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‘From dark art to dark science’: the evolution of digital gerrymandering

6 points by Pikkie 5y ago

dane-pgp 5y ago
> in 2019, the US supreme court said for the first time that there were no federal limits on how severely politicians could draw districts to give their party a political advantage, a practice called gerrymandering. I still wish the SCOTUS had taken the view that the Guarantee Clause[0] necessarily implies that voters should choose their representatives, rather than the representatives choosing their voters. Or perhaps they did base their ruling on that clause, but the conservative majority decided that "a Republican Form of Government" meant something else... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarantee_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarantee_Clause
dane-pgp 5y ago
Another way to look at gerrymandering is that the principle of "one citizen, one vote" means that the composition of Congress should match, as closely as possible, the proportions of votes cast for each party. It's difficult to say, in practice, what the remedy should be if the maps drawn don't produce that result, but a naive approach would be to let the over-represented party choose a district where they won and appoint the second place candidate to take their place. A more sophisticated approach, which doesn't require the courts to revoke a candidate's win, is to demand that all parties attempt to gerrymander the maps as much as possible before the election, with the goal to select whichever map is expected to produce an outcome closest to the aggregate wishes of the population across the state. After the election, if another map would have produced a more proportional result than the one chosen, then the drawers of that map win the right to draw the maps for the next election. As there is still a small advantage to being the party who gets to decide where the boundaries are, there will be a "winner stays" effort to keep the maps producing proportional results. For details of how to measure the proportionality, Wikipedia has a good section that lists various indices, each with their own article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#Measuring_disproportionality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#Me...

6 points by Pikkie 5y ago

> in 2019, the US supreme court said for the first time that there were no federal limits on how severely politicians could draw districts to give their party a political advantage, a practice called gerrymandering. I still wish the SCOTUS had taken the view that the Guarantee Clause[0] necessarily implies that voters should choose their representatives, rather than the representatives choosing their voters. Or perhaps they did base their ruling on that clause, but the conservative majority decided that "a Republican Form of Government" meant something else... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarantee_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarantee_Clause

dane-pgp 5y ago

Another way to look at gerrymandering is that the principle of "one citizen, one vote" means that the composition of Congress should match, as closely as possible, the proportions of votes cast for each party. It's difficult to say, in practice, what the remedy should be if the maps drawn don't produce that result, but a naive approach would be to let the over-represented party choose a district where they won and appoint the second place candidate to take their place. A more sophisticated approach, which doesn't require the courts to revoke a candidate's win, is to demand that all parties attempt to gerrymander the maps as much as possible before the election, with the goal to select whichever map is expected to produce an outcome closest to the aggregate wishes of the population across the state. After the election, if another map would have produced a more proportional result than the one chosen, then the drawers of that map win the right to draw the maps for the next election. As there is still a small advantage to being the party who gets to decide where the boundaries are, there will be a "winner stays" effort to keep the maps producing proportional results. For details of how to measure the proportionality, Wikipedia has a good section that lists various indices, each with their own article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#Measuring_disproportionality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#Me...