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How I Teach Gerrymandering

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Re: How I Teach Gerrymandering

#61

Post by aidos »

bossrat wrote: post #58
aidos wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The leadership of the Greens are/were most closely aligned with my values – certainly at the time when the Blairites were still heading up the Labour party. So I wanted to vote Green as the party. My local Labour representative, however, is a pretty good person to have looking out for the area. He was born and raised in the estates opposite my house - to a working class immigrant family, no less. In his time represen…

your conundrum is that you have a distinctly minority opinion, but you would like to influence the outcome "more than your share"? so, instead of advocating unequal income distribution, you favor unequal outcome?

Erm, no, not in the slightest – well, I think not in the slightest – I'm going to be totally honest, I don't really understand all of your comment.

But I don't want to influence the outcome "more than my share". I'd like everyone to have an equal share of influence. More than anything I'd like the political process to be one that everyone is engaged in and ultimately moves the country in a direction that is good for everyone.

Re: How I Teach Gerrymandering

#62

Post by hibikir »

notahacker wrote: post #6
aidos wrote: post #4

I'd heard the term before but never looked into it – it was useful to have something to prompt me (partially because this article doesn't even mention what it is). It's when the government manipulates electorates to increase their chances of being re-elected. As someone in the UK this is something I've wondered about a lot over the last year. If you don't follow UK politics, we have a government that was elected with…

UK election outcomes have nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything to do with being a multi-party democracy using a FPTP electoral system, which tends to boost the representation of leading parties at the expense of smaller parties. Indeed, you'd actually need gerrymandering for such a system to have any hope of returning seats broadly in proportion to vote share. (the conspiracy theory about disenfranchiseme…

You don't have to use FPTP to distort: There's been plenty of debate in Spain, which uses the D'Hondt method. There have always been more than two healthy parties, but ultimately only two get major representation, just like in an FPTP system. And unless we are applying the system to the entire country (which is not how it works), there's still a boost to regional parties.

A decade ago we saw two parties with pretty much the same number of votes, one of Catalonian nationalists, and a typical european leftist party. But the nationalists all got their votes in the same region, gaining very healthy representation overall, while the other party got less than a 5th of the seats, because all their voters do not live in the same place.

What we have to face is that ultimately, the way people are represented is an aesthetic, values-based choice. This doesn't mean that there isn't such thing as partisan gerrymandering (because there is), but that even if we let a computer decide representation, there's still more than one algorithm that is unaware of party affiliation, and each will favor different ideologies in different situations.

Re: How I Teach Gerrymandering

#63

Post by erikpukinskis »

dheera wrote: post #17

Alternatively, by switching to popular vote, this problem, and many other problems could be avoided entirely. Above all things, is it fair that a voter in Massachusetts has exactly zero (and I mean exactly zero, not their fair 1/3.2e8 share) say over the election, while a voter in Ohio carries a lot of weight?

There's a referendum of public opinion after every election. Gore won his presidential election by about half a percent. We talked about it, but interest fizzled out.

If, in the future, that margin grows to a number that people care about, we can change the rules. The NPVIC* is probably the most direct way for that to happen.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

Re: How I Teach Gerrymandering

#64

Post by Fishkins »

LordKano wrote: post #46
alex_young wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This logic confounds me. Is there some inherent reason to disproportionately focus our national choices on the areas of the country with the fewest people (rural areas)? I've lived in both the most rural and urban parts of the US, and it's clear that the current system massively discounts the will of people in urban areas in this stated endeavor of providing some kind of rural / urban "balance". Depending on what you…

I don't see the composition of the Senate as a problem. I see it as balance. More populous states get greater representation in the House. The Senate serves to prevent more populous states from steamrolling less populous states. It's a feature, not a bug.

In my view, talking about how much representation a state deserves doesn't even make sense. People should decide elections, not some semi-arbitrary geographical boundaries. In the house, people are fairly represented. In the senate, people in smaller states are unfairly over-represented.

It's a feature like an "install our app" popup on every random mobile site is a feature. Someone thought it was a good idea and did it intentionally, but I think it's awful and was done for bad reasons.

Re: How I Teach Gerrymandering

#65

Post by thephyber »

rancur wrote: post #59
ergothus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One slight correction to your "less idealistic view": It's not just (or at all) that one party believes they are the best to represent the whole, it's that they believe the other(s) are HARMFUL. Ergo, disempowering that other voice is in everyones best interests. While people can often do "evil" things (manipulative, etc), they usually do them for "good" reasons, at least according to their internal rationalizations.…

maybe we should just set up states. half blue, half red. each get to do what they want, and everyone blue or red moves to blue or red state. We come back in 50 years, and see what's up. The blue states are spending gobs on tuition and everyone is still stupid, and the red states, I don't know someone help. I'm colorblind

The US _has_ been mostly self-sorting for decades now. It's one of the reasons politics is so polarized right now and Congress is incapable of governing without a looming emergency.

It's never as easy as just looking at the outcomes. As with any type of sociology, it's not possible to force large sets of people to do identical things for valid control+experimental groups.

Methods of taxation, tax rates, size of state government, expectations of government services, natural resources, macroeconomic conditions, talent of the population, and natural economic benefits all distinguish different states. There's really no effective way to control for the large variety of conditions across many states.

Re: How I Teach Gerrymandering

#66

Post by frenchy »

bossrat wrote: post #58
aidos wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The leadership of the Greens are/were most closely aligned with my values – certainly at the time when the Blairites were still heading up the Labour party. So I wanted to vote Green as the party. My local Labour representative, however, is a pretty good person to have looking out for the area. He was born and raised in the estates opposite my house - to a working class immigrant family, no less. In his time represen…

your conundrum is that you have a distinctly minority opinion, but you would like to influence the outcome "more than your share"? so, instead of advocating unequal income distribution, you favor unequal outcome?

Not necessarily. This is a bit of an issue now in Canada because with have 3 (or more) left-wing parties, and 1 right wing party

This has led to a lot of ABC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anything_But_Conservative) voting.

Re: How I Teach Gerrymandering

#67

Post by jandrese »

gohrt wrote: post #50
twoodfin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a great picture. For one thing, it's unnecessarily provocative (Title: "How to Steal an Election") and not-so-subtly partisan: The use of blue for the 'natural' winner and red for the 'thief' is clearly meant to echo (and comment on) contemporary U.S. politics. Yes, gerrymandering happens, and yes, it currently disproportionately benefits the GOP: Some lucky wave election timing put them in charge of more st…

Furhtermore, the unit is "precinct", not "voter", so the starting input is already subject to gerrymandering. And the chart ignores the reality that districting serves an important purpose: to give minorities (however defined) a non-zero voice in the representative body.

I thought that "make sure the black people have a vote" thing was a pretty clever way to disenfranchise them. One vote has very little power and you have sequestered most of the constituents behind that one vote, so the people with actual power (the majority of the other representatives) don't have to worry about them.

I am amazed that people still consider it a good thing. Or that they ever considered it a good thing.

Re: How I Teach Gerrymandering

#68

Post by tomaskafka »

rancur wrote: post #59
ergothus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One slight correction to your "less idealistic view": It's not just (or at all) that one party believes they are the best to represent the whole, it's that they believe the other(s) are HARMFUL. Ergo, disempowering that other voice is in everyones best interests. While people can often do "evil" things (manipulative, etc), they usually do them for "good" reasons, at least according to their internal rationalizations.…

maybe we should just set up states. half blue, half red. each get to do what they want, and everyone blue or red moves to blue or red state. We come back in 50 years, and see what's up. The blue states are spending gobs on tuition and everyone is still stupid, and the red states, I don't know someone help. I'm colorblind

No. Red/blue map is an illusion.

https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-we-just-split-up-the-United-S...

Re: How I Teach Gerrymandering

#69

Post by [deleted] »

LordKano wrote: post #28
dheera wrote: post #17

Alternatively, by switching to popular vote, this problem, and many other problems could be avoided entirely. Above all things, is it fair that a voter in Massachusetts has exactly zero (and I mean exactly zero, not their fair 1/3.2e8 share) say over the election, while a voter in Ohio carries a lot of weight?

There's a very good reason why we don't use the popular vote for Presidential elections. It's precisely because without the electoral college, small states would receive zero attention on national politics. Why would anyone spend time courting votes anywhere north of New York when there's a much bigger payoff to be had working the rest of the eastern seaboard and the west coast? To use your examples of Massachusetts…

[deleted]

Re: How I Teach Gerrymandering

#70

Post by jameshart »

kgreene2 wrote: post #14

To anyone interested in the subject, I'd strongly recommend playing the Redistricting Game [0] which takes you through many of the processes outlined in the article [0] - http://www.redistrictinggame.org/

Seconded - great example of how a game mechanic can be used to highlight how real world incentives play out.
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