14 ms·

Ugly Gerry – Gerrymandering font

327 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

Imnimo 4y ago
I dislike the focus on district shapes in gerrymandering discussions. The thing that matters is how severely the districting process subverts the will of the electorate, and that can be done with squares instead of squiggles.
shicholas 4y ago
Hilarious and sad. Makes me wonder, is there a fairer, algorithmic way to carve up a geographical area into election districts so we can apply the same solution to every state?
- liorben-david 4y ago
  Perhaps every district should be convex?
  - ninkendo 4y ago
    I don’t think you can tile convex shapes without leaving gaps.
    - darzu 4y ago
      sure you can, but you might not want to go that small. (simple proof is to turn everything into triangles.)
    - jxf 4y ago
      Sure you can. For example, regular triangles, squares, and hexagons can all tile the plane, and they're all convex. There are an infinite number of sets of convex shapes which tile the plane.
      - irishsultan 4y ago
        Unless state boundaries suddenly become convex it's definitely impossible. Ignoring state boundaries you have the issue that you need approximately equal numbers of population. It's possible that you can still tile the plane with convex shapes, but I'm not quite sure how to approach a proof (or disproof).
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    That sounds overly restrictive (not because it is impossible, though). Maybe we can require the area of the convex hull to be at most xx% larger than the original area. But that will be hard to enforce when a shoreline is involved.
- roenxi 4y ago
  First you need to define the word 'fair'. Noting that you have to really define the word, and not just pick a simple interpretation that also happens to favour one party. Note that the US doesn't automatically do things based on a 51% majority (which, honestly, they picked a sensible policy - really 60%+ should be the norm for political action). So "this favours the group with the 51% majority!" isn't an argument of fairness.
  - AgentOrange1234 4y ago
    Requiring 60%+ just means unfairly favoring the status quo over the will of the majority? :)
    - somenameforme 4y ago
      It's not really about favoring anything, but about preventing the degenerate case of democracy - a tyranny of the majority. It's the reason a president can veto congress, a judge can 'veto' a law both congress and the president agreed upon, or why Rhode Island has just as much influence as California in the Senate. "Fairness" being seen as the same as to majority > all would just result in what we've seen happen with our democracy experiments in places like the Mideast. The majority group just ends up using democracy as a cudgel against minority groups. Those minority groups of course don't just stand idly by and next thing you know the entire system is in meltdown and beelining right towards the next iron fist.
      - arrow7000 4y ago
        You're right. Far better to have a tyranny of the minority instead.
        somenameforme 4y ago
        Minority groups cannot pass laws by themselves. Their one and only "power" is to prevent the majority from being able to arbitrarily impose their will on everybody else. Of course the other side of this coin is that a minority group can prevent "positive" change from being enacted by a thin majority. But in general this cost pales in comparison to the alternative system where by merit of having a simple majority, a majority group can impose their every whim and desire on the every minority group with absolutely no restraint. If you can solve both problems in some way, do feel free to share - and not only here. You'd have solved a core problem of political science!
- assbuttbuttass 4y ago
  I saw a paper on this a while back https://www.math.cmu.edu/CNA/summer_institute/2018/projects/gerrymandering.pdf https://www.math.cmu.edu/CNA/summer_institute/2018/projects/...
- areoform 4y ago
  Yes! There has been a lot of scholarship on the topic, https://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html https://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html https://archive.siam.org/news/news.php?id=1237 https://archive.siam.org/news/news.php?id=1237 https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/11/fairmandering-draws-fair-districts-using-data-science https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/11/fairmandering-draws... http://autoredistrict.org/ http://autoredistrict.org/
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    I've seen a study that a simple grid-based subdivision design that allocates proportionally equal parcels to each electoral division would be unfair... to Republicans. They would lose most elections horribly, so proposed legislation banning Gerrymandering gets shot down every time by them, on the grounds of unfairness.
    - pohl 4y ago
      I’d say that politicians — who really only truly represent the richest 1% of citizens — losing is perfectly fair. If they want to play to win, they should adopt policies with a broad enough appeal to win the hearts and minds of more voters.
    - webnrrd2k 4y ago
      Just a wierd thought - what if the grid system was done such that one party chooses a square, then the other, alternating? First choice is by coin toss. Maybe the area is required to be contiguous. Maybe not.
      - AgentOrange1234 4y ago
        How would a party choose a square? They’re just trying to draw the squares to include favorable proportions of voters. If the squares are fixed, there is no choice?
        webnrrd2k 4y ago
- defrost 4y ago
  Subject to someone always being unhappy, sure; see: Optimization Approaches to Political Redistricting Problems. There are several commercial GIS packages for this and a wealth of papers on the subject. The great issue, in the US, as I understand it, is that for some entirely batshit devoid of rational reason ruling political parties oversee new districts on a semi regular basis. This fosters a culture of redistricting for personal party gain and ratcheting inequalities that follow. Saner countries involve apolitical blind consultants for initials district proposals and have party nased challenges follow "I cut, you choose" type patterns to resolve conflict.
  - gpt5 4y ago
    The “I cut, you choose” sounds optimal from a game theoretic perspective and avoid all the complex algorithms that are proposed in the links of other replies here
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      Sorry, choose what exactly? (in the context of districts) I'd argue for a "simpler" method: no district should be non-contiguous and it should be "round" (no weirdly shaped or long districts). Something like: area of the circle that fully encompasses the district cannot be more than 30% of the whole district area. (With some exceptions for coastal areas)
      - gpt5 4y ago
        Essentially - the opposition has the veto power
- lozenge 4y ago
  The entire idea of a geographical area selecting just one person to represent their views in a legislature is outdated and undemocratic. It tends to a two party system which inherently can't represent people's views accurately. In the US you see people talk about white and black districts as if all white people think the same. A proportional system means everyone's views are represented in the legislature and at that point compromises can be brokered.
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    > The entire idea of a geographical area selecting just one person to represent their views in a legislature is outdated and undemocratic. I don't think that alone makes it undemocratic. Many systems implementing proportional representation elect a single person per geographic area but also create an overall balance based on the proportional vote. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_seat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_seat for instance.
- quicklime 4y ago
  I feel like a fairer way to do this would be through proportional representation. Most issues that voters care about are not local issues, so why do need a system to carve up representation along geographical boundaries? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    While I do think the current system has gone way too far in the other direction, the concern I'd see here is that for issues that _are_ of largely local concern there's no real voice.
  - polski-g 4y ago
    > Most issues that voters care about are not local issues Do you have an data to support this claim?
    - adastra22 4y ago
      Indeed, most political science supports the opposite conclusion. Almost all politics is local.
      - bobkazamakis 4y ago
        politics is WAN when nuance is harder to find
      - jjav 4y ago
        > Indeed, most political science supports the opposite conclusion. Almost all politics is local. Interesting. I'd say all the very toxic politics is non-local. The local stuff might be more, but it's mostly mundane. Which makes sense. My city and county representatives can't get away with passing something wildly unpopular that >> 50% of local people hate. While it's far from perfect, there is a reasonable amount of accountability with local politicians. Federal-level politicians though, are so far removed from the people they purportedly represent and their election is so heavily gerrymandered that they are untouchable. They can get away with serving only special interests and passing laws which most people hate.
- retrac 4y ago
  We don't have much gerrymandering in my jurisdiction; boundaries are chosen by an nonpartisan committee. But in theory the legislatures can override it. Sometimes part of the proposed boundary changes do seem illogical. For example, a town closely linked to a nearby city, but districted with the neighbouring rural area, that it has little in common with. Those situations are most likely to result in tweaking the boundaries. (Which sometimes leads to accusations of gerrymandering. That's how it starts, after all!) It's very hard to quantify that sort of thing algorithmically, like what region a town feels it is part of. And I do think it is important to take into account; part of the whole reason for districts, is for local character to be considered and reflected in the democracy.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  Sure but most of the energy goes into algorithms to achieve the most unfair results possible instead.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- elihu 4y ago
  Probably the best way is to not have the districts in the first place. If a state has five representatives, run a single state-wide election with five winners, using some variant of proportional representation. Even better: modify the fundamental nature of the House of Representatives such that a representative's voting power is proportional to the share of the vote they got. Both of those are pretty major reforms, so absent those probably the best thing is to make sure the redistricting process is not controlled by a single party, and maybe imposing some restrictions on how complex the shapes can be.
  - pacificmint 4y ago
    > modify the fundamental nature of the House of Representatives such that a representative's voting power is proportional to the share of the vote they got. Germany does that. They have districts, which get to send the winner in each district to parliament. But these only account for a part of the total seats available. The others are filled up from a party list in such a way that the proportions are equal to the proportions of the votes. That way you get the best of both worlds, you have representatives that have a connection to each district, but you still have the distribution in parliament that represent the actual distribution of the votes.
    - Aaron2222 4y ago
      We do the same here in New Zealand. It's called MMP (Mixed Member Proportional). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
    - underyx 4y ago
      Hungary does this too, and the party list seats are filled in a way that increases the influence of smaller parties. The first seat goes to the party with the most votes, but once that seat's assigned, the winning party's vote total is cut to 1/2. Then the next seat is assigned to whoever has the most votes afterwards, and the winner's total is cut to 1/2 if it's their first time winning, or 1/3 if it's their second time winning. And so on.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  Some constitutional clause prohibiting representatives to rewrite the rules of their own impending elections in bullshit ways sounds like a pretty big oversight. I'm no constitutional scholar though - maybe such a thing was debated
- Dapperdork 4y ago
  A rule I'd propose for this would be: For every administrative region within a state (county, parish, city, village, borough, ward, etc.), a proposed congressional district must meet one of the following criteria: 1. The congressional district is completely contained within that region. 2. The congressional district completely contains that region. or 3. The congressional district contains no part of that region.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    Unless all the regions are both simply nested instead of partially overlapping and extremely conveniently sized with regard to population, this will at a minimum pretty consistently violate the Constitutional “one man, one vote” case law, and may often also be intractable.
- jonp888 4y ago
  In most countries you just hire some officials as part of an independent agency and tell them to create reasonable districts based on geographic and social groupings, and it works fine. I'm not sure if the problem is that the polticians are afraid of giving up the power to control the districts, or if the extremely adversarial nature of American politics means that Americans mistrust their goverment and their fellow citizens so much they don't believe that the possibility of that government making non-partisan decisions even exists.
  - YPPH 4y ago
    In Australia Gerrymandering isn't even part of political discourse. An independent committee composed of the Electoral Commissioner, the state or territory Surveyor-General and the state or territory Auditor-General make the decisions. They may invite submissions from the public and political parties but they do not pander to politicians. The boundaries also generally make sense.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    > In most countries... How do you calculate that? (not joking: i don't know where one looks for such data)
    - jonp888 4y ago
      Well, yes, I don't know, I'm only going off never having heard of gerrymandering being a major problem in any other country. Plus that in general America seems to involve politics in decisions which are more usually left to officials to do in an, at least theoretically, non-partisan way. I don't know of any other country in which judges are elected by popular vote, or Ambassadors are appointed and approved by politicians instead of being professional government officials(this one I am pretty sure is unique).
      - jjtheblunt 4y ago
        it's easy to find it elsewhere (i.e., American politicians aren't the only ones) The second link below is "fun": seems gerrymandering in France correlates to the French revolution. https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2021/10/21/the-tories-are-gerrymandering-democracy-to-turn-england-blue/ https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2021/10/21/the-tories-a... https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/14/what-french-revolution-teaches-us-about-dangers-gerrymandering/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/14/what-frenc...
- curiousgibbon 4y ago
  This is an active area of research for sure. One idea is basically to come up with a few rules for what the districts must look like (as unions of precincts) and use Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from a probability distribution on the possible districting plans. Several court cases have featured expert evidence from math researchers asked to quantify how crazy the districting is using this methodology (ish). Wesley Pegden's expert witness report in one such case is readily findable, for example. One of the main difficulties is that we don't have much rigorous theory telling us how long to run the Markov chains.
- ouid 4y ago
  Not even a little bit. The reasonable thing to do would be to toss out the old system and have everyone cast a ballot for a representative and weight congressional seats by how many votes you receive, with some kind of thresholding system to keep from having to rebuild the capitol all the time. IE representatives below the threshold can delegate or amalgamate their votes.
- Joeri 4y ago
  Yes, when gerrymandering was challenged in 2019 a bunch of mathematicians filed an amicus brief with a mathematical fairness test. Their work is here: https://mggg.org/ https://mggg.org/ Other tests and models have also been proposed in the challenges to gerrymandering. The supreme court just had to pick one. But what the court ruled in 2019, along strict partisan lines, is this: The Court ruled that while partisan gerrymandering may be "incompatible with democratic principles", the federal courts cannot review such allegations, as they present nonjusticiable political questions outside the remit of these courts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rucho_v._Common_Cause https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rucho_v._Common_Cause So just like how the supreme court ruled in citizens united that it wouldn’t put any limits on money in politics, it ruled in this case that it wouldn’t prevent politicians from redistricting in their favor. The supreme court is imho part of the problem of American politics, not part of the solution.
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    Translation: get the "wrong" unlimited money and the "wrong" party gerrymandering and they might get off their behinds and change their opinions Now as for the SC being part of the problem, well, maybe it's an issue of assignments and term limits, but it is not as simple as not having one
  - mannerheim 4y ago
    The correct legal decisions were made in both cases. In Rucho, > Roberts made clear that partisan gerrymandering can be distasteful and unjust, but that states and Congress have the ability to pass laws to curb excessive partisan gerrymandering. In other words, it's up to the legislatures to ban gerrymandering first before SCOTUS can rule on it. As for Citizens United, the law granted the FEC to pick and choose who was allowed to exercise political speech: > The Chief Justice wrote separately to explain why the Court went as far as it did. Essentially, Roberts explained what I’ve written in this article: that there was no rhyme or reason anymore to which entities were allowed to influence elections and which weren’t. According to the government, Michael Moore can but Citizens United couldn’t. The New York Times (a corporation) can but other corporations couldn’t. There were so many holes and exceptions to the law organizations had been essentially reduced to asking the government for permission to criticize it, and that is contrary to the essential purpose of the First Amendment. No more narrow exceptions given to one group but not another, the whole thing must go. https://www.cato.org/commentary/michael-moore-trumpland-might-have-been-illegal-citizens-united-its-all-incredibly https://www.cato.org/commentary/michael-moore-trumpland-migh... They even went as far as to claim the authority to ban books: > A close reading of the transcript, however, reveals that General Kagan did not change the government’s answer. She suggests that someone who had their book banned by the FEC would have a “quite good as-applied challenge,” and suggests (wrongly, it turns out) that the FEC has never pursued books in any enforcement issue. > This is not the same, however, as saying flatly that under no circumstances does the government have the authority, under the Constitution and the First Amendment, to ban books for political content. Instead, Kagan asserts only that the statute in question (203) does not currently cover books, while conceding that another (441b) does cover books — but she promises they won’t use it to go after books. Promise, pinky-swear! (yes, that Kagan as well in case you were wondering) https://www.ifs.org/blog/citizens-united-its-all-about-the-book-banning/ https://www.ifs.org/blog/citizens-united-its-all-about-the-b...
- TheBrokenRail 4y ago
  Not a perfect solution, but Michigan created a bipartisan commission to redraw districts in 2020. (Well Michigan didn't create it, voters did in a proposal during the 2018 election.) https://www.michigan.gov/micrc https://www.michigan.gov/micrc
- tejtm 4y ago
  yes. and we need not even reach for the mathematical perfection readily available. Growing up a member of large semi feral child population there was one simple rule that kept the peace. "DIVIDER GETS LAST CHOICE."
- edbaskerville 4y ago
  Lots of good responses to this question. The most plausible solution being pushed right now is the one advocated by Lee Drutman and Fix Our House, proportional representation via large multi-member districts: https://www.fixourhouse.org/ https://www.fixourhouse.org/ It's more plausible than others because it doesn't require amending the U.S. Constitution. I'm not convinced you couldn't still gerrymander a bit to tilt this system one way or the other, but it's way more robust than what we have now. My ideal system has the same basic design, a combination of local and proportional representation, and would look like this: (1) Redistrict algorithmically using a simple algorithm based on population density alone, minimizing a relatively easy-to-understand objective function (e.g., average distance of people to other people in their district). The goal of this algorithm is not to be "best" or "fairest" in any sense, but to be robust to attacks like John Roberts's frightening line about "sociological gobbledygook." Once you have subjective measures of fairness, you open things up to political maneuvering (and accusations thereof). (2) Assign multiple members of Congress to each district. An election for a district involves picking n candidates via instant runoff voting. (3) Members don't get 1 vote. They get a vote proportional to the fraction of people that voted for them in the election. That way, if you have a 4-member district, with the top 4 vote-getters being a Democrat with 45% of the last-round vote, a Republican with 43%, a Libertarian with 7%, and a Green with 5%, they each get 0.45, 0.43, 0.07, and 0.05 of a vote, respectively. (4) Do this for the Senate too, ha ha ha. Senate still serves a purpose in this fantasy: it's a longer-time average of public opinion with less time spent running for re-election.
- ajuc 4y ago
  Proportional voting system makes gerrymandering (almost completely) pointless. The "almost" is there only because there's probably some threshold below which votes are wasted - and the wasted votes need to be reassigned to the other candidates somehow, which makes it not exactly proportional. But in practice it's not a big enough incentive to gerrymander. The problem with democracy is that any bugs in the process are how people who can fix them are elected, so there's negative incentive to fix them and positive incentive to abuse them even more. I'm of the opinion that a well-functioning democracy needs revolution every century to fix the accumulated trash.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > is there a fairer, algorithmic way to carve up a geographical area into election districts so we can apply the same solution to every state? I would argue to throw out the constraint that each district must contain the same number of people. There is no reason for that other than the fact that "one man, one vote" sounds good when you hear it. It makes just as much sense as applying the same constraint to senators. Representatives are supposed to represent a common interest group, not Democracy In The Abstract. If two people are a part of the same community with the same interests, why wouldn't they share a representative? The right approach is to identify natural districts first and then not care whether they're the same size.
- gwd 4y ago
  There's a really good series of podcasts from fivethirtyeight.com about this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/ The short version: Everyone agrees that gerrymandering is wrong and bad, but it's not 100% clear what the "right" result is. Is the right result proportional representation? Is the right result having more competitive districts? And what about minority influence? One thing they brought up which used to make the whole thing more complicated is that some civil rights laws also make requirements (or used to make requirements anyway) about the makeup of districts: namely, that if you could, you had to make a district which gave Blacks a significant influence in at least one district. But doing that requires "packing", which is one of the pair of techniques (along with "cracking") used in a partisan gerrymander. Lots of states have recently implemented a variety of responses to gerrymandering; in a few years it should be clear which approach(es) work best.
steponlego 4y ago
I live in a permanently Democrat state and we've got the worst Gerrymandering I've ever seen, anyhere.
- Wistar 4y ago
  “The documents Stephanie released eventually showed that her father intentionally gerrymandered North Carolina by manipulating voting districts to benefit his political party and disenfranchise the other, and that he advised the Trump Administration to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census to help discriminate against people of color for redistricting purposes.” https://ncpolicywatch.com/2019/12/20/the-gerrymanderers-daughter/ https://ncpolicywatch.com/2019/12/20/the-gerrymanderers-daug...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kristopolous 4y ago
  Can you be more specific?
  - steponlego 4y ago
    Gerrymandering seems to be thought of as something Republicans do.
    - kristopolous 4y ago
      And the name of the state is ....
      - blix 4y ago
        Illinois is known for extremely gerrymandered pro-democrat districts, that also seem designed to minimize minority impact within the party. They've cleaned up some of the shapes so it's less obvious recently.
        4y ago
trollian 4y ago
Who decided to call it Ugly Gerry and not Sans Democracy?
- ahoya 4y ago
  Sans Sherrif
- adrianmonk 4y ago
  Hellvotica. Garamondering. Lucida Election.
- gerry_shaw 4y ago
  That is a great question!
xwdv 4y ago
Is there any worse gerrymander than the Hudson Yards of NYC that ROBBED the poor to fund the new construction?
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Wow, I didn't know about that until I read your comment so googled for more info. That's really just disgusting. More details: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-12/the-visa-program-that-helped-pay-for-hudson-yards https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-12/the-visa-...
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Great submission. I was just thinking the other day "you know what needs to be highly politicised and discussed on HN? Fonts!".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
every 4y ago
When one finds themselves holding the short end of the demographic stick, it is time for some creative thinking...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
yongjik 4y ago
IMHO, an important consequence of gerrymandering is that it makes districts less competitive. Instead of a district where neither party has clear grip (so the winning candidate needs a broader appeal), we have one which is either clearly R or clearly D. Now a candidate no longer has to care about the other team, because once your own party approves your candidacy, you are as good as elected. So party loyalty is what matters. The result is a funnel to select fanatics over moderates, from both sides.
- msrenee 4y ago
  I don't think that's an unexpected consequence. That's the intention. Rope off the folks who won't vote for your party into one district and you get to win the rest of the districts. Or run the lines so that your opposition's support is broken up and sprinkled harmlessly amongst your supporters so that their votes are swallowed up by your supporters' votes. Then you've got no reason to actually work to improve anyone's lives and can spend your time figuring out how to leverage your position to make as much money as possible. The Wikipedia article has a good graphic that helps visualize the strategy. For bonus points, devise ways to make it more difficult for the demographics that are likely to vote for your opponent to get to the polls.
- junofan 4y ago
  Suggest you get involved with local politics. That’s not how it works. Otherwise nearly every gerrymandered seat would be occupied by an extremist.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Exactly, all these one party districts, and states, are not great for democracies. Basically, you get institutionalized corruption, nepotism, inefficiencies, etc. Doesn't matter if it's red or blue. It's bad either way. Swapping out parties once in a while is a good way to shake things up and break that pattern.
classified 4y ago
If only we could make gerrymandering illegal.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  It's hard to make it illegal, because under the current system someone needs to draw the lines somewhere, and as long as they can reason why those lines are in those places, it's hard to prove malice. Attempts to negate gerrymandering typically focus on making sure that those deciding the lines are as unbiased as possible, usually with cross-party committees drawing the lines instead of elected officials. The best option though is to remove the need to draw the lines at all.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  In theory a third party could spring up with the singular goal of fixing democracy by doing away with gerrymandering, instituting proportional representation, and removing overreaching executive powers and probably do well enough to get some movement towards those ends from the other parties if nothing else. They could all promise to resign and hold new elections once their goals are met and to not vote on anything else. Throw federally legalized pot in there if they really want to clinch support.
  - GLGirty 4y ago
    Lawrence Lessig attempted this, raising over $1M dollars with a kickstarter campaign. So successful that only polysci nerds remember. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harvard-professor-larry-lessig-running-president/story?id=33568066 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harvard-professor-larry-less...
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      Lessig was going to step down and put his Vice President in power, who would explicitly be a Democrat. That's not going to get broad appeal even if the whole effort was marketed correctly. And I'm not talking about just president, but congress as well. Get as many people as possible into as many offices as possible with this goal.
pavlov 4y ago
A, N, M, R, U look particularly egregious. Looking at M, it seems like the districts don't even have to be a single physically connected area because there are speckles floating above the main shape. "First past the post" is a terrible way to conduct an election. This kind of map-drawing games wouldn't matter nearly as much if many members were elected from each district as they'd have to be much larger and could more obviously follow existing state and city boundaries.
- Yizahi 4y ago
  Yes, exactly. It seems to me that any first past the post system is an accidental democracy (at best). Technically, if every voting district has voted exactly 51:49%, then every single vote of the 49% group will be void, ignored. Winner takes all. Last elections in the USA shoved discrepancy of up to 3 million votes if I remember correctly, meaning majority vote number vs. actual number. And that number can go up to almost half of the population in the most absurd scenario. But even 10-20 million discrepancy, which is much more likely, can possibly cause some huge problems and protests.
  - ant6n 4y ago
    > And that number can go up to almost half of the population in the most absurd scenario. It can get worse. If there are N parrties, the winner could take all seats with a vote percentage of 1/N+epsilon. Or could take the majority with 1/(2N)+epsilon. For example a party could win the majority of seats with 10%+epsilon of the votes in a five party system. While another party could have a minority with 60%-epsilon.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    I wonder if there could be a federal law that requires all districts in all national or state-wide elections to be large enough to send at least ten representatives, leaving it up to the states to choose their preferred mechanism for how voters will select those ten from a longer list.
    - charlieyu1 4y ago
blululu 4y ago
Squiggly lines do not necessarily imply a gerrymander. California is unfairly on this list even though it’s districts are drawn by and independent bipartisan commission that attempts (generally successfully) to give an even balance to both political parties as well as different ethnic groups.
- LocalH 4y ago
  "both political parties" That's a big part of the problem right there. We've shoehorned US politics into two silos that constantly steal all the feed from the much smaller independent silos.
  - blululu 4y ago
    Not necessarily. It would take a pretty tremendous gerrymander to give the Greens (as an example) a seat in the state legislature. At the point where they held a meaningful percent of the vote we could easily incorporate their voters into this framework. The simple truth is most people support one of the two main parties (independents are about 1/3 of voters but these are generally aligned between the two major parties than any alternative). You could take issue with the legislature being allowed to localities instead of parties. The scheme used by the European parliament is nice for representing more fringe political orientations but it neglects the immediate material interests of different regions. Given that most of what the state legislature does is allocate resources to different localities, the ideological issues are probably secondary to the basic questions like who gets water, or funding for roads.
- tokai 4y ago
  >to give an even balance to both political parties Hows that a positive?
  - blululu 4y ago
    I don't think that I am understanding the objection. The idea is that the legislature should roughly match the popular vote. Having a legislature that proportionately represents the demographics and opinions of the populace is essential for a meaningful democracy what is the problem?
LocalH 4y ago
The whole system is utterly broken. It benefits a few at the top, while heavily disenfranchising the 99%. It's literally a race to the bottom, chasing a "free market" that will never truly exist, and would cause immense damage to the world (even the highly regulated and captured "free market" we claim exists nowadays is accelerating our collective demise). "Everything not forbidden is compulsory."
dancemethis 4y ago
It's fitting, since the word itself is also very, very ugly. It _feels_ like a word for a 50-year-old-something guy walking in the street letting his arms bounce wildly. It's as ugly as shenanigans, flamboyant, gentrification, astroturfing, tomboy and such.
- layer8 4y ago
  Jerrymeandering?
worik 4y ago
Perfect mix of geek and politics It is now my system font I promise

327 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

I dislike the focus on district shapes in gerrymandering discussions. The thing that matters is how severely the districting process subverts the will of the electorate, and that can be done with squares instead of squiggles.

shicholas 4y ago

Hilarious and sad. Makes me wonder, is there a fairer, algorithmic way to carve up a geographical area into election districts so we can apply the same solution to every state?

liorben-david 4y ago
Perhaps every district should be convex?
- ninkendo 4y ago
  I don’t think you can tile convex shapes without leaving gaps.
  - darzu 4y ago
    sure you can, but you might not want to go that small. (simple proof is to turn everything into triangles.)
  - jxf 4y ago
    Sure you can. For example, regular triangles, squares, and hexagons can all tile the plane, and they're all convex. There are an infinite number of sets of convex shapes which tile the plane.
    - irishsultan 4y ago
      Unless state boundaries suddenly become convex it's definitely impossible. Ignoring state boundaries you have the issue that you need approximately equal numbers of population. It's possible that you can still tile the plane with convex shapes, but I'm not quite sure how to approach a proof (or disproof).
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  That sounds overly restrictive (not because it is impossible, though). Maybe we can require the area of the convex hull to be at most xx% larger than the original area. But that will be hard to enforce when a shoreline is involved.
roenxi 4y ago
First you need to define the word 'fair'. Noting that you have to really define the word, and not just pick a simple interpretation that also happens to favour one party. Note that the US doesn't automatically do things based on a 51% majority (which, honestly, they picked a sensible policy - really 60%+ should be the norm for political action). So "this favours the group with the 51% majority!" isn't an argument of fairness.
- AgentOrange1234 4y ago
  Requiring 60%+ just means unfairly favoring the status quo over the will of the majority? :)
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    It's not really about favoring anything, but about preventing the degenerate case of democracy - a tyranny of the majority. It's the reason a president can veto congress, a judge can 'veto' a law both congress and the president agreed upon, or why Rhode Island has just as much influence as California in the Senate. "Fairness" being seen as the same as to majority > all would just result in what we've seen happen with our democracy experiments in places like the Mideast. The majority group just ends up using democracy as a cudgel against minority groups. Those minority groups of course don't just stand idly by and next thing you know the entire system is in meltdown and beelining right towards the next iron fist.
    - arrow7000 4y ago
      You're right. Far better to have a tyranny of the minority instead.
      - somenameforme 4y ago
        Minority groups cannot pass laws by themselves. Their one and only "power" is to prevent the majority from being able to arbitrarily impose their will on everybody else. Of course the other side of this coin is that a minority group can prevent "positive" change from being enacted by a thin majority. But in general this cost pales in comparison to the alternative system where by merit of having a simple majority, a majority group can impose their every whim and desire on the every minority group with absolutely no restraint. If you can solve both problems in some way, do feel free to share - and not only here. You'd have solved a core problem of political science!
assbuttbuttass 4y ago
I saw a paper on this a while back https://www.math.cmu.edu/CNA/summer_institute/2018/projects/gerrymandering.pdf https://www.math.cmu.edu/CNA/summer_institute/2018/projects/...
areoform 4y ago
Yes! There has been a lot of scholarship on the topic, https://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html https://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html https://archive.siam.org/news/news.php?id=1237 https://archive.siam.org/news/news.php?id=1237 https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/11/fairmandering-draws-fair-districts-using-data-science https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/11/fairmandering-draws... http://autoredistrict.org/ http://autoredistrict.org/
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  I've seen a study that a simple grid-based subdivision design that allocates proportionally equal parcels to each electoral division would be unfair... to Republicans. They would lose most elections horribly, so proposed legislation banning Gerrymandering gets shot down every time by them, on the grounds of unfairness.
  - pohl 4y ago
    I’d say that politicians — who really only truly represent the richest 1% of citizens — losing is perfectly fair. If they want to play to win, they should adopt policies with a broad enough appeal to win the hearts and minds of more voters.
  - webnrrd2k 4y ago
    Just a wierd thought - what if the grid system was done such that one party chooses a square, then the other, alternating? First choice is by coin toss. Maybe the area is required to be contiguous. Maybe not.
    - AgentOrange1234 4y ago
      How would a party choose a square? They’re just trying to draw the squares to include favorable proportions of voters. If the squares are fixed, there is no choice?
      - webnrrd2k 4y ago
defrost 4y ago
Subject to someone always being unhappy, sure; see: Optimization Approaches to Political Redistricting Problems. There are several commercial GIS packages for this and a wealth of papers on the subject. The great issue, in the US, as I understand it, is that for some entirely batshit devoid of rational reason ruling political parties oversee new districts on a semi regular basis. This fosters a culture of redistricting for personal party gain and ratcheting inequalities that follow. Saner countries involve apolitical blind consultants for initials district proposals and have party nased challenges follow "I cut, you choose" type patterns to resolve conflict.
- gpt5 4y ago
  The “I cut, you choose” sounds optimal from a game theoretic perspective and avoid all the complex algorithms that are proposed in the links of other replies here
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    Sorry, choose what exactly? (in the context of districts) I'd argue for a "simpler" method: no district should be non-contiguous and it should be "round" (no weirdly shaped or long districts). Something like: area of the circle that fully encompasses the district cannot be more than 30% of the whole district area. (With some exceptions for coastal areas)
    - gpt5 4y ago
      Essentially - the opposition has the veto power
lozenge 4y ago
The entire idea of a geographical area selecting just one person to represent their views in a legislature is outdated and undemocratic. It tends to a two party system which inherently can't represent people's views accurately. In the US you see people talk about white and black districts as if all white people think the same. A proportional system means everyone's views are represented in the legislature and at that point compromises can be brokered.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  > The entire idea of a geographical area selecting just one person to represent their views in a legislature is outdated and undemocratic. I don't think that alone makes it undemocratic. Many systems implementing proportional representation elect a single person per geographic area but also create an overall balance based on the proportional vote. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_seat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_seat for instance.
quicklime 4y ago
I feel like a fairer way to do this would be through proportional representation. Most issues that voters care about are not local issues, so why do need a system to carve up representation along geographical boundaries? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
- emodendroket 4y ago
  While I do think the current system has gone way too far in the other direction, the concern I'd see here is that for issues that _are_ of largely local concern there's no real voice.
- polski-g 4y ago
  > Most issues that voters care about are not local issues Do you have an data to support this claim?
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Indeed, most political science supports the opposite conclusion. Almost all politics is local.
    - bobkazamakis 4y ago
      politics is WAN when nuance is harder to find
    - jjav 4y ago
      > Indeed, most political science supports the opposite conclusion. Almost all politics is local. Interesting. I'd say all the very toxic politics is non-local. The local stuff might be more, but it's mostly mundane. Which makes sense. My city and county representatives can't get away with passing something wildly unpopular that >> 50% of local people hate. While it's far from perfect, there is a reasonable amount of accountability with local politicians. Federal-level politicians though, are so far removed from the people they purportedly represent and their election is so heavily gerrymandered that they are untouchable. They can get away with serving only special interests and passing laws which most people hate.
retrac 4y ago
We don't have much gerrymandering in my jurisdiction; boundaries are chosen by an nonpartisan committee. But in theory the legislatures can override it. Sometimes part of the proposed boundary changes do seem illogical. For example, a town closely linked to a nearby city, but districted with the neighbouring rural area, that it has little in common with. Those situations are most likely to result in tweaking the boundaries. (Which sometimes leads to accusations of gerrymandering. That's how it starts, after all!) It's very hard to quantify that sort of thing algorithmically, like what region a town feels it is part of. And I do think it is important to take into account; part of the whole reason for districts, is for local character to be considered and reflected in the democracy.
emodendroket 4y ago
Sure but most of the energy goes into algorithms to achieve the most unfair results possible instead.
deleted 4y ago
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elihu 4y ago
Probably the best way is to not have the districts in the first place. If a state has five representatives, run a single state-wide election with five winners, using some variant of proportional representation. Even better: modify the fundamental nature of the House of Representatives such that a representative's voting power is proportional to the share of the vote they got. Both of those are pretty major reforms, so absent those probably the best thing is to make sure the redistricting process is not controlled by a single party, and maybe imposing some restrictions on how complex the shapes can be.
- pacificmint 4y ago
  > modify the fundamental nature of the House of Representatives such that a representative's voting power is proportional to the share of the vote they got. Germany does that. They have districts, which get to send the winner in each district to parliament. But these only account for a part of the total seats available. The others are filled up from a party list in such a way that the proportions are equal to the proportions of the votes. That way you get the best of both worlds, you have representatives that have a connection to each district, but you still have the distribution in parliament that represent the actual distribution of the votes.
  - Aaron2222 4y ago
    We do the same here in New Zealand. It's called MMP (Mixed Member Proportional). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
  - underyx 4y ago
    Hungary does this too, and the party list seats are filled in a way that increases the influence of smaller parties. The first seat goes to the party with the most votes, but once that seat's assigned, the winning party's vote total is cut to 1/2. Then the next seat is assigned to whoever has the most votes afterwards, and the winner's total is cut to 1/2 if it's their first time winning, or 1/3 if it's their second time winning. And so on.
kristopolous 4y ago
Some constitutional clause prohibiting representatives to rewrite the rules of their own impending elections in bullshit ways sounds like a pretty big oversight. I'm no constitutional scholar though - maybe such a thing was debated
Dapperdork 4y ago
A rule I'd propose for this would be: For every administrative region within a state (county, parish, city, village, borough, ward, etc.), a proposed congressional district must meet one of the following criteria: 1. The congressional district is completely contained within that region. 2. The congressional district completely contains that region. or 3. The congressional district contains no part of that region.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  Unless all the regions are both simply nested instead of partially overlapping and extremely conveniently sized with regard to population, this will at a minimum pretty consistently violate the Constitutional “one man, one vote” case law, and may often also be intractable.
jonp888 4y ago
In most countries you just hire some officials as part of an independent agency and tell them to create reasonable districts based on geographic and social groupings, and it works fine. I'm not sure if the problem is that the polticians are afraid of giving up the power to control the districts, or if the extremely adversarial nature of American politics means that Americans mistrust their goverment and their fellow citizens so much they don't believe that the possibility of that government making non-partisan decisions even exists.
- YPPH 4y ago
  In Australia Gerrymandering isn't even part of political discourse. An independent committee composed of the Electoral Commissioner, the state or territory Surveyor-General and the state or territory Auditor-General make the decisions. They may invite submissions from the public and political parties but they do not pander to politicians. The boundaries also generally make sense.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  > In most countries... How do you calculate that? (not joking: i don't know where one looks for such data)
  - jonp888 4y ago
    Well, yes, I don't know, I'm only going off never having heard of gerrymandering being a major problem in any other country. Plus that in general America seems to involve politics in decisions which are more usually left to officials to do in an, at least theoretically, non-partisan way. I don't know of any other country in which judges are elected by popular vote, or Ambassadors are appointed and approved by politicians instead of being professional government officials(this one I am pretty sure is unique).
    - jjtheblunt 4y ago
      it's easy to find it elsewhere (i.e., American politicians aren't the only ones) The second link below is "fun": seems gerrymandering in France correlates to the French revolution. https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2021/10/21/the-tories-are-gerrymandering-democracy-to-turn-england-blue/ https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2021/10/21/the-tories-a... https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/14/what-french-revolution-teaches-us-about-dangers-gerrymandering/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/14/what-frenc...
curiousgibbon 4y ago
This is an active area of research for sure. One idea is basically to come up with a few rules for what the districts must look like (as unions of precincts) and use Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from a probability distribution on the possible districting plans. Several court cases have featured expert evidence from math researchers asked to quantify how crazy the districting is using this methodology (ish). Wesley Pegden's expert witness report in one such case is readily findable, for example. One of the main difficulties is that we don't have much rigorous theory telling us how long to run the Markov chains.
ouid 4y ago
Not even a little bit. The reasonable thing to do would be to toss out the old system and have everyone cast a ballot for a representative and weight congressional seats by how many votes you receive, with some kind of thresholding system to keep from having to rebuild the capitol all the time. IE representatives below the threshold can delegate or amalgamate their votes.
Joeri 4y ago
Yes, when gerrymandering was challenged in 2019 a bunch of mathematicians filed an amicus brief with a mathematical fairness test. Their work is here: https://mggg.org/ https://mggg.org/ Other tests and models have also been proposed in the challenges to gerrymandering. The supreme court just had to pick one. But what the court ruled in 2019, along strict partisan lines, is this: The Court ruled that while partisan gerrymandering may be "incompatible with democratic principles", the federal courts cannot review such allegations, as they present nonjusticiable political questions outside the remit of these courts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rucho_v._Common_Cause https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rucho_v._Common_Cause So just like how the supreme court ruled in citizens united that it wouldn’t put any limits on money in politics, it ruled in this case that it wouldn’t prevent politicians from redistricting in their favor. The supreme court is imho part of the problem of American politics, not part of the solution.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Translation: get the "wrong" unlimited money and the "wrong" party gerrymandering and they might get off their behinds and change their opinions Now as for the SC being part of the problem, well, maybe it's an issue of assignments and term limits, but it is not as simple as not having one
- mannerheim 4y ago
  The correct legal decisions were made in both cases. In Rucho, > Roberts made clear that partisan gerrymandering can be distasteful and unjust, but that states and Congress have the ability to pass laws to curb excessive partisan gerrymandering. In other words, it's up to the legislatures to ban gerrymandering first before SCOTUS can rule on it. As for Citizens United, the law granted the FEC to pick and choose who was allowed to exercise political speech: > The Chief Justice wrote separately to explain why the Court went as far as it did. Essentially, Roberts explained what I’ve written in this article: that there was no rhyme or reason anymore to which entities were allowed to influence elections and which weren’t. According to the government, Michael Moore can but Citizens United couldn’t. The New York Times (a corporation) can but other corporations couldn’t. There were so many holes and exceptions to the law organizations had been essentially reduced to asking the government for permission to criticize it, and that is contrary to the essential purpose of the First Amendment. No more narrow exceptions given to one group but not another, the whole thing must go. https://www.cato.org/commentary/michael-moore-trumpland-might-have-been-illegal-citizens-united-its-all-incredibly https://www.cato.org/commentary/michael-moore-trumpland-migh... They even went as far as to claim the authority to ban books: > A close reading of the transcript, however, reveals that General Kagan did not change the government’s answer. She suggests that someone who had their book banned by the FEC would have a “quite good as-applied challenge,” and suggests (wrongly, it turns out) that the FEC has never pursued books in any enforcement issue. > This is not the same, however, as saying flatly that under no circumstances does the government have the authority, under the Constitution and the First Amendment, to ban books for political content. Instead, Kagan asserts only that the statute in question (203) does not currently cover books, while conceding that another (441b) does cover books — but she promises they won’t use it to go after books. Promise, pinky-swear! (yes, that Kagan as well in case you were wondering) https://www.ifs.org/blog/citizens-united-its-all-about-the-book-banning/ https://www.ifs.org/blog/citizens-united-its-all-about-the-b...
TheBrokenRail 4y ago
Not a perfect solution, but Michigan created a bipartisan commission to redraw districts in 2020. (Well Michigan didn't create it, voters did in a proposal during the 2018 election.) https://www.michigan.gov/micrc https://www.michigan.gov/micrc
tejtm 4y ago
yes. and we need not even reach for the mathematical perfection readily available. Growing up a member of large semi feral child population there was one simple rule that kept the peace. "DIVIDER GETS LAST CHOICE."
edbaskerville 4y ago
Lots of good responses to this question. The most plausible solution being pushed right now is the one advocated by Lee Drutman and Fix Our House, proportional representation via large multi-member districts: https://www.fixourhouse.org/ https://www.fixourhouse.org/ It's more plausible than others because it doesn't require amending the U.S. Constitution. I'm not convinced you couldn't still gerrymander a bit to tilt this system one way or the other, but it's way more robust than what we have now. My ideal system has the same basic design, a combination of local and proportional representation, and would look like this: (1) Redistrict algorithmically using a simple algorithm based on population density alone, minimizing a relatively easy-to-understand objective function (e.g., average distance of people to other people in their district). The goal of this algorithm is not to be "best" or "fairest" in any sense, but to be robust to attacks like John Roberts's frightening line about "sociological gobbledygook." Once you have subjective measures of fairness, you open things up to political maneuvering (and accusations thereof). (2) Assign multiple members of Congress to each district. An election for a district involves picking n candidates via instant runoff voting. (3) Members don't get 1 vote. They get a vote proportional to the fraction of people that voted for them in the election. That way, if you have a 4-member district, with the top 4 vote-getters being a Democrat with 45% of the last-round vote, a Republican with 43%, a Libertarian with 7%, and a Green with 5%, they each get 0.45, 0.43, 0.07, and 0.05 of a vote, respectively. (4) Do this for the Senate too, ha ha ha. Senate still serves a purpose in this fantasy: it's a longer-time average of public opinion with less time spent running for re-election.
ajuc 4y ago
Proportional voting system makes gerrymandering (almost completely) pointless. The "almost" is there only because there's probably some threshold below which votes are wasted - and the wasted votes need to be reassigned to the other candidates somehow, which makes it not exactly proportional. But in practice it's not a big enough incentive to gerrymander. The problem with democracy is that any bugs in the process are how people who can fix them are elected, so there's negative incentive to fix them and positive incentive to abuse them even more. I'm of the opinion that a well-functioning democracy needs revolution every century to fix the accumulated trash.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> is there a fairer, algorithmic way to carve up a geographical area into election districts so we can apply the same solution to every state? I would argue to throw out the constraint that each district must contain the same number of people. There is no reason for that other than the fact that "one man, one vote" sounds good when you hear it. It makes just as much sense as applying the same constraint to senators. Representatives are supposed to represent a common interest group, not Democracy In The Abstract. If two people are a part of the same community with the same interests, why wouldn't they share a representative? The right approach is to identify natural districts first and then not care whether they're the same size.
gwd 4y ago
There's a really good series of podcasts from fivethirtyeight.com about this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/ The short version: Everyone agrees that gerrymandering is wrong and bad, but it's not 100% clear what the "right" result is. Is the right result proportional representation? Is the right result having more competitive districts? And what about minority influence? One thing they brought up which used to make the whole thing more complicated is that some civil rights laws also make requirements (or used to make requirements anyway) about the makeup of districts: namely, that if you could, you had to make a district which gave Blacks a significant influence in at least one district. But doing that requires "packing", which is one of the pair of techniques (along with "cracking") used in a partisan gerrymander. Lots of states have recently implemented a variety of responses to gerrymandering; in a few years it should be clear which approach(es) work best.

steponlego 4y ago

I live in a permanently Democrat state and we've got the worst Gerrymandering I've ever seen, anyhere.

Wistar 4y ago
“The documents Stephanie released eventually showed that her father intentionally gerrymandered North Carolina by manipulating voting districts to benefit his political party and disenfranchise the other, and that he advised the Trump Administration to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census to help discriminate against people of color for redistricting purposes.” https://ncpolicywatch.com/2019/12/20/the-gerrymanderers-daughter/ https://ncpolicywatch.com/2019/12/20/the-gerrymanderers-daug...
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kristopolous 4y ago
Can you be more specific?
- steponlego 4y ago
  Gerrymandering seems to be thought of as something Republicans do.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    And the name of the state is ....
    - blix 4y ago
      Illinois is known for extremely gerrymandered pro-democrat districts, that also seem designed to minimize minority impact within the party. They've cleaned up some of the shapes so it's less obvious recently.
      - 4y ago

trollian 4y ago

Who decided to call it Ugly Gerry and not Sans Democracy?

ahoya 4y ago
Sans Sherrif
adrianmonk 4y ago
Hellvotica. Garamondering. Lucida Election.
gerry_shaw 4y ago
That is a great question!

xwdv 4y ago

Is there any worse gerrymander than the Hudson Yards of NYC that ROBBED the poor to fund the new construction?

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Wow, I didn't know about that until I read your comment so googled for more info. That's really just disgusting. More details: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-12/the-visa-program-that-helped-pay-for-hudson-yards https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-12/the-visa-...

LAC-Tech 4y ago

Great submission. I was just thinking the other day "you know what needs to be highly politicised and discussed on HN? Fonts!".

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

every 4y ago

When one finds themselves holding the short end of the demographic stick, it is time for some creative thinking...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

yongjik 4y ago

IMHO, an important consequence of gerrymandering is that it makes districts less competitive. Instead of a district where neither party has clear grip (so the winning candidate needs a broader appeal), we have one which is either clearly R or clearly D. Now a candidate no longer has to care about the other team, because once your own party approves your candidacy, you are as good as elected. So party loyalty is what matters. The result is a funnel to select fanatics over moderates, from both sides.

msrenee 4y ago
I don't think that's an unexpected consequence. That's the intention. Rope off the folks who won't vote for your party into one district and you get to win the rest of the districts. Or run the lines so that your opposition's support is broken up and sprinkled harmlessly amongst your supporters so that their votes are swallowed up by your supporters' votes. Then you've got no reason to actually work to improve anyone's lives and can spend your time figuring out how to leverage your position to make as much money as possible. The Wikipedia article has a good graphic that helps visualize the strategy. For bonus points, devise ways to make it more difficult for the demographics that are likely to vote for your opponent to get to the polls.
junofan 4y ago
Suggest you get involved with local politics. That’s not how it works. Otherwise nearly every gerrymandered seat would be occupied by an extremist.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Exactly, all these one party districts, and states, are not great for democracies. Basically, you get institutionalized corruption, nepotism, inefficiencies, etc. Doesn't matter if it's red or blue. It's bad either way. Swapping out parties once in a while is a good way to shake things up and break that pattern.

classified 4y ago

If only we could make gerrymandering illegal.

danpalmer 4y ago
It's hard to make it illegal, because under the current system someone needs to draw the lines somewhere, and as long as they can reason why those lines are in those places, it's hard to prove malice. Attempts to negate gerrymandering typically focus on making sure that those deciding the lines are as unbiased as possible, usually with cross-party committees drawing the lines instead of elected officials. The best option though is to remove the need to draw the lines at all.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
In theory a third party could spring up with the singular goal of fixing democracy by doing away with gerrymandering, instituting proportional representation, and removing overreaching executive powers and probably do well enough to get some movement towards those ends from the other parties if nothing else. They could all promise to resign and hold new elections once their goals are met and to not vote on anything else. Throw federally legalized pot in there if they really want to clinch support.
- GLGirty 4y ago
  Lawrence Lessig attempted this, raising over $1M dollars with a kickstarter campaign. So successful that only polysci nerds remember. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harvard-professor-larry-lessig-running-president/story?id=33568066 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harvard-professor-larry-less...
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Lessig was going to step down and put his Vice President in power, who would explicitly be a Democrat. That's not going to get broad appeal even if the whole effort was marketed correctly. And I'm not talking about just president, but congress as well. Get as many people as possible into as many offices as possible with this goal.

pavlov 4y ago

A, N, M, R, U look particularly egregious. Looking at M, it seems like the districts don't even have to be a single physically connected area because there are speckles floating above the main shape. "First past the post" is a terrible way to conduct an election. This kind of map-drawing games wouldn't matter nearly as much if many members were elected from each district as they'd have to be much larger and could more obviously follow existing state and city boundaries.

Yizahi 4y ago
Yes, exactly. It seems to me that any first past the post system is an accidental democracy (at best). Technically, if every voting district has voted exactly 51:49%, then every single vote of the 49% group will be void, ignored. Winner takes all. Last elections in the USA shoved discrepancy of up to 3 million votes if I remember correctly, meaning majority vote number vs. actual number. And that number can go up to almost half of the population in the most absurd scenario. But even 10-20 million discrepancy, which is much more likely, can possibly cause some huge problems and protests.
- ant6n 4y ago
  > And that number can go up to almost half of the population in the most absurd scenario. It can get worse. If there are N parrties, the winner could take all seats with a vote percentage of 1/N+epsilon. Or could take the majority with 1/(2N)+epsilon. For example a party could win the majority of seats with 10%+epsilon of the votes in a five party system. While another party could have a minority with 60%-epsilon.
- pavlov 4y ago
  I wonder if there could be a federal law that requires all districts in all national or state-wide elections to be large enough to send at least ten representatives, leaving it up to the states to choose their preferred mechanism for how voters will select those ten from a longer list.
  - charlieyu1 4y ago

blululu 4y ago

Squiggly lines do not necessarily imply a gerrymander. California is unfairly on this list even though it’s districts are drawn by and independent bipartisan commission that attempts (generally successfully) to give an even balance to both political parties as well as different ethnic groups.

LocalH 4y ago
"both political parties" That's a big part of the problem right there. We've shoehorned US politics into two silos that constantly steal all the feed from the much smaller independent silos.
- blululu 4y ago
  Not necessarily. It would take a pretty tremendous gerrymander to give the Greens (as an example) a seat in the state legislature. At the point where they held a meaningful percent of the vote we could easily incorporate their voters into this framework. The simple truth is most people support one of the two main parties (independents are about 1/3 of voters but these are generally aligned between the two major parties than any alternative). You could take issue with the legislature being allowed to localities instead of parties. The scheme used by the European parliament is nice for representing more fringe political orientations but it neglects the immediate material interests of different regions. Given that most of what the state legislature does is allocate resources to different localities, the ideological issues are probably secondary to the basic questions like who gets water, or funding for roads.
tokai 4y ago
>to give an even balance to both political parties Hows that a positive?
- blululu 4y ago
  I don't think that I am understanding the objection. The idea is that the legislature should roughly match the popular vote. Having a legislature that proportionately represents the demographics and opinions of the populace is essential for a meaningful democracy what is the problem?

LocalH 4y ago

The whole system is utterly broken. It benefits a few at the top, while heavily disenfranchising the 99%. It's literally a race to the bottom, chasing a "free market" that will never truly exist, and would cause immense damage to the world (even the highly regulated and captured "free market" we claim exists nowadays is accelerating our collective demise). "Everything not forbidden is compulsory."

dancemethis 4y ago

It's fitting, since the word itself is also very, very ugly. It _feels_ like a word for a 50-year-old-something guy walking in the street letting his arms bounce wildly. It's as ugly as shenanigans, flamboyant, gentrification, astroturfing, tomboy and such.

layer8 4y ago
Jerrymeandering?

worik 4y ago

Perfect mix of geek and politics It is now my system font I promise