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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 solutio

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.

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.