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An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

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Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#51

Post by bloaf »

mathfan2 wrote: post #19
bloaf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I like the name "Efficiency Gap" but the metric of "require the overall district results be within a certain range of the popular results" seems pretty straightforward to me. I've always thought they should just reverse the order of operations. Instead of having people draw the districts, then machines evaluate them, they should have machines draw a bunch of potential "low efficiency gap" districts, then…

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?

Why not? My issue with districts are that they are not representative, not that they look weird. The only "real" issue with crazy districts is that the administrative costs might be higher (i.e. they might require more polling places.)

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#52

Post by dragontamer »

Retric wrote: post #47
dragontamer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Approximately the same difficulty to game the US Court system.

At the end of the day, Judges will adapt the rules to future cases. Law is an innately human process, not the cold machine logic that most of us Computer Science folks deal with.

If a major mistake is made in the current rubric, future lawyers and judges will bring it up on a case-by-case basis. Unlike code, Law is pliable and changes on local conditions. The issue isn't the "edge cases" which are dealt with as they come up.

If the proposal isn't working for say, Washington DC, then you can expect a case to bubble up through the Washington DC Courts, to maybe the US Court of Appeals, and eventually back to the Supreme Court if its major enough. If its purely a Washington DC issue (and not applicable anywhere else), there might not be any need for the US Court of appeals or US Supreme Court to hear about the case!

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#53

Post by sova »

dragontamer wrote: post #43
sova wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see. Thank you. Considering the Census: Voter distribution and Voter Mobility are probably socio-economically determinable factors (numerically speaking) since the state legislature or whatever body is responsible for redrawing the lines gets access to the census data [per obligation of their task] that is, "age and race" ... I'd like to point out to friends from around the world that the United States census questionnaire is rather unsightly when it comes to the section entitled "race" [0].

[0] https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/2010questionnaire.pdf Page 2 question #6.

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#54

Post by indubitable »

andrewla wrote: post #40
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…

What I don't like about this analysis is that it enshrines the notion of political parties. It makes individuals into automata that simply vote for whatever candidate is thrown at them. The ideal is that candidates can rest on their own merits, with the party mechanic existing to provide support to candidates who nominally align with the party's interests. People vote for candidates, not parties. Even the reality is…

I think something you're fundamentally getting at is that in today's system people's views are not necessarily representative of their party's views. Ron Paul is not really what you'd call a republican, but he certainly ran as one. The reason is that in our current system, small parties cannot exist - or at least they can't get any representation in congress, but is there really any difference? So if you want to actually get a seat you put an R or a D by your name, or you run in a state like Maine or Vermont - both with total populations far smaller than many cities.

The reason for this is because of our electoral system. Imagine we have 4 parties each with about a quarter of the support. One of those parties is going to get 100% of the representation, and the rest are going to get 0. This incentivizes these parties to begin to merge. Two parties go 'Hey I know we have nothing in common, but if we work together we can guarantee our voices are at least heard in congress.' And the other two also see this going on and does the exact same thing. Next thing you know it you have things like libertarians and evangelical Christians both being supposedly represented by the same party, and you get a congressional approval rating in the teens.

Proportional representation changes this. Fractional support being more than sufficient to get seats in congress means people can break into parties that actually fundamentally represent their views - instead of being forced to clump up into super-parties. I think this effect would be particularly emphasized in our country. We have a phenomenally good system of checks and balances ensuring that even 'the little guy' in congress can have a meaningful effect. The problem is our electoral system all but precludes there being any little guys in congress.

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#55

Post by importantbrian »

I think the real answer to all of this is to restore a reasonable ratio of population to representatives. It is much more difficult to Gerrymander 133 districts than with 9. It will still happen but the possible advantage one party can get is much smaller.

The constituents also get much better representation, because they are much closer to the person representing them. The representative is intimately familiar with their constituents concerns because they live in and around them.

It also strips a lot of the money out of politics. Representatives don't have to spend all their time fundraising to raise war chests of millions of dollars. You can win an election in a 30,000 person district by knocking on doors and sending out inexpensive mailers.

http://www.thirty-thousand.org/

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#56

Post by andrewla »

indubitable wrote: post #54
andrewla wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't like about this analysis is that it enshrines the notion of political parties. It makes individuals into automata that simply vote for whatever candidate is thrown at them. The ideal is that candidates can rest on their own merits, with the party mechanic existing to provide support to candidates who nominally align with the party's interests. People vote for candidates, not parties. Even the reality is…

I think something you're fundamentally getting at is that in today's system people's views are not necessarily representative of their party's views. Ron Paul is not really what you'd call a republican, but he certainly ran as one. The reason is that in our current system, small parties cannot exist - or at least they can't get any representation in congress, but is there really any difference? So if you want to actu…

Proportional representation sort-of fixes this. I think rank-preferential (instant run-off) or approval voting also solves this, even on single candidate elections, because they remove the spoiler effect. I think switching to these methods but keeping districting is a good intermediate step that doesn't "completely change the game" but opens some new doors.

Proportional representation, as I mention above, does remove most incentives to vote other than your actual preferences, but it does introduce very complex strategies on the part of candidates and parties. Every election becomes a state-wide election, so smaller candidates representing regional interests will find it harder to target their campaign. I'm not sure whether this is a net positive or negative.

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#57

Post by [deleted] »

andrewla wrote: post #40
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…

What I don't like about this analysis is that it enshrines the notion of political parties. It makes individuals into automata that simply vote for whatever candidate is thrown at them. The ideal is that candidates can rest on their own merits, with the party mechanic existing to provide support to candidates who nominally align with the party's interests. People vote for candidates, not parties. Even the reality is…

[deleted]

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#58

Post by erentz »

shadofx wrote: post #50
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?

Under an STV you're still voting for people. The independent with 40% of the vote would be elected and then a proportion of their unneeded votes would be transferred to the subsequent candidates on those voting papers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#Findi...

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#59

Post by indubitable »

andrewla wrote: post #56
indubitable wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think something you're fundamentally getting at is that in today's system people's views are not necessarily representative of their party's views. Ron Paul is not really what you'd call a republican, but he certainly ran as one. The reason is that in our current system, small parties cannot exist - or at least they can't get any representation in congress, but is there really any difference? So if you want to actu…

Proportional representation sort-of fixes this. I think rank-preferential (instant run-off) or approval voting also solves this, even on single candidate elections, because they remove the spoiler effect. I think switching to these methods but keeping districting is a good intermediate step that doesn't "completely change the game" but opens some new doors. Proportional representation, as I mention above, does remove…

Smaller candidates today already stand stand practically 0 chance of getting elected. Literally every single member in the house of representatives is either a democrat or a republican. That is a consequence of a simple question: 'If a person receives 10% of the vote in a state with 10 representatives, how many seats should they receive?' The current answer is 0.

In our current system the one and only power of smaller candidates is a spoiler effect. This enables them to have some influence on the super-party that's closest to their own ideology, even if implicitly. Rank preferential / Australian voting / etc not only fail to change the 10% support = 0% representation issue, but they even remove the spoiler effect which means that smaller parties can safely be completely ignored unless they look to gain a plurality themselves - which is rather contrary to the notion of smaller.

On this note, I'm not seeing why you think that proportional would make campaigning more difficult for 'smaller candidates.' It would mean they might actually stand a chance of finally getting a seat in congress. A basic example from Europe would be something like 'The Pirate Party.' They're never likely to gain substantial support, but they have been able to receive representation at the national level in a variety of nations, proportional to their support, exclusively due to proportional systems.

Re: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering

#60

Post by crazygringo »

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…

Correct. This was recognized a long time ago, starting in the late 1700's and gaining popularity in the 1800's, but it's never had much mindshare in the US, unfortunately. The solution is proportional representation [1], something much more common in Europe. Taken to its most extreme, it treats the entire country as a single district -- Israel is an example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#Hi...

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