It's interesting to think about how difficult it is to define "fair" with the current system. If a state's population is 60/40 and there are ten districts, do you want them each to be representative at 60/40, and thus 10-0? Or do you want six districts one way and four the other way? In other words, there's a real tension between "competitive districts" and "representative outcomes".
Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
71–80 of 83 posts
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#72There has to be a better way of representing a population than our current system. There is just no way you can represent real, complex, demographics in a fair and proportional way -- there are an unlimited number of ways to categorize people, and by grouping them one way you will often exclude grouping them in other, and perhaps not less significant ways. What you end up with is a very skewed representation of a pop…
This is a strong argument for a broken status quo. It’s essentially dismissing many possible, tangible, in other places implemented approaches to improve representation, by essentially declaring that fixing the system cannot be done, or must first involve some completely new solution.
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#73I got a flawless victory in a landslide with 0 hints but the result screen is a bit confusing. There are players that used hints that are to the "right" of where it shows me. Makes me feel like those people did better than me... But actually they did worse since they needed a hint or 4. Fun little game. How do you curate the puzzle each day? Can you easily automate a bunch of puzzles then hand select them so back to…
> But actually they did worse since they needed a hint or 4.
Hmm, that is interesting, I had not thought about that. I will see if it makes more sense to reverse the axis. Might just make it more confusing though
> How do you curate the puzzle each day? Can you easily automate a bunch of puzzles then hand select them so back to back days aren't too similar? Or is it manual?
It's mostly manual, but I have some tools to quickly create map layouts and fill them with various distributions. Just to speed up testing out new levels.
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#74[flagged]
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#75It's interesting to think about how difficult it is to define "fair" with the current system. If a state's population is 60/40 and there are ten districts, do you want them each to be representative at 60/40, and thus 10-0? Or do you want six districts one way and four the other way? In other words, there's a real tension between "competitive districts" and "representative outcomes".
This is missing the forest for the trees. You'd want them represented accurately at a local level along reasonable district lines, rather than intentionally being misrepresented with district lines so tortured that the shapes they make are said to resemble a lizard. Maybe that's hard but I suspect it gets a lot easier once the bad-faith decision-makers are removed from their decision-making power. In the context you present, "competetive districts" means precisely the same thing as "representative outcomes".
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grouchy old political scientist here: 1. Due to geographic sorting smaller districts would be more intensely partisan than today, not less. A smaller land mass is going to be more deeply blue or red 2. A gigantic house would be less cacophonous and boisterous, not more so, because you'd need more hands-on party control to get anything done. It's deeply unrealistic that a huge mass of representatives are going to get…
Smaller districts, because of geographical sorting, or spatial covariance, or however you'd like to describe it, would be more homogeneous, and that is EXACTLY the point. What matters is that Representatives better reflect the opinions and beliefs of their constituents, not just the half that won the election, and that the people know their representative, and that the Representative does not need to depend on large…
I traced the two-party dynamic back to something underneath district size a while ago: how we vote. One person, one vote, actually encourages first past the post winners. Shrink the district, grow the district, doesn't matter, you're still forcing every voter into a single binary mark, and a binary mark always collapses into two stable attractors.
Consider the Olympics instead. Judges score, and 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place simply fall out of the scores, nobody had to design a tournament bracket to make that happen. Give voters that same instrument: score every candidate on desirability. For a pooled multi-seat district, take however many winners the pool needs, ranked by score. Nothing stops someone from voting like they do now, give the candidate you despise a 0 and the one you want a 100, but most people think in preference, a first, second, third choice, not a single binary mark.
The numerology of district size and pop-per-rep will always be heuristic at best. If the goal is to improve representation, we should focus on the mechanism of selecting people and elevating them into office. That's the biggest bang for the buck.
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smaller districts, because of geographical sorting, or spatial covariance, or however you'd like to describe it, would be more homogeneous, and that is EXACTLY the point. What matters is that Representatives better reflect the opinions and beliefs of their constituents, not just the half that won the election, and that the people know their representative, and that the Representative does not need to depend on large…
I traced the two-party dynamic back to something underneath district size a while ago: how we vote. One person, one vote, actually encourages first past the post winners. Shrink the district, grow the district, doesn't matter, you're still forcing every voter into a single binary mark, and a binary mark always collapses into two stable attractors. Consider the Olympics instead. Judges score, and 1st place, 2nd place,…
Because the median voter doesn't realistically have that detailed a level of knowledge on legislators/their policies. This is tough for a lot of people to believe- especially the kind of high-information voters who propose these sorts of reforms to begin with. But there's an enormous, multi-decade literature on voter ignorance. They simply don't know much about who's running or what their policies are
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I traced the two-party dynamic back to something underneath district size a while ago: how we vote. One person, one vote, actually encourages first past the post winners. Shrink the district, grow the district, doesn't matter, you're still forcing every voter into a single binary mark, and a binary mark always collapses into two stable attractors. Consider the Olympics instead. Judges score, and 1st place, 2nd place,…
Because the median voter doesn't realistically have that detailed a level of knowledge on legislators/their policies. This is tough for a lot of people to believe- especially the kind of high-information voters who propose these sorts of reforms to begin with. But there's an enormous, multi-decade literature on voter ignorance. They simply don't know much about who's running or what their policies are
But if they came from your own small town and had a reputation in that small town based on years of living there?
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the median voter doesn't realistically have that detailed a level of knowledge on legislators/their policies. This is tough for a lot of people to believe- especially the kind of high-information voters who propose these sorts of reforms to begin with. But there's an enormous, multi-decade literature on voter ignorance. They simply don't know much about who's running or what their policies are
But if they came from your own small town and had a reputation in that small town based on years of living there?
1. I grew up in a small town, and occasionally ask my parents how mayoral/city council politics is going there. (Or, I check out the latest drama on Facebook about it). My good friend's uncle was our mayor for a long time, etc. People might know personalities, but they're still not following national policy positions. Not to mention that people would be voting purely for personalities/clan/ethnic affiliations, and again not policy- we have a term for that in poly sci, personalism
2. A country of 340 million people with an elected representative from every small town would have an unrealistic number of representatives. 1 for every 5k citizens would be 68,000 reps in the House
I get that you're fetishizing hyper-localism to the exclusion of all else, but it's just a bad basis to run a modern society. This is not a realistic vision
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#80I could see this being a great activity in a high school civics class. Very creative. One rule that tripped me up is: > If two parties tie in a district, nobody wins it. This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it. But the spirit of the gerrymandering concept is conveyed well enough.
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