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Mathematicians looking to make elections in the US more representative

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Re: Mathematicians looking to make elections in the US more representative

#121

Post by catskul2 »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #17
ValG wrote: post #2

There are a ton of important issues, but, I believe that gerrymandering is a core issue in the United States because : Partisan gerrymandering allows for politicians to secure their seats - this leads to less voters being represented (allowing the politicians to become more polarized) e.g. when races are tight, politicians tend to move towards the center. [2] Partisan gerrymandering is strongly disliked by both parti…

One of my professors at UT Dallas has a book that argues that districts in fact should be partisan. It's been a few years but the logic is something like if you've got a 50-50 district, you're gonna end up with 50% of the people in the district unhappy. Where as if you intentionally designed districts to be like like 90-10 (or whatever possible), more people are happy. Not sure if I believe him, but it's interesting.…

Many argue for multi-member districts to avoid that problem.

Re: Mathematicians looking to make elections in the US more representative

#122

Post by wu-ikkyu »

orthecreedence wrote: post #7
frabbit wrote: post #3

The problem is with the idea of representative democracy at all. If the electorate is smart enough to figure out that Candidate A is _both_ correct on a range of policy matters _and_ of a trustworthy nature, then why are they not smart enough to decide directly on said policy matters? Governments should be composed solely of civil servants drawn from academia and other fields in which they need to prove their knowled…

Just like I hire a person to fix my car, or hire a person to fly the planes I sometimes travel on, we hire people to handle running the country for us. It's an abstraction of labor. I really don't want to be bothered with every little tiny decision about budget or foreign policy. That said, people in the US are so busy that they don't have any time at all to even make informed decisions on who to elect to run the cit…

>Just like I hire a person to fix my car, or hire a person to fly the planes I sometimes travel on, we hire people to handle running the country for us.

This could easily still be done with referendum voting, by allowing people to appoint SMEs as proxies for relevant issues.

>That said, people in the US are so busy that they don't have any time at all to even make informed decisions

Neither does congress, because most of their time is spent begging for money and selling legislation. So much so that they regularly pass bills that was neither authored by a congressman nor read by many of those who voted for it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read_the_Bills_Act

Re: Mathematicians looking to make elections in the US more representative

#123

Post by taejo »

ouid wrote: post #45
lacker wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the article, it says there are actually two types of gerrymandering. One is "packing" all of a voting block together, and the other is "cracking" a voting block into multiple districts so that it can't win in any of them.

and somehow, neither of these strategies are "making your own seats more secure"

A seat can be secure at 55% just as it can be at 95%. Packing and cracking both tend to yield secure seats - if nobody could confidently predict who would win the seats, how would it be gerrymandering?

Re: Mathematicians looking to make elections in the US more representative

#124

Post by tmaly »

ValG wrote: post #2

There are a ton of important issues, but, I believe that gerrymandering is a core issue in the United States because : Partisan gerrymandering allows for politicians to secure their seats - this leads to less voters being represented (allowing the politicians to become more polarized) e.g. when races are tight, politicians tend to move towards the center. [2] Partisan gerrymandering is strongly disliked by both parti…

To solve this, I think some more universal mathematical truths would have to be employed. If you have 30 different definitions of compactness, the party in power will tend to choose the definition that will benefit them the most. If however, you choose some construct in mathematics where there is only a single option, you may avoid this particular problem.

This may not be the perfect example, but something like this

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3201424/A-new...

Re: Mathematicians looking to make elections in the US more representative

#125

Post by sqeaky »

fivestar wrote: post #82
yarg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that gerrymandering is even possible is a symptom (albeit an severely exacerbating one) - not the cause - of the problems in the US electoral structure. It could be countered quite effectively by a system using larger jurisdictions each with multiple representitives.

I would say the biggest problem by far is voter education--people simply are not educated on issues. They listen to idiotic MSM sound bites and narratives and are influenced by identity politics rather than anything of substance.

I must disagree. As person with an education and half a wit it doesn't matter how I vote in Omaha Nebraska. We will always vote republican and because of gerrymandering my local reps won't change.

No amount of education can be accepted by this crowd that doesn't amount to propaganda or brainwashing.

Re: Mathematicians looking to make elections in the US more representative

#126

Post by jamesonquinn »

As others have noted, proportional representation (PR) is the best solution to gerrymandering. (Not arguing that we shouldn't also support second-best solutions like nonpartisan redistricting and court challenges to the worst gerrymanders.)

The three PR methods in common use are STV-with-multimember-districts; mixed-member proportional (MMP); and open (or, yuck, closed) list systems. All of these (except closed lists) are decent, but have downsides. STV leads to very complex ballots; MMP leads to "two classes" of representatives; open list focuses your voting power on the partisan choice, but doesn't give you much power to help set the direction of your favorite party. And all three can lead to extreme party fragmentation and thus excess "kingmaker" power for splinter parties, unless there are rules against that.

It is, however, possible to design a method without any of these downsides. Perfection is impossible, but the Pareto frontier is, and none of the above methods are on it. Here's one that is:

http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Geographic_Open_List/Delegat...

Here's an article about why it's good:

https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/make-all-votes-count-part-...

Re: Mathematicians looking to make elections in the US more representative

#127

Post by winstonewert »

gizmo686 wrote: post #15
75dvtwin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think allowing to specify what percent of your tax goes into what 'pre-canned' list of causes, would allow a way for folks to influence the politicians outside of the 'election process', and, without, full blown on-line-referendum surveys for all the issues. Clearly, the above would bias some of the decision making power away from low-income populous, however this can be addressed by some form of weighting and thre…

The problem is, I, and the typical taxpayer, is not qualified to make an informed decision about budget allocations. When I want to know where to spend my tax dollar, It is not sufficient to know how I value the causes, but rather how I value them relative to their existing budget allocations, and how useful additional money would be to them. For instance, I may value national defense and our military in the abstract…

Actually, I think that some people would specialize in providing good allocations for people to use. After all some people specialize in providing good stocks to pick, or good collections of parts to build a computer out of, or good combinations of ingredients to make a recipe.

So I think that people would have no problem finding someone who they trust who has taken the time to identify the best places to spend government money without a huge large scale marketing scheme being necessary.

Re: Mathematicians looking to make elections in the US more representative

#128

Post by uoaei »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #17
ValG wrote: post #2

There are a ton of important issues, but, I believe that gerrymandering is a core issue in the United States because : Partisan gerrymandering allows for politicians to secure their seats - this leads to less voters being represented (allowing the politicians to become more polarized) e.g. when races are tight, politicians tend to move towards the center. [2] Partisan gerrymandering is strongly disliked by both parti…

One of my professors at UT Dallas has a book that argues that districts in fact should be partisan. It's been a few years but the logic is something like if you've got a 50-50 district, you're gonna end up with 50% of the people in the district unhappy. Where as if you intentionally designed districts to be like like 90-10 (or whatever possible), more people are happy. Not sure if I believe him, but it's interesting.…

This is running on the egregious assumption that people can only choose one option to make them happy, and that there are only two options to choose from. It may be applicable now for the most part (when people worry about spoiling the vote, they will support one of the two) but in a situation where other parties have a serious chance of gaining a seat and people have multiple choices they approve of, this theory begins to break down.

Re: Mathematicians looking to make elections in the US more representative

#129

Post by TheCoelacanth »

a_imho wrote: post #68

Sortition >> Voting

I think this is a really interesting idea, and I would love to see it tried in a modern government. There are a lot of potential problems, but possibly less than those involved with voting.

Re: Mathematicians looking to make elections in the US more representative

#130

Post by ouid »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #102
ouid wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, it is making your opponent's seat more secure.

Think about it for more than half a second. Moving a Democrat into a Democratic district makes that district's Democratic seat more secure. At the same time, moving that Democrat out of your district makes your Republican seat more secure. You can't do one without the other.

Probability of victory is highly non-linear in the proportion of voters. It's so non-linear that it makes sense to treat it as a phase transition. A district is secure when the outcome is certain. There are two distinct phases where the outcome is "secure" and the border between these two phases is, because of the non-linearity, very small. That is what secure means to most people.

The specific language that the OC, and almost all journalism uses to describe the strategy is "making districts more secure". The only way to interpret that, in the context of the phase definition of security, is adding voter proportion to a district which is already secure. This is never in the interest of the party that it is happening to, so yes, it is dishonest to describe it this way.

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