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Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

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Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#61

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

sudosteph wrote: post #25
spankalee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horribly. States borders are one of the worst districting systems imaginable, and the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Senate makes it a huge, and basically insurmountable, problem.

States aren't supposed to be districting systems though - they're meant to be independent governing bodies that work under a set of shared constraints for a shared repbublic. The entire point of the Sentate is to give a representation to the need of the state as its own entity - not as a representation to the people in the state. It wasn't even intended to be an elected body. It may feel unfair, but it's intentional,…

The concept of "a state as its own entity - not [ ... ] the people in the state" is so broken as to almost need no remark.

What on earth does that even mean? How does a Senator represent "the state as its own entity - not [ ... ] the people in the state" ? Presumably the Senator responds to legislative proposals based on how their perceive them to affect the state, but what can it mean to say "how it affects the state" if that doesn't actually mean "how it affects the people of the state" ?

Well, I'll suggest how: it makes sense only if you reinterpret "the state as its own entity - not [ ... ] the people in the state" as meaning "the existing distribution of power and resources within the state". That is, the role of the Senator from state XX is to ensure that the existing power structure of the state remains in place.

I cannot imagine any other intepretation of "the state as its own entity" that can be offered. Do you have one?

Also, this notion of "the states as the fundamental unit" is a concept that was certainly in place at the time of the DoI. It simply isn't how most Americans experience their citizenship or lives, and arguably it suffered a fatal blow post-civil war. You can argue, if you wish to, that the Constitution still reflects the old arrangement (there are some smart folk who will disagree with you). The de facto situation on the ground, however, is that Americans conceive of themselves living in a single nation with differences in laws and regulations from state to state.

[ EDIT: clarify para 3 and drop word bombs ]

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#62

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

totalZero wrote: post #39
spankalee wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's intentional, but it's unfair and broken. There's no valid reason for a WY resident to have 60x the voting power of a CA resident.

The reason is that WY would never become part of a federation where its partial sovereignty means nothing. Look up the Great Compromise.

WY was created by the United States of America. It wasn't some pre-existing entity that opted to join the union.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#63

Post by jdmichal »

wffurr wrote: post #52
sudosteph wrote: post #13

I'm a North Carolinian - so it's fair to say that "creative" redistricting has harmed my state a bit more than most. However, I disagree with fundamental precepts they are using because they do not take culture into account. The representative system works best when it's able to group people with similar interests and values and lets them elect someone who can share those interests. I do not think that valuing "compa…

A maximally representative district would be a large multi-representative district that elects 5 representative using ranked choice or approval voting. Then you get the property of representation you're looking for without having to draw fine-grained arbitrary distinctions on a map. https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation#what_is_fair_vo...

I assume you mean that all the candidates run against each other simultaneously, and the top 5 all win a seat? I don't think that has the properties you are claiming. At least not with approval voting.

Let's spherical cow this for a second and say that 51% of the population would like candidates from the Foo party, and 49% would like candidates from the Bar party. What prevents the 51% from electing five Foo candidates? When a "fair" split would be three Foo candidates and two Bar candidates.

In Approval voting, one would expect five Foo candidates with 51% votes, and five Bar candidates with 49% vote.

Ranked choice might fix this, but the actual results would depend entirely on the vote resolution mechanism.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#64

Post by MarkLowenstein »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #9
ndiscussion wrote: post #4

These things are all just opinion - there is no such thing as a "fair" district. Or do you not really agree with this concept? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority Voting blocks are how they are... and these kinds of changes will have sweeping, unpredictable consequences. I find it humorous that people have a big enough ego to think that they could get it "right". More generally, what people consider…

Exactly. Suppose you have a state with five districts and the state is 60% Brown Party and 40% Black Party. If you draw five districts that are each 60% Brown, you get five Brown representatives even though 40% of the state is Black. If you draw districts along party lines then you get three Brown representatives and two Black representatives, but the districts are totally uncompetitive and the representatives from b…

It used to be that geographic proximity caused a lot of similarity in needs/votes. But now our votes are more alike when our "tribe" is alike - e.g. professional, rural, urban poor. Plus few people ever see their local representative except on national TV. So maybe the time for geographic districts has passed.

To get real minority interests some representation, and to solve the geography problem, I'd like to see a state say they've got 10 representative positions, and you're all going to have a vote (or maybe 10). The top 10 vote-getters are then chosen.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#65

Post by scarmig »

andrewla wrote: post #36
spankalee wrote: post #2

Districts themselves are the problem. They can be more "fair" than they are currently, but they can't overcome the fact that common interests and voting alignment are not exclusively geographic. Removing districts, or enlarging them so the borders barely matter, and implementing ranked choice voting and proportional representation is a far, far better solution.

You have to be very cautious with this approach. The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office, but an individual that you hold personally accountable for their political actions. Removing districts means that you are moving to statewide elections, and then it becomes a statewide office rather than a local office, which is not the intent. The better solution is to make the scarc…

> The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office

The "intent"? Whose intent?

Regardless, that's not how modern elections work. The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation. Candidates (on both sides!) who are known for exceptional constituent services are regularly voted out for faceless party hacks. When people do switch their votes, it's a consistent shift up and down the ballot. The days when representatives carefully pursued their local constituents' interest are long gone: consider how Californian Republican representatives voted to hike their own property owning constituents' taxes in 2017.

It doesn't make sense to have local elections, because politics isn't local now.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#66

Post by pessimizer »

I don't think that political parties or race should be included in redistricting plans, especially since I think that this could often accidentally result in optimally "cracking" or "packing" minority districts. Neither political parties nor races should be intentionally institutionalized.

The defining characteristic of a district is that it is geographically contiguous. A defining specification for districts is that they have a roughly even population. With those constraints, what you would want to do is find physical commonalities (not abstract loyalties.) For example: water sources, proximity to commercial areas, types of housing stock, local weather patterns, local roads/accessibility, proximity to major land features/employers (like quarries, factories, lakes.) That's harder than doing this.

A problem I have with with doing this by political parties is that the two parties aren't themselves part of government and shouldn't be. A real problem I have with making racial guarantees (other than the possibility of packing and cracking) is that it seems to be calculated through averaging "diversity" - meaning that a group with 6% representation would be guaranteed 6% voting power on the district level (assuming people vote purely based on racial allegiance.) "Diversity" is a red herring; it's remedy that is important. 6% can be ignored at the district level nearly as easily as it can be ignored at the individual level. You're not going to get remedy from redistricting, but districts that grow from material features of the places where people live will end up shaped by race anyway (due to the history of those places.)

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#67

Post by wffurr »

jdmichal wrote: post #63
wffurr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A maximally representative district would be a large multi-representative district that elects 5 representative using ranked choice or approval voting. Then you get the property of representation you're looking for without having to draw fine-grained arbitrary distinctions on a map. https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation#what_is_fair_vo...

I assume you mean that all the candidates run against each other simultaneously, and the top 5 all win a seat? I don't think that has the properties you are claiming. At least not with approval voting. Let's spherical cow this for a second and say that 51% of the population would like candidates from the Foo party, and 49% would like candidates from the Bar party. What prevents the 51% from electing five Foo candidat…

The idea you are looking for is Single Transferable Vote aka STV: https://www.fairvote.org/rcv#how_rcv_works

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#68

Post by WorldMaker »

ogre_codes wrote: post #55
WorldMaker wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you keep the group small enough per representative you can still hold community meetings. The internet adds more options for "central meeting places" even if the geography is absurdly large (say, a random sampling of Texas or Alaska) even if you can't find other ways to incentivize travel to in person meetings. That said though, when was the last time any representative in the US was concerned about in person comm…

> The status quo, especially when you look at the maps of how some districts have been gerrymandered to incredibly abstract shapes is already broken from the ideal. This is something we can fix though. I know where our representative's office is. While I haven't gone to our representative for specific needs, I know people who have. Knowing our representative lives in our district and is local means I know he understa…

I'm not saying being regional is the problem, but that we have an opportunity to question the definitions/assumptions behind "regional". A lot of our country's ideals of a representative district stem from concepts/assumptions that a representative's office should be no more than a brief horse ride away. Gerrymandering has insured that isn't the case in a lot of places today hence the assertion that the original ideals are unmet ("broken").

But what happens if we question the assumption directly? Is it okay to take public transportation into account? What about car travel? To get into useful extremes for illustrative purposes, what about air travel? How far in travel time is feasible/allowable, an hour's distance? Four or more, like some of the classic representative horse "ridings"?

It doesn't entirely matter where you stand with specifics to those travel methods/distance qualifiers: the point is that those are variables/knobs in the equation. If the outcome is better representation overall, knowing that your representative is less than four hours by car away, for instance, may still be sufficient to meet the useful parts of the "regional" ideal while providing more options to explore in optimizing representation (such as random sampling or some k-means clustering gradient) than the traditional "geographies need to be contiguous and no more than a simple horse ride big".

Technology also presents other opportunities to explore: Would you be happy if your Representative's "Office" was a Discord server of "the right size" (say, small enough that it isn't a cacophony, big enough that it isn't just in jokes and memes of two to three shitposters every day) and your Representative had mandated "Office hours" to "hang out/townhall" in a voice or video chat channel? I know that a lot of people might find the idea ugly or terrifying, but I find it an interesting ideal of a different more modern sort. You might feel more likely that your voice is directly heard, and a good Discord server can feel very "regional" even when the actual participants are scattered to the winds geographically. I'm not saying "Discord but for Politics" is necessarily the best idea either, just that it is a useful thought experiment in questioning what it means to be "regional" in 2021.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#69

Post by arrosenberg »

jdmichal wrote: post #63
wffurr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A maximally representative district would be a large multi-representative district that elects 5 representative using ranked choice or approval voting. Then you get the property of representation you're looking for without having to draw fine-grained arbitrary distinctions on a map. https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation#what_is_fair_vo...

I assume you mean that all the candidates run against each other simultaneously, and the top 5 all win a seat? I don't think that has the properties you are claiming. At least not with approval voting. Let's spherical cow this for a second and say that 51% of the population would like candidates from the Foo party, and 49% would like candidates from the Bar party. What prevents the 51% from electing five Foo candidat…

Make it proportional to the vote. If it's 51/49, bar still gets 2. Also makes third parties feasible that way.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#70

Post by arrosenberg »

WorldMaker wrote: post #49
sudosteph wrote: post #13

I'm a North Carolinian - so it's fair to say that "creative" redistricting has harmed my state a bit more than most. However, I disagree with fundamental precepts they are using because they do not take culture into account. The representative system works best when it's able to group people with similar interests and values and lets them elect someone who can share those interests. I do not think that valuing "compa…

A lot of that gets to the question of what are we optimizing our k-clusters for? The idea of geography-based representation spurs from the ideal that a representative should be able to "shake hands" with everyone they represent, right? That a townhall with one's representative might be isomorphic with one's "neighborhood meeting"? In those cases things like "compact" serve a purpose in going back towards that "neighb…

The important thing about geography is that cultures tend to develop along with it. That matters a little less today than in the past, but someone in Fresno is still going to have more in common with someone from Los Angeles than someone from Louisiana.

We also already have systems of representation along other lines that feed into geographically-representative government - consumer groups, interest groups, lobbyists, etc.

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