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The way to solve Gerrymandering is not geometry, but by removing the incentive. It's easy to remove the incentive: Just add some statewide delegates that are e
by thomasahle 5y ago
The way to solve Gerrymandering is not geometry, but by removing the incentive.
It's easy to remove the incentive: Just add some statewide delegates that are elected based on the "wasted" votes. That way you get both local representation and overall proportionality.
I never see this discussed in the US context, even though it's done like that all over the world. Apparently people will rather come up with obscure algorithms based on problematic census data.
- consp 5y agoIs that doable? My understanding is it would require a constitutional change in contrast to a simple law which is even more unlikely considering the current political climate. Then again, why bother with the district thing for non-local politics if you are at it in changing the constitution of a country.
- cameldrv 5y agoI believe that would require a change to the constitution, which is currently politically impossible, as it would require Republican support, and it is Republicans that created the current extreme gerrymanders and benefit from them. The only way I could see something like what you suggest happening would be for the Democrats to gerrymander the blue states to even things out, and then a better solution could be agreeable to both sides.
- thomasahle 5y ago> I believe that would require a change to the constitution, which is currently politically impossible I guess you are right, but isn't that the same deal with the filibuster? Anvf that hasn't stopped people from talking about it.
- xmodem 5y agoTHe filibuster in the senate can be changed or removed with a simple majority, i.e. 9 less than the number of votes needed to break a filibuster.
- etrevino 5y agoThe filibuster isn't written into the Constitution: it's actually just Congress setting its rules of order. Changing the Constitution is a big and difficult process.
- jeltz 5y agoOnly the state constitutions as far as I know. Every state decides on its own how to conduct elections.
- etrevino 5y agoNo, at-large reps used to be a thing until a lawsuit made its way to the Supreme Court, who said it was illegal. I believe that the death knell of the idea might have been the reapportionment bill in 1929.
- runarberg 5y agoPersonally I find one representative per 700,000+ constituents a little unrepresentative. I don’t call my representative “local” if they are representing more then a few thousand. I wonder why we bother with single party electorates at this point, and not just move to all proportional voting.
- otherme123 5y agoThe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore... more or less states that there's no solution to the representative problem. I live in a country using another method, and in each election a lot of people begs for a change in the aggregation system. Some even say that the U.S. system is the best solution, while you are defending basically our election system.
- thomasahle 5y agoThat's not was Arrows theorem says at all. It just says that all (deterministic) voting systems can sometimes incentivise tactical voting. "Tiered" voting, where we add up local majorities, is known as the tribe system in mathematical social choice theory and can be proven to be the worst possible in terms of making the individual vote matter.
- qsort 5y agoI thought the standard interpretation of Arrow's theorem was that if no voting system satisfies the hypotheses, then there is no such thing as an objective electoral mandate, and therefore almost any set of rules that's generally acceptable to the constituents is equally valid. Am I misunderstanding something? I'm not an expert on this at all.
- tialaramex 5y agoIt's crucial especially in practice for something in the real world like US gerrymandering, to remain aware that Arrow is talking about the hypothetical worst case. This isn't "No system can work" it's "No system will always work". If out of 5000 voters, 4985 voters prefer Alice to anybody else, 10 prefer Bob and only 5 prefer Charlie; Arrow does not mean Bob and Charlie can tell their voters "See, nobody knows who really won". Alice won. Overwhelmingly the voters prefer Alice. Arrow has nothing interesting to tell us about this scenario. But if only 2400 prefer Alice, 1800 prefer Bob and 800 prefer Charlie, it gets trickier and Arrow starts to appear on the horizon. After all, what if every one of those Charlie supporters hates Alice and would rather have voted for Bob than see Alice win? We can try to improve our system to try to ensure we get this case right, but Arrow proves that we can't ever do a good enough job for every such case. Especially in the case of US election it's worth remembering that if you only have two candidates, Arrow doesn't actually apply at all. A straight-forward majority works fine if all you wanted to do was decide whether the Red or Blue team wins.
- bonzini 5y agoWhy not instead have an independent entity draw districts?
- Swenrekcah 5y agoThat just moves the problem around. It might sort-of work for a time but all the incentives are still there so the parties will find a way.
- chrisseaton 5y agoNobody ever believes the entity is really independent. We have an independent entity in the UK and people still aren't happy.
- rjtavares 5y agoIt's also a terrible system that basically makes it impossible for a country-wide third party to ever gain significant representation. See, e.g., Scottish National Party having 35 seats with 3% of the vote vs. Lib Dems having 12 seats with 7%.
- chrisseaton 5y agoBut it allows areas with a national identity, like Scottish or Welsh seats, to be represented.
- runarberg 5y agoIf 50% of the seats is enough to control the legislator, you could argue that the Scottish and Welsh nationals don’t have true representation either.
- bonzini 5y agoThat has nothing to do with how districts are drawn.
- tialaramex 5y ago
- tchalla 5y ago> It's easy to remove the incentive: Just add some statewide delegates that are elected based on the "wasted" votes. Can you make this more generic so that people who don't understand the US political system could follow your proposal?
- jeltz 5y agoHe is proposing MMP (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_re...) or something like it. Where some seats are awarded based on who gets the most votes in the election district while the rest of the seats are awarded in a way which compensates and achieves a total seat distribution which matches popular vote.
- thomasahle 5y agoI was actually thinking about Party-list proportional representation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party-list_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party-list_proportional_repres...), but mostly because I hadn't heard about MMP. I'm still not quite sure what the difference is.
- sofixa 5y agoThe difference is that with mixed you vote for a person and a list of people ( party), not only for a party.
- thomasahle 5y agoIn party list systems you also often vote for a candidate: "Voters may vote for the party, as in [...]; or for candidates whose vote total will pool to the party/parties.
- Dagonfly 5y agoMMP by definition guarantees a direct representative for each district. You can think of it as FPTP (per district) and a party-list election at the same time. The FPTP winner in each district gets a guaranteed seat, but the remaining seats are filled (based on the party lists) such that the final proportions in parlament match the party-list election. In theory, you get the best of both worlds: a direct representative for everyone and parlament according to popular vote.
- howling 5y agoThere are quite a few voting systems that removes/minimizes incentive of gerrymandering. My favourite is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_ballot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_ballot .