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Interesting question: Isn't having laws that prohibit putting ethnic groups together in an algorithmically generated way discrimination in itself? For example,

Interesting question: Isn't having laws that prohibit putting ethnic groups together in an algorithmically generated way discrimination in itself? For example, if the algorithm generates a predominantly black district (that's algorithmically generated and thus unbiased), breaking it up because it is predominantly black is an act of discrimination.

btilly 14y ago
Isn't having laws that prohibit putting ethnic groups together in an algorithmically generated way discrimination in itself? Sorry I was unclear, it was the other way around. If you can, you have to keep ethnic groups together. So, for instance, if you can put all of Chinatown together, you have to. The political effect is kind of complicated. On the one hand it gives members of those ethnic groups a chance to win office. On the other hand it creates very safe districts. Given the way the math works, creating very safe districts for your side leads to improving the odds that the other side will win more seats than their share of the popular vote. Activists are very focused on the first effect and tend to ignore the second. Furthermore politicians encourage this because they like safe seats. But the math is inescapable - an effective electoral gerrymander is created by creating a modest number of ultra-safe seats for the other side, and many more safe but less extreme seats for your side. So all black seats that guarantee black representation in Congress leads to seats that vote 80%+ for the Democrat which in turn leads to Republicans electing more than their share of the popular vote.
- alexqgb 14y ago
  That's exactly correct. A successful gerrymander is a product of packing AND cracking. A mathematically perfect gerrymander, which optimizes both, will allow a party to hold a state with a mere 26% of the vote. I don't know know how close any state has gotten to this theoretical limit, but the fact that the practice can skew results this dramatically only underscores how toxic it really is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Packing_and_cracking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Packing_and_crac... As an aside, gerrymandering has been a personal point of obsession for at least five years now. I've got a long-running familiarity with the Wikipedia entry, and am just thrilled by how clear and comprehensive it's become within the last year. The issue may not have gone mainstream yet, but it's starting snowball, with the lopsided results from the last election accelerating progress dramatically. When gerrymandering in the House is considered in tandem with Senate filibuster rules that effectively require a supermajority to do anything, the issue of a sharply unrepresentative Congress comes into crisp focus. Put simply, our system of Government was never designed to work under minority rule. Indeed, the whole thing is predicated on straight majority rule in both the House and Senate. I'd love to see a popular campaign that restores majority rule to both chambers by refusing to elect or re-elect any representative who won't support a restoration of this basic condition, and pronto.
  - justincormack 14y ago
    Why does the US put up with gerrymandering, which barely exists in most countries?
    - mseebach 14y ago
      The same reason anyone puts up with anything: It's difficult (very costly in political capital) to change for an intangible benefit.
    - aptwebapps 14y ago
      The lazy answer is that the people who practice it also happen to be the people who make all the rules. Of course, they're supposed to be accountable to the general public, but then said public has already been gerrymandered and managed in countless other ways. A little more to the point is that each state gets to choose how to draw their Congressional districts at the time of a new census which happens every ten years. Unless a given state legislature is fairly evenly split there is a great deal of incentive for them to draw the districts in such a way as to give themselves the greatest possible advantage. If they lose control of the legislature by the time the next census rolls around, then the other party will just do the same to them. In order for a state to stop gerrymandering (not all states do it to the fullest extreme) there would need to be some groundswell of opinion that would cause a freshly elected legislature to setup some rules. It has happened in a very few states. I don't know all of them but Iowa has a system that is designed to be completely neutral in execution and Colorado has a mandate that the resulting districts must be as competitive as possible. I'm not really sure which approach I like better. Colorado's system should make elected representatives more responsive to the will of their constituents, but at the same time seems to rule out third-party candidates ever having much of a chance.
    - alexqgb 14y ago
      For the longest time, it was also a very technical issue, of issue only to wonks. The general public simply didn't understand it well enough to recognize how pernicious an effect it really had, the news media (which is resolutely pro-status quo) wasn't going to make an issue of anything that would shift the balance of power away from the establishment, and activists realized that organizing against it was a fool's errand, since it would come down to petitioning the corrupt and asking them to give up their power and get nothing in return. But as Leonard Cohen noted, there is a crack in everything - that's how the light gets in. And those cracks appeared in California. Starting with the special election that recalled Gray Davis, and installed Arnold Schwarzenegger (which put the kind of pro-reform candidate who would have never made it through the party machine into the Governors' Office) and the often-problematic-but-in-this-case-fantastic direct initiative system (which allows voters to route around obstructionist legislators) the change got through in the biggest state. The last election, which gave the GOP a huge majority in the House with a slight minority of the vote, showed people in unambiguous terms that something was very clearly wrong. And as California gets itself out from under this awful system, it'll do what it does best: drive change by demonstrating that another future is possible.

btilly 14y ago

Isn't having laws that prohibit putting ethnic groups together in an algorithmically generated way discrimination in itself? Sorry I was unclear, it was the other way around. If you can, you have to keep ethnic groups together. So, for instance, if you can put all of Chinatown together, you have to. The political effect is kind of complicated. On the one hand it gives members of those ethnic groups a chance to win office. On the other hand it creates very safe districts. Given the way the math works, creating very safe districts for your side leads to improving the odds that the other side will win more seats than their share of the popular vote. Activists are very focused on the first effect and tend to ignore the second. Furthermore politicians encourage this because they like safe seats. But the math is inescapable - an effective electoral gerrymander is created by creating a modest number of ultra-safe seats for the other side, and many more safe but less extreme seats for your side. So all black seats that guarantee black representation in Congress leads to seats that vote 80%+ for the Democrat which in turn leads to Republicans electing more than their share of the popular vote.

alexqgb 14y ago
That's exactly correct. A successful gerrymander is a product of packing AND cracking. A mathematically perfect gerrymander, which optimizes both, will allow a party to hold a state with a mere 26% of the vote. I don't know know how close any state has gotten to this theoretical limit, but the fact that the practice can skew results this dramatically only underscores how toxic it really is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Packing_and_cracking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Packing_and_crac... As an aside, gerrymandering has been a personal point of obsession for at least five years now. I've got a long-running familiarity with the Wikipedia entry, and am just thrilled by how clear and comprehensive it's become within the last year. The issue may not have gone mainstream yet, but it's starting snowball, with the lopsided results from the last election accelerating progress dramatically. When gerrymandering in the House is considered in tandem with Senate filibuster rules that effectively require a supermajority to do anything, the issue of a sharply unrepresentative Congress comes into crisp focus. Put simply, our system of Government was never designed to work under minority rule. Indeed, the whole thing is predicated on straight majority rule in both the House and Senate. I'd love to see a popular campaign that restores majority rule to both chambers by refusing to elect or re-elect any representative who won't support a restoration of this basic condition, and pronto.
- justincormack 14y ago
  Why does the US put up with gerrymandering, which barely exists in most countries?
  - mseebach 14y ago
    The same reason anyone puts up with anything: It's difficult (very costly in political capital) to change for an intangible benefit.
  - aptwebapps 14y ago
    The lazy answer is that the people who practice it also happen to be the people who make all the rules. Of course, they're supposed to be accountable to the general public, but then said public has already been gerrymandered and managed in countless other ways. A little more to the point is that each state gets to choose how to draw their Congressional districts at the time of a new census which happens every ten years. Unless a given state legislature is fairly evenly split there is a great deal of incentive for them to draw the districts in such a way as to give themselves the greatest possible advantage. If they lose control of the legislature by the time the next census rolls around, then the other party will just do the same to them. In order for a state to stop gerrymandering (not all states do it to the fullest extreme) there would need to be some groundswell of opinion that would cause a freshly elected legislature to setup some rules. It has happened in a very few states. I don't know all of them but Iowa has a system that is designed to be completely neutral in execution and Colorado has a mandate that the resulting districts must be as competitive as possible. I'm not really sure which approach I like better. Colorado's system should make elected representatives more responsive to the will of their constituents, but at the same time seems to rule out third-party candidates ever having much of a chance.
  - alexqgb 14y ago
    For the longest time, it was also a very technical issue, of issue only to wonks. The general public simply didn't understand it well enough to recognize how pernicious an effect it really had, the news media (which is resolutely pro-status quo) wasn't going to make an issue of anything that would shift the balance of power away from the establishment, and activists realized that organizing against it was a fool's errand, since it would come down to petitioning the corrupt and asking them to give up their power and get nothing in return. But as Leonard Cohen noted, there is a crack in everything - that's how the light gets in. And those cracks appeared in California. Starting with the special election that recalled Gray Davis, and installed Arnold Schwarzenegger (which put the kind of pro-reform candidate who would have never made it through the party machine into the Governors' Office) and the often-problematic-but-in-this-case-fantastic direct initiative system (which allows voters to route around obstructionist legislators) the change got through in the biggest state. The last election, which gave the GOP a huge majority in the House with a slight minority of the vote, showed people in unambiguous terms that something was very clearly wrong. And as California gets itself out from under this awful system, it'll do what it does best: drive change by demonstrating that another future is possible.