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How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising

• Msw242 4y ago
  This is dumb. We could just vote for parties instead of candidates, then have the party choose representatives, or have party members vote to choose representatives to fill their slots. Not everything is first past the poll, vote for your candidate, etc.
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    Or you could have situation in between. Have people vote for candidate and share the votes between party and then rank those candidates in order of votes received. Would mean that winners would first be the most popular and the extra votes would still go towards the party. And the unpopular in terms of votes received candidates of party wouldn't get elected.
    • Msw242 4y ago
      Basically a delegate system? Sure
  • bumper_crop 4y ago
    Live in California? The candidates for (Republican|Democratic) parties are wildly different in their ability and likelihood to do a good job. A 30 yearold candidate of the same party as a 50 yearold are going to have vastly different social networks, favors to lean on, money, appearance, etc. Picking the person is a much better choice to make than the party.
    • Msw242 4y ago
      And the people who are good at winning elections are different from the candidates who are good at governing. So you're screwed either way. At least with parties, the members of the party get to choose the boundaries of their concerns. E.g. the working families party in NY is a powerful presence in the state democratic party, and that is in a FPTP system. If you vote for parties based on platforms, and then parties coordinate with one another to build coalitions, then you might just end up optimizing for governance. Not perfect, but less flawed.
  • mandmandam 4y ago
    If you're going to call a system dumb, maybe at least try to get its name right. Jeeze man.
• RappingBoomer 4y ago
  gerrymandering has the potential to increase homogeneity of voting districts...more homogeneity means that the electorate is more united and can therefore force the politicians to do what the voters want.
  • pavlov 4y ago
    Gerrymandering and a first-past-the-post electoral system can result in parliaments where a clear majority of all voters chose party X, yet the majority of seats are held by party Y. (There are several examples of these in the American states.) That doesn't seem to represent "what voters want" very well.
  • kelnos 4y ago
    That only works if the elected official from a particular voting district has complete say over the law in that district, which they do not. They go on to represent their district in a larger body, which may then vote against that district's wishes.
    • totierne2 4y ago
      Swiss canton? We prefer blood than clocks...
  • saxonww 4y ago
    That's not what gerrymandering does. No districting scheme forces the elected representative to do what the voters want. Once they get elected, they have their term, and can vote however they want barring expulsion or recall. Gerrymandering is where you draw up districts such that the voting power of people who won't vote for you is minimized. It doesn't have to result in homogeneous districts. The point is to maximize your party's voting power as durably as possible.
• penneyd 4y ago
  There is no political will to do anything whatsoever about gerrymandering. Sad state of affairs.
  • sky_rw 4y ago
    Of course not. Both parties use it at all levels of government. Getting rid of it only helps non-politicians, ergo politicians will never support it (unless they are losing).
    • hannasanarion 4y ago
      Assuming you're talking an an American context, is is absolutely not true that "both parties use [gerrymandering] at all levels of government". The US Democratic party has a national policy of non-gerrymandering at all levels of government. Maryland had a Democratic gerrymander in the 00s, but it was exchanged for a fair map in 2011. The US Republican party, on the other hand, has a national policy of gerrymandering as much as possible. The national committee hired gerrymandering consultant Thomas Hofeller to draw Republican-maximizing maps for every state in 2009, and used those maps as the backbone of their REDMAP plan to seize permanent control of every state through extreme gerrymandering.
      • nemo44x 4y ago
        An independent council just rejected New York states proposed congressional map because it was so obviously gerrymandered. Democrats do it too.
        • HWR_14 4y ago
          The independent council that rejected the map was set up in law by Democrats. If they hadn't passed that law recently (or just undid it), then there would be no legal problem. So it's actually their own check that stopped them. Similar to how only companies with an ethics hotline get ethics complaints.
          • 4y ago
• rdw 4y ago
  This is written in such a way that it seems like it makes sense, but it ultimately takes its conclusion as an axiom and is thus essentially meaningless. Gerrymandering is to draw districts according to political party affiliations. So of course if you only divide up your districts by political party affiliation (in rather extreme ways) you will discover that doing so doesn't lead to stable political systems. No shit, that's the problem with gerrymandering. Any serious analysis of this problem needs to confront the realities of geographical location and migration.
  • kelnos 4y ago
    > Gerrymandering is to draw districts according to political party affiliations. That not really what it is. It's to draw districts in order to give a particular party an advantage. Usually the way to do that is not to draw them along party lines, but to mix voters of different affiliations in the same district such that your party comes out with a majority in as many districts as possible.
    • rdw 4y ago
      The practice of using political party affiliation as a criteria at all for drawing district borders inevitably leads to gerrymandering. This part of the article does seem apparent, which is why the solution, to _not_ do that, seems mysterious in its absence.
• tunesmith 4y ago
  I think this article is too absolutist in its conclusions (and its interpretation of Arrow's theorem). There are definitely ways to limit the worst effects of gerrymandering. We came close with a lawsuit from Wisconsin (I forget the details) and there was hope that Justice Kennedy was waiting for that to make it to the Supreme Court, but then he decided the other way and promptly retired. EDIT: I'm thinking of the Efficiency Gap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote#Efficiency_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote#Efficiency_gap
• daenz 4y ago
  >Congratulations, you've now created a totalitarian one-party dictatorship! The blues hold 60% of every district, so they win every district, so 100% of the national legislature is in the control of the blues, even though they only hold 60% of the vote. I'm afraid too many people would be ok with this. There is a strong desire for "democracy" over "republic" (not a combination of the two), meaning 51% of your average voters can do whatever they want to the remaining 49%. Fundamentally, including a "republic" in the formulation means that some people get a prioritized say. I think a strong case can be made for that, but the idea itself is deeply unpopular.
  • mastazi 4y ago
    I grew up learning that "republicanism" means that you are opposed to the monarchy so I'm really confused by your comment. It seems that you are using the term "republic" as an equivalent of "pluralism" or possibly of "indirect democracy"?
    • daenz 4y ago
      I'm using "republic" here to point out that a district is acting like an elected representative.
      • mastazi 4y ago
        Yeah, thank you I get it now, I knew that concept under a different name, "indirect democracy". I guess in the USA, because of your history, you don't have a lot of debates around the pros and cons of monarchy and so the other meaning of "republican" is probably less common on your side of the ocean.
    • 8ytecoder 4y ago
      There's rule by majority and then there's individual rights. Pure democracy prioritizes majority rule and does not guarantee any right to individuals. A Republic has a constitution that usually lays out the fundamental rights of a person and laws are valid only if those rights are not violated.
    • 4y ago
• cato_the_elder 4y ago
  I'm not really an expert on the issue, but there's this suggestion that I kinda like: let people living in a district choose to vote in the adjacent districts if they want to do so. This "blurs" the arbitrary lines a bit. Also, this is probably an unpopular opinion, but I actually kinda like gerrymandering. In the sense that I like the fact that it exposes the absurdity of counting votes and claiming that it somehow represents the voice of the people. The outcome is clearly very dependent on what voting method is used, how the districts maps are drawn, who is eligible to vote, etc. It's all just vanity of vanities.
  • SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    if you enable to choose districts freely this can be mass gamed.
  • Loughla 4y ago
    >it exposes the absurdity of counting votes and claiming that it somehow represents the voice of the people. I actually 100% disagree with this sentence. I do not, honestly, believe it exposes that. My experience with people who vote is that they harangue about the "other side" gerrymandering, but when their preferred candidate wins their district, it's because voting works. I genuinely believe people are either (a) willfully ignorant, or (b) pants-on-head idiotic when it comes to this issue.
    • hannasanarion 4y ago
      There is no "both sides" to be had here. Republican candidates winning Staten Island sometimes is not gerrymandering. The Republican National Committee hiring gerrymandering consultant Thomas Hofeller in 2009 to draw them maps of Wisconsin and North Carolina that will give them absolute supermajorities even if they lose the popular vote by a wide margin, and then using those supermajorities to strip incoming Democratic governors of all of their powers thus instituting permanent one-party rule forever, that's gerrymandering.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
• no_protocol 4y ago
  Why do they need to only have single-member districts? How about having fewer districts with more members per district? It seems like Fix Gerrymandering is a solution aimed at the wrong problem when the entire problem could just be eliminated.
  • colechristensen 4y ago
    That's what the Senate is. This has neutralizing effect on tyranny of a single party by forcing that party to win in separate kinds of representation strategies.
    • no_protocol 4y ago
      It doesn't talk about a senate at all: > It is divided up into 10 districts, each of which sends one representative to the national legislature, which consists of 10 people. They take this as a given and try to come up with convoluted ways to 'fix' the problem, when just fixing this axiom would solve it much easier.
      • colechristensen 4y ago
        Yes they don't talk about the Senate because it's not gerrymandered because it's a statewide position not subject to districting. We already have the bundled-population representation in a senator, the House uses a different strategy explicitly because it's different for the benefits of competing means of representation to even out power.
        • dane-pgp 4y ago
          > the Senate because it's not gerrymandered You make it sound like there aren't partisan considerations that go into deciding which states are added to the union.
    • kelnos 4y ago
      In the US, the Senate directly causes the tyranny of the minority that we're currently experiencing. The House also has representation issues: since the total number of representatives in the House hasn't increased over time as population has increased, there's a "floor" on the number of per-state representatives that causes smaller states to have outsized representation. The article doesn't really deal with any of this, though: it assumes each "district" has the same number of people in it, which isn't the case for House or Senate seats when you consider the entire country. The article is more about considering the representation within a single US state, based on its division into districts.
• dane-pgp 4y ago
  This article nicely explains the problem, but is a bit defeatist about the possibility of reforms that could mitigate it. To offer one reform, allow me to present the following: Suppose in the hypothetical country, the total number of votes cast for Blue is some number "B", and the total for Violet is "V". Further suppose that the number of seats won by Blue is "C" and the seats for Violet is "W". A non-gerrymandered map would be one where B:V is approximately C:W (or at least there is no possible change to the seats result that would make C:W any closer to B:V). My proposed reform, therefore, is that after an election, if those ratios are not as close as possible, the electoral officers would go down the list of seats that were lost by the under-represented party (from best performance to worst) and flip the result so that the under-represented party gains representation, until the ratio can't be improved any more. Obviously this would feel hugely unfair to the voters in the districts where the result was flipped, but they should blame the people who drew the unfair map in the first place. Indeed, the incentive would be on both parties to draw districts which were most likely to produce a balanced result that doesn't need any flipping. This method has the added bonus that it would encourage parties to appeal to voters in "safe seats" just as much as "swing seats", since everyone's vote would count towards the B:V ratio. The maths gets a little more complicated when dealing with more than 2 parties, and with independent candidates who don't belong to any party, but I don't believe these are insurmountable obstacles. Solving the problem of gerrymandering, unrepresentative legislatures, and voter apathy with this one weird trick (that doesn't involve changing the ballot papers or counting process) seems like such a big win that the cost of a few flipped seats has to be an acceptable price to pay.
  • quink 4y ago
    Or you could just do IRV or multi-member electorates or any number of other things done in other more democratic countries that are at least harder to characterise as stealing votes.
    • dane-pgp 4y ago
      Like I say, my proposal allows the electorate to keep the same ballot papers, the same counting process, and the same number of seats in the legislature. You're right, though, that if voters were prepared to sacrifice some of that familiarity, they could do much better than the system I proposed (which was somewhat inspired by the multi-member system I mentioned in another comment).
• Jensson 4y ago
  Gerrymandering is very easy to fix: don't make voting districts matter that much. Have local seats in districts so they get represented, but also have popular vote seats to even out so each party gets seats corresponding to the total vote. Done, gerrymandering no longer matters enough for it to be a big deal.
  • dane-pgp 4y ago
    Yes, this is effectively the solution that Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP) offers. The normal complaint with this is that it typically involves having closed lists of candidates who get a free ticket into parliament without any local accountability, and this is only slightly improved by having an open list system (although that requires teaching voters to mark extra ballot papers in unfamiliar ways). Fortunately a better solution has been found and actually implemented in Baden-Württemberg, and they call it the Zweitmandat system. Basically, the "proportional seats are filled by losing candidates who won the highest proportion of votes". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zweitmandat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zweitmandat
    • Jensson 4y ago
      Yeah, that seems reasonable. I'm all for giving more power to people to pick the candidates they want instead of having political parties handpick the last ones.
• david_draco 4y ago
  "Gerrymandering is universal in any political system that has geographic units that demand representation." A unstated assumption here is a winner-takes-all election system, which is common in the US and UK, but not other countries, where parliament is proportional, and coalitions are common. It works. A more interesting question would be how to build incentives in a winner-takes-all election system towards reducing gerrymandering, and to discuss what it would take to change away from a winner-takes-all geographical election system.
  • lkrubner 4y ago
    "A unstated assumption here is a winner-takes-all election system" In terms of the math, increasing the number of representatives from each district is the same as making the districts smaller. As the essay said: "As the districts get smaller, then the size of the shift needed (to punish the previous majority party) describes the asymptote of the tangent, converging towards the reality of what the public actually wants." Increasing the number of representatives from each district is the same thing, as the number increases, the shift needed (to punish the previous majority party) describes the asymptote of the tangent, converging towards the reality of what the public actually wants. But there remains some distortion, however small. You eventually get into infinitesimals that have no practical impact, but it is still there. If you have districts that only have 1,000 people each, and each district elects 1,000 representatives (everyone in the district) then the distortion disappears, but if you have districts with 1,000 people, and they only elect 999 representatives, the distortion reappears, however small that might be. Also, from the essay: --------------------- Some nations have fine-grained representation of land but course-grained representation of ideas Some nations have fine-grained representation of ideas but course-grained representation of land You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.)
    • StillBored 4y ago
      You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.) I think as one of the comments on the article mentions, that this concept is far too easily dismissed. A large part of creating a functioning democracy is actually gridlock when a strong majority can't agree. There are a _LOT_ of advantages of expanding the US house of representatives back out to not only 5k members but maybe 15-20 thousand to match the 30k-50k people per representative that the country was founded with. Starting with the fact that it would cost large organizations a _LOT_ more money to lobby them, vs the amount of lobbying that an individual could perform, and gerrymandering suddenly is a lot more difficult, a representative could actually meet all their constituents, etc. Many of the difficulties are simply wiped out by the fact that we have computers to count votes, and the ability to record and stream multiple debates at the same time. And of course nothing says that any given representative needs to vote on smaller issues that don't affect their district/etc, and it becomes harder to have country wide parties because local ideals are allowed to express themselves. Basically everything suddenly has the option to become finer grained, and the difficulties that presents are mostly actual advantages.
• nitwit005 4y ago
  The rules don't need to be perfect. The fundamental issue with gerrymandering is that we want politicians to compete by appealing to voters, rather than competing by toying with election rules. And while I agree there are tradeoffs involved in having geographic representation, these bizarrely shaped districts don't really provide that. They don't align with any administrative or cultural borders.
• onphonenow 4y ago
  Very quick solutions that at least drive politics towards the middle vs extremes: Open primaries with ranked choice voting. Top two to general. Done. The current model, in a "safe" dem seat (45% R / 55% D) whoever wins D primary wins everything. This means the D primary (with 20% of voters - most activist) are deciding things. Same on the right. With open primaries, you will get 2 D's potentially in general, but now the R vote actually matters. This drives towards the middle. Additionally RCV in the primary (ie pick 3 in order) also allows votes for less well known folks without as much wasted voting. Another method is RCV with a multi-seat election. So you rate 5 candidates and their are 5 winners in the larger geo area. This tends to give even groups with let's say 20% makeup of voter pool a seat at the table. Traditional winner takes all does not.
  • chrisseaton 4y ago
    > Open primaries I don't get the idea of open primaries - why should someone who is not a member of a party get to vote on who the party wants to represent them? Imagine there was a Women's Equality Party party (there is in the UK.) Should a large number of men, with no interests in women's equality, be able to come along and tell the Women's Equality Party who will represent them in an election?
    • birken 4y ago
      edit: was describing a jungle primary
      • aidenn0 4y ago
        If that is what GP meant, then they used the wrong term. The term usually used is "Blanket Primary" or "Jungle Primary" (Jungle Primary is a specific type of blanket primary) for what you describe. An open primary allows people to vote regardless of party affiliation; the states which have these may not even ask you for party affiliation when you register to vote (Virginia, where I first voted does not, for example). It does make an aggregate difference because few people vote in primaries anyways, and even fewer will change their party affiliation every year, making raiding much harder.
• samatman 4y ago
  The problem posed by gerrymandering is a social problem, not a math problem. There are all kinds of geographical and legal boundaries in a country, with varying levels of affinity to them. Defining gerrymandering precisely isn't possible, it isn't even a know it when you see it thing, and in practice it's a Russell conjugation: they gerrymander, and we redistrict so that people get proper representation. However, social problems can be solved with maths, law could require something like this to be performed after every census: https://sites.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/uw_1034.pdf https://sites.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/uw_1034.pdf I think this has considerable advantages, the biggest being that it's objective, the next being that just looking at a Voronoi diagram makes it clear what's going on. This essentially removes human factors from redistricting, and says you get the Congressional district you get when the population heatmap is relaxed in the simplest way it can be into the appropriate number of partitions. Remember there's nothing about this which is 'fair', except for the part where people could perhaps be persuaded to abide by the results.
  • crowbahr 4y ago
    Perhaps the best way to district is more about maximum contention in a race? Voroni partitioning so that the maximum number of "purple" districts are achieved makes sense to me.
    • SamBam 4y ago
      But then you're maximizing the number of "loser" voters in each district, who don't feel that their representative in government accurately represents them. Is that the goal of a representative democracy?
      • croon 4y ago
        Only looks like a problem on a micro scale. If elections are indeed 50:50 on a macro scale, then yes, you would want all purple districts, because the "loser" voters are indeed close to 50%. If the voters are 70:30 on a macro scale, it wouldn't matter if you create a bunch of purple districts, because they all can't be purple when you have exhausted the 30% of that ratio. Conversely, if you were to create fixed color districts, you could hide a larger majority as "loser" voters on a macro scale by stuffing them to a few of that color on a micro scale. But to be clear, I don't think artificially creating purple districts for that express reason is a good idea, I just think it would be less of a problem than the current gerrymandering, when optimizing for democracy.
• elicash 4y ago
  Part of why partisan gerrymandering has become such a problem is that the tech makes it easier to gerrymander. But mostly, political party matters much more than ever before. The electorate is more ideological and the candidates for office are much more loyal to the party platform. In an era where political party mattered less than, say, geography, then partisan gerrymandering was less of a national problem. Of course, there are several types of gerrymandering and this is just one of them. The best summary of possible solutions and their limitations I've seen was done by 538 as part of a larger gerrymandering project: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-probably-not-possible-to-end-gerrymandering/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-probably-not-possib...
• maxwell 4y ago
  > You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.) Madison said the same thing, but we didn't have contemporary communication tools. My company's Slack has over 5,000 people and works just fine. Why is it unrealistic to repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 and increase membership in the House by an order of magnitude?
  • aidenn0 4y ago
    Increasing membership of the House has the effect of reducing the advantage less-populous states have (both in the house and in the electoral college). That might make it politically infeasible to pass.
    • rootusrootus 4y ago
      > politically infeasible to pass. Probably true. But I would hope that argument could be deflated easily, since it was the senate that was supposed to give smaller states a disproportionate amount of influence.
      • aidenn0 4y ago
        Which is why people who don't want to pass it for this reason will state some other reason, like "5000 representatives is obviously silly and way too many"
  • lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    Because it might be possible to stand out in a crowd of 500 but not 5,000. And it certainly is not possible to do deals other than "this is good for everyone". It would almost certainly end political parties. Lead to good ideas being debated openly by people who have no chance of hanging together long enough to force a direction. My god man what are you thinking ! (/s)
• not2b 4y ago
  While Germany is mentioned in the article, they don't mention the best features of the German system: two choices -- one for the candidate who will represent your district, one for the party you prefer. So you get someone who truly represents the district, and you also guarantee that the party that wins the most votes gets the most seats.
  • seunosewa 4y ago
    MMPR. There's a balancing step to enforce proportional representation.
    • not2b 4y ago
      Overhang seats. The size of the German parliament is variable to make everything come out right. If some party wins more first-past-the-post seats than their share of the second (party) vote entitles them to, extra seats are created to give the other parties more until things balance.
• bumper_crop 4y ago
  The crux of this is that the majority/plurality system is a winner-takes-all outcome. I would like to propose a completely fair (and totally unacceptable) Voting system: Blues and Violets each get a single vote. On election day, everyone puts their vote into a big hat, and one of the ballots is pulled out. Whoever is on that ballot, gets a unilateral victory. This system has numerous good properties: 1. Power never falls into a state where the majority party can stay in control. Gerrymandering is a non-issue. 2. Every vote counts. Instead of a single, tie breaking vote changing the outcome of the election, each additional vote increases the odds. If there are 40% violets and 60% blues, the likelihood of a violet leader is still 40%. 3. Extreme minority votes still matter. If 99% of the population is blue, and 1% of the population is violet, violet supporters still feel their voice can be heard. 4. (edit) Political spending is massively reduced, since there is a diminishing return to spending ever more money trying to tip the 49% into being 51%.
  • noduerme 4y ago
    Assuming that the 1% extreme minority wants to turn it into a dictatorship, you'd be guaranteeing that sooner or later the democracy would fail.
    • bumper_crop 4y ago
      Sure, but we could have separate rules for changing how the voting works, compared to the day to day operation of the groups. Also, on the good end, maybe the 1% have some amazingly good ideas that the other side would never implement otherwise.
    • Supermancho 4y ago
      > Assuming that the 1% extreme minority wants to turn it into a dictatorship, you'd be guaranteeing that sooner or later the democracy would fail. Luckily a single election isn't enough to make a dictatorship, in the US. There is never a guarantee that a government will stand forever.
    • winstonewert 4y ago
      If used to elect something like a president, yeah, that could be problematic. But if used to elect a legislative body then its not really a problem. Sure 1% of the body would be pro-dictatorship, and occasionally a bit more due to the randomness, but its not a serious risk that a majority of the body would turn out to be pro-dictatorship.
• marricks 4y ago
  Don’t some European counties like Germany have the number of delegates forced to roughly equal the total vote totals for a party? So if you have “60% violet party and 40% teal party” but the seats are split 50/50 10 closest seats move over to violet? Theres no perfect way to solve it but the ultimate problem is social: one party is willing to gerrymander to win and the other doesn’t because they don’t have to but would if they actually saw any gain in it.
• Krisjohn 4y ago
  Anyone should be able to submit new boundaries to break up a large area into the required districts. It should be accepted automatically if; the populations are equal based on the last official census, no boundaries pass through a residential property, the total length of all the boundaries is less than the current divisions.
• q-big 4y ago
  Why not solve the problem of gerrymandering by getting rid of the "winner takes all" property? E.g. instead of having 100 districts selecting 1 representative using the winner-takes-all principle, which are very sensitive with respect to gerrymandering, make 10 districts where each one sends 10 representatives, where the distribution of representatives approximates the distribution of the submitted votes. This should decrease the problem a lot.
  • spaetzleesser 4y ago
    That would be my preference. Or split between a number of representatives selected by winning a district and a number of representatives selected by the popular vote. Germany has a system like this.
  • lkrubner 4y ago
    From the essay: Some nations have fine-grained representation of land but course-grained representation of ideas Some nations have fine-grained representation of ideas but course-grained representation of land You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.)
    • colinmhayes 4y ago
      Why do we need both? It's not like my house rep gives a shit about what I think even though I'm in his party. Having "your" rep seems incredibly overvalued.
      • hvusslax 4y ago
        Coming from a non-Anglosphere country with a long tradition of proportional voting, this idea of "my" representative has simply never made any sense to me. How can a member of a legislative body represent voters that didn't actually vote for him? What does it effectively mean to have "your" representative that you share with half a million other people and who doesn't share your values?
• spaetzleesser 4y ago
  I think the US needs some form of representation based on the popular vote and not by winning districts. For example if a certain percentage of the House would be allocated to parties based on the popular vote, districts would be less important and third parties would be viable. Basically we should reduce the importance of districts and give the popular vote more weight. In my view everything else doesn’t have a chance to solve the real issues.
  • Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    Probably would be better to split the Congress into three, one that represents the states (Senate), one that represents communities (House of Representatives/Communities), and one that represents ideologies (House of Values) and then come up with a new balance between the three. Keeping a geographic based house is necessary because sometimes people of a wide variety of values still having needs in common due to shared local geography. Both rich and poor are impacted if the dam above their town breaks and a flood doesn't care about your race, gender, sexual preference or anything else. House of Values wouldn't even need to be based on each state but rather could be something like "One representative for every 250,000 votes the group receives nationwide". Maybe even allow people to split their vote between groups. Perhaps under this arrangement the Senate could go back to being appointed by governors and state legislatures as the earlier issues with corruption would not necessarily apply (depending on how laws get passed between the three houses). The above of course would require near universal support from the public as it would be a change to the basic working of our representative democracy. Not sure if we're capable of getting that level of agreement on pretty much anything anymore.
• magpi3 4y ago
  > Congratulations, you've now created a totalitarian one-party dictatorship! This is not true. It totally discounts independents (38% of American are independent), and districts obviously evolve and the popularity of the party in power tends to wane as that party either fails to fulfill its promises or abuses its authority in some way. It is no coincidence that in modern times whenever a party has control over all three houses in the U.S., they lose that control in the very next election.
• dmasi 4y ago
  I'm not understanding this math can I get a hand? 1,000,000 people that can vote 600K : blue & 400K : violet 4 districts hold 400K : blue 6 districts hold 33.3K : blue & 66.6K : violet if that's all of the districts... then isn't that only 500k?
• revscat 4y ago
  These people like the TFA’s author who come up with good-faith solutions to problems caused by those acting in (very) bad faith… I mean, bless their hearts, but they just seem so completely naive. No policy will ever be pursued by the US government that gives more political or economic power to the poor and middle classes. Not ever.
  • GavinMcG 4y ago
    That's historically not true, and especially in that light, such extreme pessimism seems irresponsible—by convincing people they're disempowered, you're just encouraging the result you hope to avoid.
    • revscat 4y ago
      Name something that has benefited the poor or middle class that has passed within the last 50 years. Because what I see is… dick. Nada. What I see is never ending transfer of wealth upwards, without exception. Maternal leave? Get fucked. Universal health care? Lol no. Hell, legalized marijuana at the federal level? Fiiiiilibuster. Nah. I’m “encouraging” nothing. Just pointing out historical — and contemporary — reality.
      • Karunamon 4y ago
        Doubling the standard deduction.
      • photochemsyn 4y ago
        Well, the FDR presidency is kind of instructive. FDR succeeded in creating things like Social Security and various New Deal programs that definitely benefited poor people and bolstered the middle class (Rural Electrification and Homeowners Loan Corporation respectively, plus others). However, a key point he leaned on was that failure to act would lead to either a communist or a fascist revolution of the kinds seen in Russia and Germany. Such an argument would carry weight today.
      • GavinMcG 4y ago
• peacefulhat 4y ago
  The only solution is removing geographic districts entirely. The focus is on how squiggly the district lines are rather than the underlying issue that your vote is worthless in almost any election.
• armchairhacker 4y ago
  Does the author argue for geographic representation? I don't think so, but I already know why it's important: the cold north whom has 60% of the population votes to ban air-conditioning, leading the 40% in the hot south to suffer. I think that ultimately, the best solution wrt. fair elections is to enable free movement across regions and countries. Then people can choose to live in their own communities of like-minded people. Nobody has to be a minority at least in the issue they care about most, they can just move. Also, even if you do gerrymander, if the oppressed 30% blue just move to the 90% blue regions it becomes ineffective. Unfortunately free movement has its own problems re: the migrant crisis, housing prices, etc.
  • throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    >I think that ultimately, the best solution wrt. fair elections is to enable free movement across regions and countries. This sounds good but you just get the people with the means to do so constantly migrating away from the fallout of their bad policy every decade or so. Some ability to flee is definitely a good thing but on the other hand if you make your bed you should sleep in it.
  • Jensson 4y ago
    > the cold north whom has 60% of the population votes to ban air-conditioning, leading the 40% in the hot south to suffer. This is solved by better legislated states rights not by creating a less undemocratic voting system. There is no reason why the fed should be allowed to ban something like air conditioning or showerheads. But now they did, people in low water states complained that saving water is important since they lack water, so now even in very water rich states it is illegal to sell high throughput showerheads. So the current system doesn't protect against such shenanigans at all.
• almog 4y ago
  As someone living in a country that uses proportional representation for its electoral system, my first introduction to gerrymandering was this episode on the Data Skeptic podcast which I highly recommend: https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2021/gerrymandering https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2021/gerrymandering
• sk8terboi 4y ago
• bironran 4y ago
  > Some countries, such as Israel, have purely party based parliamentary systems with no geographic representation ... Some nations have fine-grained representation of ideas but course-grained representation of land Before putting this on a pedestal, it's worth noting that Israel: 1. Has smaller some power blocs which have non-proportional power at the parliament due to being the "swing vote". 2. Had other smaller political parties completely eliminated (voter desertion) due to ineffectiveness. 3. Had 4 elections in 2 years due to inability to form a ruling government with more than 50% of the parliament approval. 4. Had a government average run-time of 2.5 years since 1999 due to "no confidence" votes that force re-election. Less than ideal. The American system, with its flaws, significantly more stable.
  • EdwardDiego 4y ago
    In NZ, MMP is doing us well. There's still electorate MPs (members of parliament), but there's also MPs determined by their party's percentage of the party vote. So at election time, you vote for your preferred local representative, and then you vote for your preferred party.
  • hvusslax 4y ago
    The Netherland has pretty much the same system as Israel, there is slight geographic representation but nationwide party votes do dictate the composition of parliament. All the Nordic countries also use a proportional system with multi-member districts and measures to make the overall party representation in parliament align with their national share of the votes. Maybe the problems with Israel are just problems with Israel rather than their particular system of voting.
  • mcv 4y ago
    From what I understand, Netherland has practically the same system as Israel. There's no regional representation at all, you vote on the party, and although you do vote on a specific candidate from that party, seats are assigned in the order of the list that the party determined, unless a candidate receives enough individual votes to reach the threshold for a seat on their own (which is rare for anyone not on the #1 or #2 spot for their party). As a result, Dutch parliament currently has 16 parties, and the senate 13. And although governments do fall, and sometimes have trouble forming a new government, the system is very stable. Every government is a coalition, a compromise between enough parties to hold 50%+1 seat in parliament, and that means you generally see the same big parties in government. Sometimes one of the big parties loses popularity and thus seats, and doesn't govern. Other, possibly fairly new, parties can take their place. Parties that most other parties think are terrible (like the racist parties) still won't be able to form a government even if they're large, because nobody wants to work with them.
• scythe 4y ago
  >You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. Australian five-member STV districts beg to differ. As does MMP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repre... And DMP: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-member_proportional_representation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-member_proportional_rep... And PR-OAC: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2778867 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2778867 One of the biggest problems we run into is not that there are no options, but there are so many possibilities that people who study the problem in detail end up arguing with each other rather than forming a coalition for a single reform! I also designed a system based on a simplified CPO-STV, but I keep putting off writing it up.
• umeshunni 4y ago
  Whenever I read some article like this about politics in the US, I wonder why they never look at how the world's largest democracy deals with these problems, instead of looking at trivial countries like Hungary or New Zealand with like 5 people. Is it ignorance? Racism? Some "stuck in the 60s" notion that third world countries are run by dictators?
• brianolson 4y ago
  I've studied redistricting and gerrymandering for 15+ years ( https://bdistricting.com https://bdistricting.com ), and yes the punch line is that people don't even want geographic districts at least half the time. Sometimes you want 'your local rep' to talk to about local and regional issues, but all the argument is about ideological representation (party, culture, pet issue, etc.). My best guess solution is a two part legislature, one house of small local districts, one house elected in at-large Proportional Representation.
  • lkrubner 4y ago
    Your town assembly can take care of the concerns of your town. Your provincial assembly can take care of the concerns of your province. Your National Assembly can take care of the concerns of your nation. We can get rid of gerrymandering and still have different levels of government, each devoted to a particular level of localism. Indeed, having one level of localism interfere in the affairs of a higher level seems like a violation of encapsulation, in the sense that a software developer would understand the concept.
  • sidewndr46 4y ago
    My "local" representative at the state level is a several hour drive to another city which has nothing in common with the city I live in.
• moosey 4y ago
  I think we should fill most elected positions basically at random, and eliminate the presidency. Populations make great quantitative judgements, but not qualitative. It seems that selecting at random would be best to get voices of folks experiencing homelessness and poverty. Rich folks would still get a couple of seats. My guess is less war, more money for anti-poverty and education programs.
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    The problem is that most people are idiots
    • textbookrental 4y ago
      I fail to see how elections rectify that problem.
  • rland 4y ago
    Sortition! I really do think it is the only way. Everything else gets distorted. People say, well, most people are stupid. But I'm not so sure. Juries are a sort of pseudo-sortition, and they actually fare pretty well (far better, I would argue, than legislative or even judicial bodies). I think many positions would be admirably served by random appointment.
• ouid 4y ago
  The answer is easy. Instead of electing officials, we give them our votes to cast. No one is disenfranchised.
• theptip 4y ago
  Phrasing this in terms of two tribes each with precisely one candidate and geographically homogeneous support bakes in some assumptions that I think break the model quite fundamentally. In the real world: * Rural vs. Urban produces a very strong polarization in party/policy support. So you simply cannot get the result described where you have one party winning all districts. * There are many candidates both within a party and between them that would receive approval from a given voter beyond their first choice. * Currently because of the structure of the system there can only be two serious parties. (A serious third party splits the vote and prevents either from being successful). But if you had more parties you’d probably get better representation. Basically, I think this model is both oversimplifying to the point where it is useless for making claims about what would happen in our current system if we eliminated gerrymandering, and also not interesting as a model for other voting systems. For what it’s worth I think Single Transferrable Vote and Approval Voting are both interesting options that get round most of the problems in our current system.
• beloch 4y ago
  An interesting and related problem is over-representation of swing-vote regions in public policy and the alienation this can cause in other regions. Let's use an example from the post: > 2 districts each hold 100,000 blues > 8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets In this situation, the government is considered to be unstable, since a small number of people changing their minds in the eight swing districts can decide elections. This is an example that closely matches reality in which some regions tend to be "strongholds" while others have swing ridings. The strongholds always vote for the same party, so their parties are motivated to to ignore their interests and, instead, pour all their efforts into competing in the regions with swing ridings. Why don't neglected regions gradually turn into swing regions? Sometimes they do, but sometimes the parties involved make region a part of politics. Say that, in the above example, the 2 districts with 100,000 blue supporters were in a regionally distinct part of the country. The violets discover that there is an undercurrent of mistrust about that region in the 8 other districts, and demonize the blues by claiming they have a secret agenda from the blue region. This gives the violets an edge when it comes to winning in the 8 swing-vote districts, but it also frees up the blues to almost completely ignore the interests of their stronghold. Sure, citizens in the stronghold are free to vote for the violets, but if the violets actively demonize them in elections, why would they? Instead, they might become disaffected from politics entirely, since elections are decided entirely in the other 8 districts according to the concerns of those districts, and not theirs. Even though the blues are more numerous overall in the country, there will frequently be governments with strong violet majorities in which the blue strongholds are completely neglected. It's easy to see how this can lead to alienation and even separatist sentiments. If this seems far-fetched, take a look at "Western alienation" in Canada. Most Western provinces tend to vote overwhelmingly CPC on a consistent basis. The LPC has won majorities and now controls a coalition minority government with a smaller share of the popular vote because the East is dominated by swing ridings. In the past, they have smeared CPC leaders by saying they have "hidden Western agendas". The result today is disaffection from federal politics in the West, alienation, and, yes, some separatism. Hence, getting rid of geographic representation might actually help reduce geographic alienation. Of course, in the case of Canada, why would people in swing-ridings, who currently control the outcome of elections, ever vote for candidates who are actually serious about electoral reform that might reduce their influence?
• 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  > You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. Worked for Athens. "Estimates of the population of ancient Athens vary. During the 4th century BC, there might well have been some 250,000–300,000 people in Attica.[4] Citizen families could have amounted to 100,000 people and out of these some 30,000 would have been the adult male citizens entitled to vote in the assembly." "There were three political bodies where citizens gathered in numbers running into the hundreds or thousands. These are the assembly (in some cases with a quorum of 6,000), the council of 500 (boule), and the courts (a minimum of 200 people, on some occasions up to 6,000)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy Athenian eligible voters to boule ratio: 60-to-1 US eligible voters (233M) to 5000 representatives ratio: 46,600-to-1 US eligible voters to House + Senate (435+100) ratio: 435,514-to-1 Let's not discount the possibility.
• cryptonector 4y ago
  There is nothing wrong with gerrymandering. It's not me saying it, it's Sandra Day O'Connor, whose words I'll be paraphrasing (from memory; maybe later I'll dig up the actual opinion). You can gerrymander to make your party's representatives' seats more secure, or you can gerrymander to have more seats for your party. In the former case your overall majority will be smaller when you win all the elections you expect to win, while in the latter case your overall majority will be bigger, though in each district the popular vote majority will be smaller. Either way your party can lose badly in the event of a wave election, either because few seats need flipping (in the first case), or because popular preferences change enough to swamp your large majority of small majority districts (second case). We've had one anomalous period of 62 years of no wave elections in the past 100 years in the U.S.: 1932-1994. Since then we've had these wave election years that flipped the House or greatly enhanced the majority party's majority: 1994, 2006, 2008, 2010. That's... quite a few wave elections. That's in spite of the democrats having had 62 years to gerrymander before 1994, and despite the mid-cycle gerrymandering of the 00s. We can expect more wave elections. Gerrymandering is self-limiting.
• coward123 4y ago
  We've already got states, and under those states we have counties. I don't understand why we can't mandate that congressional and legislative districts must conform to county boundaries (which is fundamentally where people live, vote, are regulated, etc anyway). My guess is this would result in a simple and fair answer and that couldn't possibly work because politics.
  • uneventual 4y ago
    Well to take the most obvious problem, each California congressional district has to have roughly 750k people but Los Angeles County has 9.9 million.
    • coward123 4y ago
      I get that, and yet the root of my observation is simply that there are are already existing valid political boundaries. The core problem with legislative and congressional districts is that they are utterly arbitrary and subject to change based on political whims (yes I understand there is also a nominal census reasoning as well). My point then is simply: could there be permanent, non-arbitrary boundaries that would no longer be subject to political manipulation?
      • uneventual 4y ago
        I don’t think so! Even permanent and supposedly non-arbitrary boundaries are subject to intense political contestation. Observe how in the first decades of this country’s history states were often admitted in pairs, one slave and one free (for instance Missouri and Maine), in order to maintain the balance of power.
• flavius29663 4y ago
  Another approach is to do what Romania is doing. They tried implementing FPTP, but it failed in the referendum, so they implemented it half-way: you still have FPTP, so you get a representative from the local community, but the national votes that are "wasted" get redistributed nationally to each party , such that the popular vote matches the seats closely. The only thing is: your party needs to clear 5% of the popular vote nationally, and it will have guaranteed seats. It's a bit more complex, but that's the crux of it. This system allows for parties to be created and destroyed very easily, we had 2 new parties in the last 10 years that at some point got 15-20% of the votes
• User23 4y ago
  Gerrymandering is irrelevant because elections are irrelevant. The USA isn’t a democracy or even a representative republic[1]. [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
• dboreham 4y ago
  Hmm. This is interesting because I've always wondered about using mathematics to generate a "gerrymandering-ness metric" from a given population/boundary distribution. The idea being that instead of having the supreme court scratch their heads wondering if a boundary assignment was unfair, you could just compute the metric. But this article seems to imply that this metric can't exist. Ok so now I wonder about the corollary: use an algorithm to generate the boundaries. If the article has a proof that all boundary assignments are unfair, then presumably an algorithmic boundary generator can be made to be randomly unfair one way or the other, balancing out the unfairness overall.
  • dane-pgp 4y ago
    I think the "gerrymandering-ness metric" you are looking for is called the "Efficiency gap". The problem, of course, is getting everyone to agree what the acceptable range is for this value, and to make it the law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote#Efficiency_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote#Efficiency_gap
• pacaro 4y ago
  I believe that sortition is a solution to this. Being a politician should be like jury duty, there's a low but significant probability that you can lose the lottery and have to be a representative for a couple of years. The same mechanism should be uses to select peace officers also. There are certain roles that society appears to need, but that the kind of people who want to fill those roles are likely to be the worst people to do the job (i.e. anyone with a hint of megalomania). Sortition solves this problem.
  • a_imho 4y ago
    Absolutely. Some people (especially the ones profiting from the current system) do not want to change the fundamentals though. In those cases shortening the feedback loop by cutting the cycles could also mitigate the problem. Also reducing the obscene amounts of power we put in a selected few hands could help.
• perryizgr8 4y ago
  > Gerrymandering is bad, right? I know TFA is not addressing this point intentionally, that's ok. You can choose what you want to focus on. But does anybody have a logically sound argument that supports this assertion?
• locallost 4y ago
  I notice a lot of the discussion can't think beyond the current two party "system" - if we do this then A will always win, do that and B always wins... but actually other than the US, democracies that I know (Europe at least) have multiple parties. And these, if they can't win, can at least take away enough votes to shift the power. Other than that, some countries have a combination of "first past the post" geography based voting, and seat distribution based on vote totals. Which I think is a good system.
• thomasahle 4y ago
  Simple solution to get rid of gerrymandering: Create a pool of extra mandates, not assigned to a specific district. Distribute them to the parties however needed to make the overall vote proportional. This way districts still have a representative, but there is no insentive for gerrymandering. This is a commonly known as Overhang seats in MMP: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhang_seat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhang_seat
  • jakub_g 4y ago
    I'm not an expert but the mixed system is used in Hungary, and the result is that Fidesz (Orban's party), with ~50% votes, gets ~68% seats (just above 2/3 they need to have infinite power), third time in a row
    • hvusslax 4y ago
      The Hungarian system is basically two separate elections at once where the results are just added together. There are single-member districts where the candidate that wins the plurality of votes in the district is elected (almost always a Fidesz candidate). Then there are party list elections in larger multi-member districts where the party affiliation of the MPs elected is roughly proportional to the votes to each party in the district. There is no effort in this system to make the final results proportional. Germany, New Zealand and devolved legislatures of Scotland and Wales use a different sort of system where the party lists are used to achieve proportionality. In a system like that, Fidesz wouldn't get a lot of seats from the party listes because they are way overrepresented already in the single-member districts.
• ur-whale 4y ago
  > the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic why is it not realistic?
• bambax 4y ago
  > Hmm, okay, so what would be fair? Perhaps we want to give each party a fighting chance in each election? Isn't that fair? (etc.) This is trying to solve gerrymandering with (more, different) gerrymandering. That's not the way it should work. Districts should represent something from the real world, outside of political affiliation. It's natural for the political "color" of a district to change over time, because people move, and sometimes get older and change their mind. This should not result in a change of the shape of the district.
• kohlerm 4y ago
  Do I miss something,but isn't the real solution for this to elect using proportional representation?
• TheJoeMan 4y ago
  I was hoping the “math” might be a Euclidean analysis of how … concave? … or dumbbell-shaped? … a district boundary is. I don’t see how a district that narrows to 100 yards wide in the middle could be fair.
• ggm 4y ago
  Interesting to read the spread of opinions on multi member seats here, and a strong element of "doesn't work" from people who I think haven't experienced it. Gerrymandering made a single party run Queensland for 19 years. it was very real in Australia, but the downside of democratising the election method was dis-enfranchising the rural voter. Multi Member would fix this. No matter what, I think the vast majority of people here agree the US system is particularly bent out of shape in many respects.
• vannevar 4y ago
  I think this article is more damning of a simple two-party system than it is of re-districting. How does the math change if you simply draw arbitrary boundaries of roughly equal size but have multiple parties and ranked-choice voting?
• dathinab 4y ago
  The solution is not having any form of "winner takes it all" voting for anything with a lot of power. Due to the dynamics it creates "winner takes it all" is fundamentally undemocratic. Through that would be a fundamental change in US politics on all levels, so it's a bit too much to ask for. And a bit tricky wrt. the president.