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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 varyin

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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
    - SamBam 5y ago
      The problem is that you've fallen into the trap of modern political thinking: that all politics is national, and all that matters is the big decisions that get voted on that affect everyone equally. And similarly, the false notion that all members of Party A are fungible, and it doesn't matter if I, personally, am represented by someone I hate, so long as there's a member of my party somewhere in congress. But that's not really the point of a representative republic. Our specific, local needs and desires are supposed to actually be represented by by our members of Congress. So in terms of actual representation, it would actually be better to have a district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate A, and another district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate B, because then the vast majority of people would be getting the representative that they voted for, and represents them. In the scenario where every district is purple, fully half the people have no representation of their interests in congress.
      - croon 5y ago
        Macro scale doesn't have to mean national. There are many precincts per district, and many districts per county, etc. > So in terms of actual representation, it would actually be better to have a district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate A, and another district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate B, because then the vast majority of people would be getting the representative that they voted for, and represents them. No, only the throwaway districts in gerrymandered maps are represented, all other districts swallow up many more unrepresented voters. > In the scenario where every district is purple, fully half the people have no representation of their interests in congress. But you missed the point, not every district can be purple. In absolute terms, more people would be represented than the status quo. It's better than gerrymandering. But again, not my prefered solution.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  From the essay: ------------------------- Hmm, okay, so what would be fair? Perhaps we want to give each party a fighting chance in each election? Isn't that fair? 2 districts each hold 100,000 blues 8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets So now the violets have a 50% chance of winning 8 districts. The blues are granted two districts automatically, but that is fair, since they are more popular than the violets. Each party has some chance of winning. However, in this model, if 1 blue voter in each district changes their mind, then the violets end up with 80% of the legislature. We’ve engineered a system that is very unstable! If Katechon is like the nation of Hungary, where a 2/3rds majority can amend the constitution, then Katechon is now vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover, much like what happened in Hungary after 2010. And that's because 8 people out of a 1,000,000 changed their vote.
  - crowbahr 5y ago
    Unstable means each vote matters. Ideally we'd do away with this bullshit electoral system entirely and make each vote matter by having it be proportional representation. Until then: Maximum instability = maximum Government accountability.
    - lkrubner 5y ago
      You actually remove the possibility of accountability if you are drawing the maps so that a party that behaves badly still has a 50% chance of winning.
zackees 5y ago
“Gerrymandering” is baked right into the constitution. It’s a good thing. You want the representatives drawing the districts because they are closest to their constituents. You also don’t want random district allocation, you want the representatives to match with your constituents in a 90/10 split, not a 50/50 split where nothing gets done. The barrels of ink used to slander redistricting is being supplied by very powerful money interests. They do this because it’s one of the last impediments to the NWO globalist government that is incrementally being setup. The removal of representative redistricting, along with the installation of the horribly complex rank choice voting system the media elites are pushing everywhere effectively ends the American democratic experiment.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  I am not a very powerful money interest.
tptacek 5y ago
it isn't even a know it when you see it thing I'm glad you said this. One of the more infamous gerrymanders in the US is in Chicago --- the notorious "earmuffs". You can just look at it and see that something's hinky. But what's really happening there is that there are in fact very well-defined Latino neighborhoods in Chicago, and the earmuffs capture a bunch of them neatly: Pilsen, Little Village, Cicero, Belmont-Cragin. If you know Chicago, you know these places, and you also know what the boundary between, say, Belmont-Cragin and North Austin is like; however artificial it looks on a map, it is a real border. That these communities are where they are is also not purely happenstance: a lot of very unfortunate social engineering took place in the early-mid-20th century to put those neighborhoods (and all the other neighborhoods) where they are now. That's not to defend gerrymandering writ large, or even necessarily the earmuffs, but just to second your point about the complexity of the problem.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  I think a lack of fairness is a inherent problem with districting first past the post elections. We could solve the problem by moving to a proportional system with much larger or no districts. The more proportional representatives you have per district, the less value you get for gerrymandering it as it gets harder to ignore voters.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    Proportional representation goes a long way of increasing fairness. Societies are not split cleanly by geographic lines. You can have a lot more diverse ruling class by coalescing single person electorates into at least 30 electorates per district. But what would also be needed is to increase the total numbers of representatives by a whole factor at least. USA is one of the least represented democracies in the world (only India is worse). Even China has more representatives per capita. This also extends to local elections where cities as big as Seattle or San Francisco only have 9 and 11 members in their respective city counsels. There is no way to represent such big and diverse cities with this few seats. In comparison Oslo has 59 seats in their city council.
  - vidarh 5y ago
GavinMcG 5y ago
> 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 There are absolutely situations where it is obvious, most notably when those drawing the maps say they're motivated by partisan power. The situations at issue in Rucho v. Common Cause, for example, were not ambiguous in the least.
mpalczewski 5y ago
The rural populations seems would not like a redistricting where every district is dominated by its largest population center. Essentially this voronoi type redistricting would push more power towards cities at the cost of rural areas.
- jchanimal 5y ago
  In the USA that is an unambiguously good thing.
  - zaphar 5y ago
    No it isn't. There may be some aspects of it that would have good results. But there would also be aspects that would have poor results. Pretending that larger population centers will make better electoral decisions and that those decisions will not ignore the legitimate needs of more rural areas reeks of unjustified superiority and is unbecoming.
    - Akronymus 5y ago
      I certainly would deem city like zoning for rural areas to be a nightmare scenario. And that is just one of the MANY MANY policies that would make problems.
- samatman 5y ago
  Correct, as I said, it isn't fair, merely objective. It isn't possible to get fair by drawing lines around people which are smaller than the actual sovereign boundary under discussion. You can hand that power to the government, an 'independent commission' (the government with extra steps), or an algorithm run by the government, those are your options. All outcomes will fail fairness, this has been extensively studied.
edbaskerville 5y ago
I agree that algorithmic redistricting based entirely on population density would be the best way to do strict single-member geographic representation. But even neutrally drawn districts give more power to the party that is less concentrated geographically. Proportional representation solves this, but if you still value the notion that local communities should be able to have their collective power represented, then you need a solution that combines the two. As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, multi-member districts with proportional representation are a good way to do this without needing to change the Constitution. The gist is, split states into a smaller number of larger districts, each of which gets multiple representatives. The representatives are allocated proportionally to the vote in each large district. So if the district has 5 representatives, party X gets 63% of the vote, and party Y gets 37% of the vote, then party X gets 3 members and party Y gets 2 members. Political scientist Lee Drutman is actively promoting this approach, and recently founded Fix Our House (https://www.fixourhouse.org https://www.fixourhouse.org). If I could rewrite the Constitution, I'd get rid of the rounding error by weighting the votes of individual members of Congress. E.g., if there were only two candidates in a district, candidate X got 60% of the vote, and candidate Y got 40% of the vote, send them both to Congress, with X getting 0.6 of a vote and Y getting 0.4 of a vote. Of course all of this is better when combined with instant runoffs (aka ranked choice).
- xahrepap 5y ago
  I haven’t ever heard of this. Seems really interesting. Thanks. Another thought I’ve had for a long time: why not just lift the limit on Congress? My understanding is that Congress set a law to cap it (as opposed to the constitution specifying it) Which made sense 100 or even 50 years ago when members of Congress needed to be physically present to vote in DC. But today in a world of the internet, video conferencing, etc. it seems like that limitation is arbitrary. Much smaller districts would exists. Making gerrymandering harder. Making a the house look a lot different than the senate. It would make the House more like … a mayor who writes and votes on laws in DC instead of locally.
  - blacksqr 5y ago
    The Constitution sets a minimum district size, but not a maximum. The minimum is 30,000 ppl, the average now is over 700,000 ppl. Congress could easily double the size of the House, and should. That and a law requiring that districts have maximum compactness/population density would I think solve many of our problems with running a democracy.
BbzzbB 5y ago
The root of the issue is that the US doesn't separate elected lawmakers from district distribution. The fact[0] elected officials can redraw their own electoral map is just beyond belief, in a tough competition with Citizen's United for the worst political bug (well... feature) in the US. Cherry on top is calling/dubbing one such major and catastrophic instance of gerrymandering "REDMAP". So brazenly rubbing it in while openly chipping at US democracy. As long as that holds true, theoretical solutions don't really matter when those using them will pry any model into their favor. Not that a mathematical solution even makes sense for a district map that accounts of cultural ties for local representation (short of going for proportional elections, which I think is desirable with some form of local representation). In Canada, and I presume most countries of the G7, it's an independent entity[1], which one would think goes without saying. That's not incorruptible of course, but I wager it's held it's own for over 60 years here, modern district maps are quite reasonable. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP 1: https://www.vox.com/2014/4/15/5604284/us-elections-are-rigged-but-canada-knows-how-to-fix-them https://www.vox.com/2014/4/15/5604284/us-elections-are-rigge...
- tialaramex 5y ago
  It's crazy that local elected legislators end up able to manipulate this, but you can't really prevent the government of the sovereign entity, in this case the Federal Government (which will presumably be elected in a democracy otherwise what's the point) from being able to seize this power if it determines to do so. If it can't then it's not much of a sovereign government. For example in England an independent Boundary Commission draws these lines. But, they only exist because the government allows them to exist, Parliament can (and often does) ignore what the Commission says, indeed it's perfectly normal for a party who expect to lose seats to complain that it's unfair, and if that party happens to be in government they will stall boundary reforms. In practice the Commission acts as some sort of bulwark against gerrymandering overall, but it's for local stuff that this is more important, because local government just can't seize that power for themselves. That's where the US approach is crazy. The extra crazy thing in the US is that its sovereign government acts as though it is permanently beholden to dusty old documents (a written "Constitution"), or rather, to the very modern interpretation of those documents by partisan hacks in its "Supreme Court". This makes no sense, and Americans shouldn't put up with it.
karpierz 5y ago
I don't think objective is the word right word to describe this. It's algorithmic and deterministic. But it's not objective in the sense that it's objectively correct to group people like this. You're baking in a lot of implicit assumptions about how representation should/should not work by choosing this particular grouping algorithm. It also doesn't remove the human factors from redistricting; humans would have to choose and approve this method. It's just laundering the gerrymandering through an algorithm to give it credibility. But if you're the party that stands to benefit from changing redistricting laws, then the system loses credibility because you picked this method. And if you're the party that stands to lose from changing these laws, then you're unlikely to self-sabotage yourself by doing so.
- samatman 5y ago
  I think you're wrong. An algorithm which will produce the same results every time you feed a set of numbers into it is objective. I don't respect your attempt to make objective mean something it doesn't.
  - minkzilla 5y ago
    I think the two of you are using two different but legitimate definitions. GP is not trying to make it mean something it doesn't. 1. Existing independent of or external to the mind; 2. actual or real. Based on observable phenomena; empirical. 3. Uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices: synonym: fair. For an example, I write an algorithm to use different seeds and distance functions for the Voronoi diagram to find the one that benefits Republicans the most. It would be deterministic and maybe objective in definition 1 and 2 but it would not fit definition 3. I would say it is heavily influenced by personal prejudice, just one step removed because it is the coders prejudice not the algorithms.
SamBam 5y ago
It's a funny thing, because the point of representation is that you want to group the people together by something so you can accurately represent them, but the only thing pretty much every nation has settled on is to group them by geography. Why is that? How much of a connection does a rich white socialite in New York have with a poor custodian from an immigrant family? Sure, their representative may be trying to bring money into their district, but beyond that is it really possibly to represent both of their interests? What if representatives could represent based on other factors, like sex or wealth or race? What would that do to the idea of representational government? Or what if, in the online age, you could simply decide which representative represented you, no matter where they were from? Each representative could have no more than [US pop./num. districts] constituents, but they'd hail from anywhere, in some complex series of elections? Thought experiments, of course.
- runarberg 5y ago
  This is a completely valid concern, and is the reason why many people believe single person electorates fail to offer equal representation. Luckily there is an alternative: proportional representation. Meaning your district would be represented by multiple people. In my opinion a well represented district should have at least 30 members (but ideally closer to 300). For example if you are of the working class, and want representation from someone to represent you that also belongs to the working class you can vote for—say—the workers party, and if your district had 100 members, that party would only need 1% of the votes and you’ll have your preferred representation. In fact in many democracies with proportional representation so often had special women‘s parties which were voted into the national assembly when women were fighting for equal representation back in the 60s-80s
  - tatersolid 5y ago
    We don’t elect “parties” in the USA, we elect people. There’s no mention of political parties in the US constitution nor in most US state constitutions. This is a feature, not a bug.
    - 5y ago
wolverine876 5y ago
> 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 ... One way to define the problem is to maximize the number of competitive elections.
- somenameforme 5y ago
  Interesting idea. Mathematically it seems that it would on average create a perfect distribution. But it'd also lend itself to some substantial variance. Imagine you have a 650-350 voter lead in a state with 10 districts. The way you maximize the number of competitive election is by packing 3 districts 100-0. The party with 650 voters now has the same number of voters remaining as the party with 350, for the next 7 districts. Mathematically this works out perfectly because the party with 650 voters has an overall seat expectation of (3 + 7 * 0.5) = 6.5, but if you run the math further here's how it looks. The party with 35% of the representation gets (assuming a 50% outcome per competitive election): =============== 0 seats = 1% 1 seats = 6% 2 seats = 16% 3 seats = 27% 4 seats = 27% 5 seats = 16% 6 seats = 6% 7 seats = 1% ===============
- samatman 5y ago
  That would be wonderful for betting markets on the outcome of elections. Would it produce good governance do you think? I think, perhaps, the opposite.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  From the essay: ------------------------- Hmm, okay, so what would be fair? Perhaps we want to give each party a fighting chance in each election? Isn't that fair? 2 districts each hold 100,000 blues 8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets So now the violets have a 50% chance of winning 8 districts. The blues are granted two districts automatically, but that is fair, since they are more popular than the violets. Each party has some chance of winning. However, in this model, if 1 blue voter in each district changes their mind, then the violets end up with 80% of the legislature. We’ve engineered a system that is very unstable! If Katechon is like the nation of Hungary, where a 2/3rds majority can amend the constitution, then Katechon is now vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover, much like what happened in Hungary after 2010. And that's because 8 people out of a 1,000,000 changed their vote.
nemosaltat 5y ago
>Remember there’s nothing about this which is ‘fair’ except for the part where people could perhaps be persuaded to abide by the results. With a kid on the way, I’ve been looking for a succinct explanation of life and politics. Thank you
hexo 5y ago
> The problem posed by gerrymandering is a social problem, not a math problem. Nope, it's "stupid broken laws" problem. Nothing else.
mcv 5y ago
The real problem isn't even gerrymandering, it's having a district system at all. Gerrymandering is merely one of the symptoms of a district system. Having a district system will tend to reduce the number of viable parties to two. The article doesn't even question the fact that there's only a blue and a violet party in the example. In reality, lots of people feel badly represented by even the best of those two parties. For as long as I've talked to Americans about politics, they've complained about voting for the lesser evil. Why not vote for a party you actually agree with? Because it's not viable in a two-party system. If you've got 3 parties: Green, Yellow and Pink. 40% of the people vote Green, 30% vote yellow and 30% vote Pink. However, Green is supported all over the country, whereas Yellow and Pink are more regional, so in every district, Green gets 40% of the vote, whereas one of Yellow and Pink gets the other 60%, while the other gets none. Despite being the largest party, Green gets no votes. Or let's say Green and Yellow each gets 40% of the vote and Pink gets 20%. All votes are distributed reasonably evenly, so about half of the districts are won by Green and half are won by Yellow. This sounds reasonable, until you realise that the Pink voters get no representation at all. It's possible to have a system where even a majority of voters wouldn't be represented, as long as the two largest parties manage to keep the smaller parties divided. And in the US, that situation has devolved to the point that many voters don't even bother to vote for the smaller parties anymore, because they'd be throwing away their vote. And instead, they vote for candidates they disagree with because the only other viable candidate would be even worse. Just use proportional representation. That's the only way to ensure that all political opinions get represented. It's not perfect, because nothing ever is, but at least the system is flexible, and voters can vote for completely new parties if they disagree with all existing parties, and those new parties can actually win seats.
lkrubner 5y ago
Author here. Some people, who wrote comments in response to this essay, were focused on the intentional dishonesty of gerrymandering, and they wrote things like this: "You can easily get rid of gerrymandering simply by proscribing an algorithmic process for districting." There were several people who said this, here and on Reddit and on Hacker News. I believe they are defining gerrymandering as a deliberate and intentional act. By contrast, I was using the word "gerrymandering" to refer to the fact that any geographic boundary will establish a gap between the will of the voters and the final result of voting. So even if an algorithmic process is followed, and the damage done is accidental and unintentional, I am still referring to that as "gerrymandering." Indeed, the whole point of my essay is that if one group does its best to be fair when drawing lines on the map, and another group is evil and immoral and corrupt, and does its worst when drawing lines on a map, the damage done by both groups will be about the same, over the long-term.
- JJMcJ 5y ago
  Square state, two Congressional districts, relatively uniform population distribution but one party clustered in one section of state. Sometimes you get different outcomes if you divide state in half north-south vs. east-west, depending on how the cluster is divided between districts.
  - lkrubner 5y ago
    Are you describing the state you live in?
    - JJMcJ 5y ago
      No, I once saw this described for Nebraska. I don't remember the details or which party benefited from each possibility. Here's an idealized example. Imagine a state with 1,000,000 people. 400,000 Democrats live in a narrow strip on the Eastern border, uniformly distributed in that strip. The 600,000 Republicans are uniformly distributed in the rest of the state. Split the population in half by a north-south line. The Eastern district has 400,000 Democrats and 100,000 Republicans, and so has a Democratic representative. The Western district has 500,000 Republicans and so had a Republican representative. Now try an east-west line. Each district has 200,000 Democrats and 300,000 Republicans. There are two Republican representatives. Yet on a map, both divisions look fine. That's one reason the anti-gerrymandering rules specify looking deeper than just population and compactness.

crowbahr 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
  - SamBam 5y ago
    The problem is that you've fallen into the trap of modern political thinking: that all politics is national, and all that matters is the big decisions that get voted on that affect everyone equally. And similarly, the false notion that all members of Party A are fungible, and it doesn't matter if I, personally, am represented by someone I hate, so long as there's a member of my party somewhere in congress. But that's not really the point of a representative republic. Our specific, local needs and desires are supposed to actually be represented by by our members of Congress. So in terms of actual representation, it would actually be better to have a district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate A, and another district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate B, because then the vast majority of people would be getting the representative that they voted for, and represents them. In the scenario where every district is purple, fully half the people have no representation of their interests in congress.
    - croon 5y ago
      Macro scale doesn't have to mean national. There are many precincts per district, and many districts per county, etc. > So in terms of actual representation, it would actually be better to have a district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate A, and another district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate B, because then the vast majority of people would be getting the representative that they voted for, and represents them. No, only the throwaway districts in gerrymandered maps are represented, all other districts swallow up many more unrepresented voters. > In the scenario where every district is purple, fully half the people have no representation of their interests in congress. But you missed the point, not every district can be purple. In absolute terms, more people would be represented than the status quo. It's better than gerrymandering. But again, not my prefered solution.
lkrubner 5y ago
From the essay: ------------------------- Hmm, okay, so what would be fair? Perhaps we want to give each party a fighting chance in each election? Isn't that fair? 2 districts each hold 100,000 blues 8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets So now the violets have a 50% chance of winning 8 districts. The blues are granted two districts automatically, but that is fair, since they are more popular than the violets. Each party has some chance of winning. However, in this model, if 1 blue voter in each district changes their mind, then the violets end up with 80% of the legislature. We’ve engineered a system that is very unstable! If Katechon is like the nation of Hungary, where a 2/3rds majority can amend the constitution, then Katechon is now vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover, much like what happened in Hungary after 2010. And that's because 8 people out of a 1,000,000 changed their vote.
- crowbahr 5y ago
  Unstable means each vote matters. Ideally we'd do away with this bullshit electoral system entirely and make each vote matter by having it be proportional representation. Until then: Maximum instability = maximum Government accountability.
  - lkrubner 5y ago
    You actually remove the possibility of accountability if you are drawing the maps so that a party that behaves badly still has a 50% chance of winning.

zackees 5y ago

“Gerrymandering” is baked right into the constitution. It’s a good thing. You want the representatives drawing the districts because they are closest to their constituents. You also don’t want random district allocation, you want the representatives to match with your constituents in a 90/10 split, not a 50/50 split where nothing gets done. The barrels of ink used to slander redistricting is being supplied by very powerful money interests. They do this because it’s one of the last impediments to the NWO globalist government that is incrementally being setup. The removal of representative redistricting, along with the installation of the horribly complex rank choice voting system the media elites are pushing everywhere effectively ends the American democratic experiment.

lkrubner 5y ago
I am not a very powerful money interest.

tptacek 5y ago

it isn't even a know it when you see it thing I'm glad you said this. One of the more infamous gerrymanders in the US is in Chicago --- the notorious "earmuffs". You can just look at it and see that something's hinky. But what's really happening there is that there are in fact very well-defined Latino neighborhoods in Chicago, and the earmuffs capture a bunch of them neatly: Pilsen, Little Village, Cicero, Belmont-Cragin. If you know Chicago, you know these places, and you also know what the boundary between, say, Belmont-Cragin and North Austin is like; however artificial it looks on a map, it is a real border. That these communities are where they are is also not purely happenstance: a lot of very unfortunate social engineering took place in the early-mid-20th century to put those neighborhoods (and all the other neighborhoods) where they are now. That's not to defend gerrymandering writ large, or even necessarily the earmuffs, but just to second your point about the complexity of the problem.

shkkmo 5y ago
I think a lack of fairness is a inherent problem with districting first past the post elections. We could solve the problem by moving to a proportional system with much larger or no districts. The more proportional representatives you have per district, the less value you get for gerrymandering it as it gets harder to ignore voters.
- runarberg 5y ago
  Proportional representation goes a long way of increasing fairness. Societies are not split cleanly by geographic lines. You can have a lot more diverse ruling class by coalescing single person electorates into at least 30 electorates per district. But what would also be needed is to increase the total numbers of representatives by a whole factor at least. USA is one of the least represented democracies in the world (only India is worse). Even China has more representatives per capita. This also extends to local elections where cities as big as Seattle or San Francisco only have 9 and 11 members in their respective city counsels. There is no way to represent such big and diverse cities with this few seats. In comparison Oslo has 59 seats in their city council.
- vidarh 5y ago

GavinMcG 5y ago

> 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 There are absolutely situations where it is obvious, most notably when those drawing the maps say they're motivated by partisan power. The situations at issue in Rucho v. Common Cause, for example, were not ambiguous in the least.

mpalczewski 5y ago

The rural populations seems would not like a redistricting where every district is dominated by its largest population center. Essentially this voronoi type redistricting would push more power towards cities at the cost of rural areas.

jchanimal 5y ago
In the USA that is an unambiguously good thing.
- zaphar 5y ago
  No it isn't. There may be some aspects of it that would have good results. But there would also be aspects that would have poor results. Pretending that larger population centers will make better electoral decisions and that those decisions will not ignore the legitimate needs of more rural areas reeks of unjustified superiority and is unbecoming.
  - Akronymus 5y ago
    I certainly would deem city like zoning for rural areas to be a nightmare scenario. And that is just one of the MANY MANY policies that would make problems.
samatman 5y ago
Correct, as I said, it isn't fair, merely objective. It isn't possible to get fair by drawing lines around people which are smaller than the actual sovereign boundary under discussion. You can hand that power to the government, an 'independent commission' (the government with extra steps), or an algorithm run by the government, those are your options. All outcomes will fail fairness, this has been extensively studied.

edbaskerville 5y ago

I agree that algorithmic redistricting based entirely on population density would be the best way to do strict single-member geographic representation. But even neutrally drawn districts give more power to the party that is less concentrated geographically. Proportional representation solves this, but if you still value the notion that local communities should be able to have their collective power represented, then you need a solution that combines the two. As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, multi-member districts with proportional representation are a good way to do this without needing to change the Constitution. The gist is, split states into a smaller number of larger districts, each of which gets multiple representatives. The representatives are allocated proportionally to the vote in each large district. So if the district has 5 representatives, party X gets 63% of the vote, and party Y gets 37% of the vote, then party X gets 3 members and party Y gets 2 members. Political scientist Lee Drutman is actively promoting this approach, and recently founded Fix Our House (https://www.fixourhouse.org https://www.fixourhouse.org). If I could rewrite the Constitution, I'd get rid of the rounding error by weighting the votes of individual members of Congress. E.g., if there were only two candidates in a district, candidate X got 60% of the vote, and candidate Y got 40% of the vote, send them both to Congress, with X getting 0.6 of a vote and Y getting 0.4 of a vote. Of course all of this is better when combined with instant runoffs (aka ranked choice).

xahrepap 5y ago
I haven’t ever heard of this. Seems really interesting. Thanks. Another thought I’ve had for a long time: why not just lift the limit on Congress? My understanding is that Congress set a law to cap it (as opposed to the constitution specifying it) Which made sense 100 or even 50 years ago when members of Congress needed to be physically present to vote in DC. But today in a world of the internet, video conferencing, etc. it seems like that limitation is arbitrary. Much smaller districts would exists. Making gerrymandering harder. Making a the house look a lot different than the senate. It would make the House more like … a mayor who writes and votes on laws in DC instead of locally.
- blacksqr 5y ago
  The Constitution sets a minimum district size, but not a maximum. The minimum is 30,000 ppl, the average now is over 700,000 ppl. Congress could easily double the size of the House, and should. That and a law requiring that districts have maximum compactness/population density would I think solve many of our problems with running a democracy.

BbzzbB 5y ago

The root of the issue is that the US doesn't separate elected lawmakers from district distribution. The fact[0] elected officials can redraw their own electoral map is just beyond belief, in a tough competition with Citizen's United for the worst political bug (well... feature) in the US. Cherry on top is calling/dubbing one such major and catastrophic instance of gerrymandering "REDMAP". So brazenly rubbing it in while openly chipping at US democracy. As long as that holds true, theoretical solutions don't really matter when those using them will pry any model into their favor. Not that a mathematical solution even makes sense for a district map that accounts of cultural ties for local representation (short of going for proportional elections, which I think is desirable with some form of local representation). In Canada, and I presume most countries of the G7, it's an independent entity[1], which one would think goes without saying. That's not incorruptible of course, but I wager it's held it's own for over 60 years here, modern district maps are quite reasonable. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP 1: https://www.vox.com/2014/4/15/5604284/us-elections-are-rigged-but-canada-knows-how-to-fix-them https://www.vox.com/2014/4/15/5604284/us-elections-are-rigge...

tialaramex 5y ago
It's crazy that local elected legislators end up able to manipulate this, but you can't really prevent the government of the sovereign entity, in this case the Federal Government (which will presumably be elected in a democracy otherwise what's the point) from being able to seize this power if it determines to do so. If it can't then it's not much of a sovereign government. For example in England an independent Boundary Commission draws these lines. But, they only exist because the government allows them to exist, Parliament can (and often does) ignore what the Commission says, indeed it's perfectly normal for a party who expect to lose seats to complain that it's unfair, and if that party happens to be in government they will stall boundary reforms. In practice the Commission acts as some sort of bulwark against gerrymandering overall, but it's for local stuff that this is more important, because local government just can't seize that power for themselves. That's where the US approach is crazy. The extra crazy thing in the US is that its sovereign government acts as though it is permanently beholden to dusty old documents (a written "Constitution"), or rather, to the very modern interpretation of those documents by partisan hacks in its "Supreme Court". This makes no sense, and Americans shouldn't put up with it.

karpierz 5y ago

I don't think objective is the word right word to describe this. It's algorithmic and deterministic. But it's not objective in the sense that it's objectively correct to group people like this. You're baking in a lot of implicit assumptions about how representation should/should not work by choosing this particular grouping algorithm. It also doesn't remove the human factors from redistricting; humans would have to choose and approve this method. It's just laundering the gerrymandering through an algorithm to give it credibility. But if you're the party that stands to benefit from changing redistricting laws, then the system loses credibility because you picked this method. And if you're the party that stands to lose from changing these laws, then you're unlikely to self-sabotage yourself by doing so.

samatman 5y ago
I think you're wrong. An algorithm which will produce the same results every time you feed a set of numbers into it is objective. I don't respect your attempt to make objective mean something it doesn't.
- minkzilla 5y ago
  I think the two of you are using two different but legitimate definitions. GP is not trying to make it mean something it doesn't. 1. Existing independent of or external to the mind; 2. actual or real. Based on observable phenomena; empirical. 3. Uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices: synonym: fair. For an example, I write an algorithm to use different seeds and distance functions for the Voronoi diagram to find the one that benefits Republicans the most. It would be deterministic and maybe objective in definition 1 and 2 but it would not fit definition 3. I would say it is heavily influenced by personal prejudice, just one step removed because it is the coders prejudice not the algorithms.

SamBam 5y ago

It's a funny thing, because the point of representation is that you want to group the people together by something so you can accurately represent them, but the only thing pretty much every nation has settled on is to group them by geography. Why is that? How much of a connection does a rich white socialite in New York have with a poor custodian from an immigrant family? Sure, their representative may be trying to bring money into their district, but beyond that is it really possibly to represent both of their interests? What if representatives could represent based on other factors, like sex or wealth or race? What would that do to the idea of representational government? Or what if, in the online age, you could simply decide which representative represented you, no matter where they were from? Each representative could have no more than [US pop./num. districts] constituents, but they'd hail from anywhere, in some complex series of elections? Thought experiments, of course.

runarberg 5y ago
This is a completely valid concern, and is the reason why many people believe single person electorates fail to offer equal representation. Luckily there is an alternative: proportional representation. Meaning your district would be represented by multiple people. In my opinion a well represented district should have at least 30 members (but ideally closer to 300). For example if you are of the working class, and want representation from someone to represent you that also belongs to the working class you can vote for—say—the workers party, and if your district had 100 members, that party would only need 1% of the votes and you’ll have your preferred representation. In fact in many democracies with proportional representation so often had special women‘s parties which were voted into the national assembly when women were fighting for equal representation back in the 60s-80s
- tatersolid 5y ago
  We don’t elect “parties” in the USA, we elect people. There’s no mention of political parties in the US constitution nor in most US state constitutions. This is a feature, not a bug.
  - 5y ago

wolverine876 5y ago

> 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 ... One way to define the problem is to maximize the number of competitive elections.

somenameforme 5y ago
Interesting idea. Mathematically it seems that it would on average create a perfect distribution. But it'd also lend itself to some substantial variance. Imagine you have a 650-350 voter lead in a state with 10 districts. The way you maximize the number of competitive election is by packing 3 districts 100-0. The party with 650 voters now has the same number of voters remaining as the party with 350, for the next 7 districts. Mathematically this works out perfectly because the party with 650 voters has an overall seat expectation of (3 + 7 * 0.5) = 6.5, but if you run the math further here's how it looks. The party with 35% of the representation gets (assuming a 50% outcome per competitive election): =============== 0 seats = 1% 1 seats = 6% 2 seats = 16% 3 seats = 27% 4 seats = 27% 5 seats = 16% 6 seats = 6% 7 seats = 1% ===============
samatman 5y ago
That would be wonderful for betting markets on the outcome of elections. Would it produce good governance do you think? I think, perhaps, the opposite.
lkrubner 5y ago
From the essay: ------------------------- Hmm, okay, so what would be fair? Perhaps we want to give each party a fighting chance in each election? Isn't that fair? 2 districts each hold 100,000 blues 8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets So now the violets have a 50% chance of winning 8 districts. The blues are granted two districts automatically, but that is fair, since they are more popular than the violets. Each party has some chance of winning. However, in this model, if 1 blue voter in each district changes their mind, then the violets end up with 80% of the legislature. We’ve engineered a system that is very unstable! If Katechon is like the nation of Hungary, where a 2/3rds majority can amend the constitution, then Katechon is now vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover, much like what happened in Hungary after 2010. And that's because 8 people out of a 1,000,000 changed their vote.

nemosaltat 5y ago

>Remember there’s nothing about this which is ‘fair’ except for the part where people could perhaps be persuaded to abide by the results. With a kid on the way, I’ve been looking for a succinct explanation of life and politics. Thank you

hexo 5y ago

> The problem posed by gerrymandering is a social problem, not a math problem. Nope, it's "stupid broken laws" problem. Nothing else.

mcv 5y ago

The real problem isn't even gerrymandering, it's having a district system at all. Gerrymandering is merely one of the symptoms of a district system. Having a district system will tend to reduce the number of viable parties to two. The article doesn't even question the fact that there's only a blue and a violet party in the example. In reality, lots of people feel badly represented by even the best of those two parties. For as long as I've talked to Americans about politics, they've complained about voting for the lesser evil. Why not vote for a party you actually agree with? Because it's not viable in a two-party system. If you've got 3 parties: Green, Yellow and Pink. 40% of the people vote Green, 30% vote yellow and 30% vote Pink. However, Green is supported all over the country, whereas Yellow and Pink are more regional, so in every district, Green gets 40% of the vote, whereas one of Yellow and Pink gets the other 60%, while the other gets none. Despite being the largest party, Green gets no votes. Or let's say Green and Yellow each gets 40% of the vote and Pink gets 20%. All votes are distributed reasonably evenly, so about half of the districts are won by Green and half are won by Yellow. This sounds reasonable, until you realise that the Pink voters get no representation at all. It's possible to have a system where even a majority of voters wouldn't be represented, as long as the two largest parties manage to keep the smaller parties divided. And in the US, that situation has devolved to the point that many voters don't even bother to vote for the smaller parties anymore, because they'd be throwing away their vote. And instead, they vote for candidates they disagree with because the only other viable candidate would be even worse. Just use proportional representation. That's the only way to ensure that all political opinions get represented. It's not perfect, because nothing ever is, but at least the system is flexible, and voters can vote for completely new parties if they disagree with all existing parties, and those new parties can actually win seats.

lkrubner 5y ago

Author here. Some people, who wrote comments in response to this essay, were focused on the intentional dishonesty of gerrymandering, and they wrote things like this: "You can easily get rid of gerrymandering simply by proscribing an algorithmic process for districting." There were several people who said this, here and on Reddit and on Hacker News. I believe they are defining gerrymandering as a deliberate and intentional act. By contrast, I was using the word "gerrymandering" to refer to the fact that any geographic boundary will establish a gap between the will of the voters and the final result of voting. So even if an algorithmic process is followed, and the damage done is accidental and unintentional, I am still referring to that as "gerrymandering." Indeed, the whole point of my essay is that if one group does its best to be fair when drawing lines on the map, and another group is evil and immoral and corrupt, and does its worst when drawing lines on a map, the damage done by both groups will be about the same, over the long-term.

JJMcJ 5y ago
Square state, two Congressional districts, relatively uniform population distribution but one party clustered in one section of state. Sometimes you get different outcomes if you divide state in half north-south vs. east-west, depending on how the cluster is divided between districts.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  Are you describing the state you live in?
  - JJMcJ 5y ago
    No, I once saw this described for Nebraska. I don't remember the details or which party benefited from each possibility. Here's an idealized example. Imagine a state with 1,000,000 people. 400,000 Democrats live in a narrow strip on the Eastern border, uniformly distributed in that strip. The 600,000 Republicans are uniformly distributed in the rest of the state. Split the population in half by a north-south line. The Eastern district has 400,000 Democrats and 100,000 Republicans, and so has a Democratic representative. The Western district has 500,000 Republicans and so had a Republican representative. Now try an east-west line. Each district has 200,000 Democrats and 300,000 Republicans. There are two Republican representatives. Yet on a map, both divisions look fine. That's one reason the anti-gerrymandering rules specify looking deeper than just population and compactness.