Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

dustingmixon.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 76 posts

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#41

Post by sova »

cmac2992 wrote: post #27
sova wrote: post #16

The Supreme Court (id est The Highest Court of the Land) is currently evaluating if they can rely on an algorithm to detect Constitutionality of district shapes. You're kidding, right? As a computational scientist this is concerning to put it mildly. Trying to ensure proportionality in representation... is that the intended goal? Is this even a meaningful pursuit in a bicameral system? The Supreme Court makes rulings…

From my understanding, the Baker v Carr in 1962 decision enabled federal courts to intervene in and to decide redistricting. Back in the day redistricting was even crazier. You could just draw an arbitrary number of districts with arbitrary population sizes. That seems bad on the surface. With this system, election outcomes could potentially be entirely determined by how districts were gerrymandered. The efficiency s…

Thanks for your words and insight. Yes, proportional voting would be great! Your state gets 5 house seats? Let's have priority-voting where a voter picks choices 1-5 for representation. Jane is first choice, then Miyoko, Sofia, Leben, and Pierre. Jane may not get all the "first place" votes but she could get enough to end up in one of the five house seats our state gets.

Reading up on the 14th amendment, it does ensure that every male over 21 is able to vote (assuming they did not lose the right through crime, also a big issue today as a third of our populous is disenfranchised). It does not, however, say anything about how voting for reps is done at the state level, and I wonder if this becomes a States' matter as soon as we part from the 14th amendment. Pardon my gap-riddled knowledge of such important affairs

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#42

Post by dragontamer »

Retric wrote: post #33
dragontamer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DC is a single city and doesn't even have one representative in Congress (Okay, they nominally have one. But she's non-voting so.... that's not really useful). They're technically a US Territory and have no more power than say Puerto Rico. So once again, if you're talking about US Representatives and Voting Districts, it only makes sense to talk about well... Voting Districts. Name me one US State with 80/20 split an…

These rules are not limited to National elections. State elections are also based on redistricting. DC is part of the US and has District Elections so these rules will apply to it. https://www.dcboe.org/election_info/election_results/v3/2016... So, no you can't dodge the question. And I ask you to draw a DC map with some Republican representation. PS: AKA draw a map such that WARD EIGHT MEMBER OF THE COUNCIL is likel…

I'm not sure why you're so obsessed with Washington DC in particular. If you live there, you probably know much more about it than I do.

But my general interest is how this whole event will play out in the greater scope of the country. I don't believe any US State with more than 1 Representative has an 80/20 split.

Perhaps Washington DC really is an edge case that needs to be thought out more. But I don't think its representative of the problems of Gerrymandering that exist in multiple states right now. (In particular, what this Gill v Whitford Supreme Court case is bringing up in Wisconsin)

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#43

Post by dragontamer »

sova wrote: post #32
mathfan2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main takeaway from the article is that sometimes there is a trade-off between nice geometrical shapes and proportional district results. If a machine gave you a crazy-shaped district map because that's the only way to get "low efficiency gap", would you agree to them?

How often are districts able to be redrawn? The same crazy shaped map that is valid in 2020 may not be very good in 2025 or even 2021.

Districts are always redrawn every Census, as it has been for hundreds of years.

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#44

Post by sova »

bannus wrote: post #35
indubitable wrote: post #21

I think this indirectly hints at something much more fundamental: district based plurality does not make sense as an election system anymore. I think an eye opening example is to consider a hypothetical single state with 10 representatives. This state has a population, perfectly well distributed, of 35% democrat, 30% republican, 20% libertarian, and 15% green. And we draw our districts up with absolutely no bias what…

For an improvement on the "1 seat for every 10% of the vote you get" system you mention, take a look at the system Cambridge, MA uses for their at-large city council election [1]. Citizens cast ranked-choice ballots, and through an iterative process each of the 9 councilors are elected if they receive over 10% of the vote. (Excess votes for winners and votes for candidates below a certain threshold are transferred in…

Ranked choice ballots! Yes, that is a winning term.

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#45

Post by sova »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #38
indubitable wrote: post #21

I think this indirectly hints at something much more fundamental: district based plurality does not make sense as an election system anymore. I think an eye opening example is to consider a hypothetical single state with 10 representatives. This state has a population, perfectly well distributed, of 35% democrat, 30% republican, 20% libertarian, and 15% green. And we draw our districts up with absolutely no bias what…

Or just add more districts...

More districts means more people hanging out in the House of Representatives. Connecticut Compromise made sure there were also 2 people per state in the Senate.

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#46

Post by dqpb »

Gerrymandering is so ridiculous. Clearly geographic coordinates is the wrong data structure for systematically biasing votes for/against certain demographics.

A voting system should be explicit about exactly which demographic criteria should carry weighted bias, what value that weight should be, and what it's purpose is.

It should also be clear to each voter which demographic categories they fall under, what the final strength of their vote will be, and what the justification is for that outcome.

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#47

Post by Retric »

dragontamer wrote: post #42
Retric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These rules are not limited to National elections. State elections are also based on redistricting. DC is part of the US and has District Elections so these rules will apply to it. https://www.dcboe.org/election_info/election_results/v3/2016... So, no you can't dodge the question. And I ask you to draw a DC map with some Republican representation. PS: AKA draw a map such that WARD EIGHT MEMBER OF THE COUNCIL is likel…

I'm not sure why you're so obsessed with Washington DC in particular. If you live there, you probably know much more about it than I do. But my general interest is how this whole event will play out in the greater scope of the country. I don't believe any US State with more than 1 Representative has an 80/20 split. Perhaps Washington DC really is an edge case that needs to be thought out more. But I don't think its r…

You can find plenty of examples on both sides South Carolina sends 7 republicans an 1 Democrat to the house, but it's own biased house is 75 Republican to 45 Democrat. Which is a very safe majority of power, while still better representing the actual voting. It also contains wacky maps like this one: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/SC/2

Still, my concern is not about the results. My concern is how easy it is to game this proposal.

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#48

Post by sova »

catpolice wrote: post #24

At this point I feel like it's worthwhile to remember to why we even have districts. We could, in principle, get rid of the districts and just have some kind of statewide scheme for electing representatives proportional to the outcome of a popular vote. The idea behind retaining districts, as far as I understand it, is that people in similar locales will often have very correlated interests (e.g. with regard to decis…

Ideally: the Representative who is chosen for a district (the weird shapes we are talking about) _represents_ everyone of the populous of that district. That way in Congress, when someone asks "hey do your constituents want a factory next to that highway plus a bunch of taxbreaks?" the representative knows which way to vote, as s/he _represents_ the local people. The weird shapes, even if they increase "efficiency" don't actually account for locality much. It'd be better to use something like commuting maps to draw regions to ensure locality.

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#49

Post by cmac2992 »

sova wrote: post #41
cmac2992 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding, the Baker v Carr in 1962 decision enabled federal courts to intervene in and to decide redistricting. Back in the day redistricting was even crazier. You could just draw an arbitrary number of districts with arbitrary population sizes. That seems bad on the surface. With this system, election outcomes could potentially be entirely determined by how districts were gerrymandered. The efficiency s…

Thanks for your words and insight. Yes, proportional voting would be great! Your state gets 5 house seats? Let's have priority-voting where a voter picks choices 1-5 for representation. Jane is first choice, then Miyoko, Sofia, Leben, and Pierre. Jane may not get all the "first place" votes but she could get enough to end up in one of the five house seats our state gets. Reading up on the 14th amendment, it does ensu…

ranked choice voting is interesting. It also has its fair share of problems (as most voting methods do)

I believe the 14th amendment specifically applies to state elections under the "equal protection clause".

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#50

Post by shadofx »

rndmize wrote: post #12

> Now suppose you are tasked with drawing 5 districts for this region. Or, we could go with proportional representation, make it a single district, and now we can reasonably expect to get 2-3 blue reps and 2-3 red ones, handling both the districting problem and efficiency/fairness problem in one go.

How would that deal with popular independents? Would they get two seats if they pull 40% of the electorate?
Post reply on HN