes makes those issues even worse.
viraptor 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 like it would essentially result in big differences in economic status and in a few decades pit people against each other. It would lead to "let's put retired NIMBYs over here and social housing over there and let each vote for representation of their extreme views". I've never seen it lead to good results.

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.

maxerickson 6y ago

Competitive districts select representative candidates. Safer districts select the candidate aligned with the majority party (competitive primaries are less common than competitive elections). Michigan has term limits. The notional goal is to avoid people that become lifetime representatives; much of the actual outcome is that policy expertise is concentrated in lobbying groups, and well liked, effective legislators are forced out. More rules end up making it easier to work the system.

sudosteph 6y ago
I don't think your first sentence necessarily holds true - at least it doesn't lately. We just don't see powerful "blue dog democrats" and moderate republicans holding the keys any more. While moderate candidates have more independent appeal - it's voter turnout that wins elections, even in competitve districts. Appealing to emotions, especially appealing to fear has been extremely successful at getting turnout for particular voters (ie, anti-abortion voters for example). Maybe that will calm down or moderates will turn out more and end this trend (as they did with Biden) - but even competitive races can turn out extreme candidates. Another possibility to consider, is that what we call "competitive districts" are really just "moderate districts" to begin with. Places the population isn't particularly threatened by or well-served by either party. In that case, it makes sense that they would be both more competitive, and more moderate.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Sure, it isn't an absolute effect, I could have phrased that better. I think it's pretty clearly a directional effect that safer districts pick their representatives in the primary (which often have a candidate backed by the institutional power structure).
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    But that just reflects the fact that a given party has overwhelming support in those districts. It doesn't mean that the result is unrepresentative. So Phila. and NYC pick their mayors in the Democratic Party primary. The result isn't unrepresentative - there was no question that the mayor was going to be a Democrat.

jandrese 6y ago

I'm not sure I agree with this. It seems to create a lot of safe seats but with just one single token representative for the entire group who doesn't have enough power to get an agenda passed. If those voters were spread across all of the state's representatives then they would have to care what the group thinks, but when they're all crammed into a single token rep they can be more easily ignored.

sudosteph 6y ago
That sounds bad, but it's really not. First of all, sometimes groups should be ignored. For example, the pig farming agriculture industry of NC is causing huge environmental destruction. If the rest of the state doesn't like the precedent it sets to let these companies contaminate our water supply - then we shouldn't have to all compromise our values just because people in that industry want special treatment and command a lot of money / swing votes in multiple districts. Secondly, it incentivizes disticts to elect representatives who are good at coaltion building and who are capable of compromising and winning over allies to actually get stuff done.
- ablerman 6y ago
  Who gets to decide which groups "should be ignored". The pig farmers certainly don't agree. The whole point of competitive districts is that the groups who should be ignored will be eliminated by competition. Your whole premise seems to set up all districts with functional lifetime appointments rather than elections.
  - sudosteph 6y ago
    In competitive districts, politicians are far more dependent on campaign funding. Competitive elections are extremely expensive. So the group that gets ignored is just the group that has the least money to throw at candidates. It's the average person that always loses in that case. That's not fair either. I would certainly prefer term limits, but if a population thinks their representative does a good job representing their needs - why shouldn't they get re-elected? Nobody is stopping them from having a competitive primary. Remember, AOC only got elected because her district was so non-competitive for republicans, that the establishment didn't bother channeling massive money into the primary for the incumbent. So this setup would actually make it easier for non-establishment candidates to sneak in, and even incentivize the other party to run a non-traditional candidate to compete (ie, like how dems used to win with blue dog democrats in rural areas).

tshaddox 6y ago

This sounds nice, but who gets to choose what attributes of populations are the right ones to group together into districts? You suggest grouping by population density, which certainly makes sense for grouping together certain political interests (like zoning). And yet by doing that, you've essentially maximally fragmented people by gender, which is another attribute that makes sense for grouping together certain political interests. That's an extreme example of course, and I'm not suggesting to instead create single-gender districts, but I hope it illustrates my point.

cabalamat 6y ago
> but who gets to choose what attributes of populations are the right ones to group together into districts? Let the voters decide. Allow them to group themselves into self-selecting affinity groups, i.e. have proportional representation.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  How would that work with representative democracy? With direct democracy that's pretty straightfoward: one could vote with conservationists on land policies, libertarians on drug policies, progressives on welfare policies, etc. instead of having to vote for a representative who probably disagrees wildly with at least one of those views.
  - cabalamat 6y ago
    > How would that work with representative democracy? With PR there would be a larger number of viable parties, for example in the last Dutch election, 13 parties got elected. > instead of having to vote for a representative who probably disagrees wildly with at least one of those views With 13 parties you'd probably be able to find one which is reasonably close to your own views.
    - tshaddox 6y ago
      Having a larger number of viable parties doesn’t seem like it would help that much when your district is huge and gets one representative elected with FPTP.

WorldMaker 6y ago

A lot of that gets to the question of what are we optimizing our k-clusters for? The idea of geography-based representation spurs from the ideal that a representative should be able to "shake hands" with everyone they represent, right? That a townhall with one's representative might be isomorphic with one's "neighborhood meeting"? In those cases things like "compact" serve a purpose in going back towards that "neighborhood" ideal (which arguably has never existed in US practice). But it's 2021 and is geography and the "neighborhood" ideal still useful for us in selecting representatives? When was the last time you shook hands with your representative? When was the last time you had a neighborhood meeting where the representative just swung by for an impromptu townhall? Maybe we should find a better optimization for our k-means clustering that isn't geography because gerrymandering seems to imply that we'll never fix geographic clustering? With tools like TV and the internet, geography may not even matter like it did to 18th century Americans. A Zoom call isn't a handshake, of course, but we have more tools for virtual shared interest groups than ever before and don't necessarily need to remain tied to the vagaries of geography. I don't necessarily have good answers for what those metrics/optimizations could be/should look like beyond geography. All I know is that it would be hard to impossible to find good ones under the current two party system and as with most things, the blame for a lot of our problems continues to be directly on the two party system.

arrosenberg 6y ago
The important thing about geography is that cultures tend to develop along with it. That matters a little less today than in the past, but someone in Fresno is still going to have more in common with someone from Los Angeles than someone from Louisiana. We also already have systems of representation along other lines that feed into geographically-representative government - consumer groups, interest groups, lobbyists, etc.
- scarmig 6y ago
  > someone in Fresno is still going to have more in common with someone from Los Angeles than someone from Louisiana I question this. Someone from San Francisco is likely to have much more in common with someone from Portland or even NYC or London than they would someone from Bakersfield or Shasta. You can see that in lots of different areas, from migration patterns to election results to what they do on Sunday morning to which media people consume.

wffurr 6y ago

A maximally representative district would be a large multi-representative district that elects 5 representative using ranked choice or approval voting. Then you get the property of representation you're looking for without having to draw fine-grained arbitrary distinctions on a map. https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation#what_is_fair_voting https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation#what_is_fair_vo...

jdmichal 6y ago
I assume you mean that all the candidates run against each other simultaneously, and the top 5 all win a seat? I don't think that has the properties you are claiming. At least not with approval voting. Let's spherical cow this for a second and say that 51% of the population would like candidates from the Foo party, and 49% would like candidates from the Bar party. What prevents the 51% from electing five Foo candidates? When a "fair" split would be three Foo candidates and two Bar candidates. In Approval voting, one would expect five Foo candidates with 51% votes, and five Bar candidates with 49% vote. Ranked choice might fix this, but the actual results would depend entirely on the vote resolution mechanism.
- wffurr 6y ago
  The idea you are looking for is Single Transferable Vote aka STV: https://www.fairvote.org/rcv#how_rcv_works https://www.fairvote.org/rcv#how_rcv_works
  - Forbo 6y ago
    I'm a fan of STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) though I'm not sure the details on how that looks with multiple positions up for grabs. https://www.starvoting.us/ https://www.starvoting.us/
  - jdmichal 6y ago
    I'm familiar with the concepts. http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ Instant runoff is listed as Hare, and it has some very... interesting results. I don't think it fixes any of the issues people have with first-to-the-post voting, and sometimes makes those issues even worse.

viraptor 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 like it would essentially result in big differences in economic status and in a few decades pit people against each other. It would lead to "let's put retired NIMBYs over here and social housing over there and let each vote for representation of their extreme views". I've never seen it lead to good results.