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Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

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Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#71

Post by drdeca »

skj wrote: post #65

Here's an idea: 1. decide how many congresspeople there should be 2. allow anyone to run 3. allow anyone to vote for anyone 4. once someone has #voters/#congresspeople, they become a congressperson 5. no one else can vote for that person So, you're not actually competing against another person. You're competing get enough people to say "this person represents me".

Intriguing.

Could a person have their vote assigned to more than one person if none of them have won yet? (Probably with some sort of ranking to resolve any ambiguities as to who their vote goes to)

I'm not sure if that would be the optimal threshold for number of votes needed.

Here is an idea for a small modification:

First, have all the voters vote on the number of congresspeople to have, and then pick the median (if there is an even number of votes, and the middle two are different, pick between the two at random).

Then, after the result of the first vote has been decided, have everyone vote on the vote threshold (making sure that they are informed of what the voters/seats number), and again, take the median of the votes (and again, if a tie between 2 values, pick between the two at random. Don't average them.).

Then do what you said, with the chosen number of seats and the chosen vote threshold.

There are no doubt some downsides to this method. I don't yet have enough understanding of them to fully recommend it, but it seems worth looking into!

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#72

Post by rocqua »

Jesus_Jones wrote: post #62
patrickmay wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but can mean quite a lot in very large states. The solution to that, however politically difficult, is to break the larger states into smaller ones. New York City, for example, shares very little p…

Breaking up the big liberal states has been proposed by conservatives, because they want to get more conservative leg members. We'd need to break up conservative states too. There has been discussion of breaking Seattle off into it's own state or country. That would add a Republican Senate and House Rep, since the test of the state is more conservative, so you have to do a 3 way breakup of WA state. Anyway, these thi…

There is a similar issue with switching states away from 'winner takes all' in the electoral college.

If a liberal state does it, it costs liberals votes. If a conservative state does it, it costs conservatives votes. It seems pretty clear that such a system is fairer, and yet no-one wants to actually do it.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#73

Post by lambertsimnel »

eli wrote: post #17

Sadly it is a bit out of date (requires Flash), but there is a neat game/simulation where you can test out different redistricting strategies SimCity style: http://www.redistrictinggame.org/ There are no easy answers. I believe the game makers advocate for independent non-partisan commissions who are restricted in how they're allowed to create maps.

You might be interested in this web-based/mobile/PC game about gerrymandering from this year: https://chequered.ink/districts-game/

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#74

Post by int_19h »

jessriedel wrote: post #66
specialist wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root cause is Duverger's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law TL;DR: With FPTP, each belligerent tries to form the smallest winning coalition, resulting in a near even split two-party system. Proportional Representation is the remedy for assemblies, councils, houses. Approval voting is the remedy for executive races (eg sheriff, mayor, governor). Additional benefits of both PR and Approval Voting: -…

Proportional representation just shifts the coalition building from the electorate level to the legislative level. It's well known that such coalitions tend to be the smallest majority possible. You may think for various reasons that it's better to form coalitions at one level of the voting process than the other, but let's not pretend PR avoids it.

The difference is that legislative coalitions don't have to be permanent, the way parties are. Various factions in the legislature can come together for a particular bill, or series of bills on some issue that's relevant to them all. But on something else, they might realign differently. Also, even when coalitions are more persistent, the terms are effectively renegotiated every election - party platforms are much more stable.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#75

Post by int_19h »

openasocket wrote: post #38
TSiege wrote: post #24

Districting has time and time again proven to be a cat and mouse endeavor. Someone is always going to be able to create models to game the system one way or another. The real solution is abandoning districting for proportional representation like a true democracy. This Vox opinion piece is a great explainer, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/11/16453512/...

"proportional representation" is a generic term for a wide variety of possible representational systems. And each system has their own advantages and disadvantages. Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but can mean quite a lot in very l…

Mixed-member proportional representation provides for geographic districts, while still ensuring that every party gets no more seats than its popular vote percentage.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#76

Post by lambertsimnel »

taoistextremist wrote: post #35
CivBase wrote: post #32

Gerrymandering is a problem because we have a poor voting system. I'm not sure if a single transferrable vote (STV) is the best system, but it would significantly reduce the benefit of gerrymandering (and probably result in better candidates from both parties). CGP Grey did a great video on STV: https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI

I don't think STV presents any function that would really prevent gerrymandering. The only thing it might do is allow entry of third parties, but even that's not guaranteed. But a party could still design districts that they'd always have a shot at the second round in every district while other parties don't. What could potentially help is to have a legislative body not determined by geography, possibly some kind of…

"STV" actually refers to at least two related systems. You seem to be commenting on the single-winner form (also called "Instant Runoff Voting" in the United States). The multi-winner form is a form of proportional representation and as such would provide substantial protection from gerrymandering. The Australian terms "majority-preferential" and "quota-preferential" help make the difference (and the connection) clear.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#77

Post by squiggleblaz »

specialist wrote: post #40
TSiege wrote: post #24

Districting has time and time again proven to be a cat and mouse endeavor. Someone is always going to be able to create models to game the system one way or another. The real solution is abandoning districting for proportional representation like a true democracy. This Vox opinion piece is a great explainer, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/11/16453512/...

The root cause is Duverger's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law TL;DR: With FPTP, each belligerent tries to form the smallest winning coalition, resulting in a near even split two-party system. Proportional Representation is the remedy for assemblies, councils, houses. Approval voting is the remedy for executive races (eg sheriff, mayor, governor). Additional benefits of both PR and Approval Voting: -…

Duverger's law isn't the whole picture. Normal FPTP assemblies the size of America's have third parties (see Canada, UK, India).

Some PR countries have strong two party systems (see most obviously Malta).

There is something additional in America that causes a two party system which may or may not continue past a switch to PR because we don't know what it is.

Also, it is good to specify your goals. You might want to make it easier for unconnected people to enter the assembly, or to make it easier to throw out the choice of the primary voters, or literally just a more fragmented assembly. It is easier to come up with useful compromises if you specify your specific objectives because not every system of PR will have any of those goals. Closed list PR with primaries is probably the antithesis of what you want, but it's an extremely common kind and what a lot of people hear when you say "PR".

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#78

Post by squiggleblaz »

int_19h wrote: post #74
jessriedel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proportional representation just shifts the coalition building from the electorate level to the legislative level. It's well known that such coalitions tend to be the smallest majority possible. You may think for various reasons that it's better to form coalitions at one level of the voting process than the other, but let's not pretend PR avoids it.

The difference is that legislative coalitions don't have to be permanent, the way parties are. Various factions in the legislature can come together for a particular bill, or series of bills on some issue that's relevant to them all. But on something else, they might realign differently. Also, even when coalitions are more persistent, the terms are effectively renegotiated every election - party platforms are much mo…

American parties aren't exactly permanent tho are they? How many bills have fallen this year because some republican senator wouldn't support it? And I certainly wouldn't describe Trump's Republican administration as pursuing the same platform as Bush II's. Certainly there's similarity but not the stability you imply.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#79

Post by int_19h »

OliverJones wrote: post #41

In an two-stage election system, rigging the districts to make the second stage irrelevant to the outcome, well, makes the first stage relevant to the outcome. When the first stage elections are contested among isolated ideological subsets of the electorate their results tend to extreme positions. What I'm saying is this: it is inevitable that the REDMAP project that yielded the kinds of district-level results shown…

I very much agree with this. What gerrymandering (and partisan voter suppression) does, is reduce the number of competitive districts in the country. Next year, the expected number of competitive House districts is 23 to 38 - out of 450! So, in over 400 districts, primaries are the only thing that matters.

On the other hand, primaries attract more motivated voters than the general. And those motivated voters tend to be motivated by their ideological positions - in other words, they're more extremist. From the perspective of candidates in the primary, they have to pander to those more extreme voters to get to the general - but they have no incentive to pander to the center, because even the more centrist members of their own party will vote for them over the opposition candidate anyway.

This also sets up a positive feedback loop, where even less ideologically radical voters, forced to vote for more and more extreme candidates of their party in the general, adopt at least some of the positions of those extreme candidates over time (making it easier to cast such a vote). Which in turn makes primaries more extreme, and shifts the overall party platform in that same direction.

We've already seen Republicans walk down that road, and where it got them. Now Democrats are going through the same process (Indivisible etc). It looks like we're undergoing the last political realignment possible in the current system, and at the end of it, we'll have two "ideologically pure" parties, with most voters going for straight party ticket, and with most legislative votes going down party lines. At which point the system is going to deadlock, because it pretty much requires some compromise to function properly.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#80

Post by int_19h »

mannykannot wrote: post #4

The framers of the US constitution were remarkably prescient about a number of things, but my guess is that they did not anticipate gerrymandering, or at least its effectiveness. I would be very interested to hear otherwise.

They did not anticipate parties. Or rather they did, but they really didn't like them, and assumed that they would be able to prevent the political system from being dominated by them. And it takes parties to gerrymander.

Also, I think it's partly because at the country's founding, most hot political issues had a clear large-scale geographic distribution, and so geographic districts were considered an adequate way to capture the overall mood.

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