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Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

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Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#81

Post by cabalamat »

tshaddox wrote: post #78
cabalamat wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but who gets to choose what attributes of populations are the right ones to group together into districts? Let the voters decide. Allow them to group themselves into self-selecting affinity groups, i.e. have proportional representation.

How would that work with representative democracy? With direct democracy that's pretty straightfoward: one could vote with conservationists on land policies, libertarians on drug policies, progressives on welfare policies, etc. instead of having to vote for a representative who probably disagrees wildly with at least one of those views.

> How would that work with representative democracy?

With PR there would be a larger number of viable parties, for example in the last Dutch election, 13 parties got elected.

> instead of having to vote for a representative who probably disagrees wildly with at least one of those views

With 13 parties you'd probably be able to find one which is reasonably close to your own views.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#82

Post by MengerSponge »

Any attempt to completely automate this process is destined to fail, for all the reasons given in this thread. Weighting factors matter, and it is naive to assume that nobody is going to attempt to subvert a nonpartisan board, when so much power is at stake.

Don't despair! There's an alternative that generates an equitable outcome between two parties that are trying to screw their rivals: Cake Cutting.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781v1

You've probably heard the basic version of how to fairly divide a piece of cake between two children. Have one of them cut it, then the other choose which piece to keep. The cutter guarantees the largest possible piece of cake by cutting the cake in half.

This is the same idea, just extended: one party divides the state into districts, then the other chooses one district to "lock" and divides the remainder, then the process repeats.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#83

Post by Forbo »

wffurr wrote: post #67
jdmichal wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm a fan of STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) though I'm not sure the details on how that looks with multiple positions up for grabs. https://www.starvoting.us/

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#84

Post by sudosteph »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #61
sudosteph wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stat…

Perhaps I'm an idealist, but I see nothing broken about my understanding of statehood and it's more than an the existing distribution of power. If we're using the dictionary definition, a state is:

"a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government."

Which is exactly which each US State is. My home state, NC, is a territory which has a distinct culture and community, and it's own governing body. I'm a 10th generation North Carolinian, and I respect that fact that NC existed before I was born - and will continue existing after I'm dead. A state is more than the people who are currently residing in it or it's current power distribution - it's a long-standing culture, governing body and community of people that are inextricably tied to their own geography and their own decisions, past and future.

I don't care about preserving the current power structure for future generations - but you can bet I care about preserving NC's culture, environment, and state sovereignty for future generations. Those things are all bigger than any individual, and I certainly still believe they are worth fighting for. NC has the world's first public university and an amazing state university system in general. We have amazing food and BBQ culture, we have 3 different unique dialects of American English, we have our own tradition of folk music, we have our own religious traditions and our own way of going through our lives.

Also, FWIW - if you think Americans think of themselves as a single nation with minor variations - you really haven't spent enough time in the South.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#85

Post by ogre_codes »

WorldMaker wrote: post #68
ogre_codes wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 idea…

If someone is a 4 hour drive away, they don't have any feel for the community and are essentially limited to doing vague party line sort of things. I want my representatives to represent ME and the needs of our community, not just focused on generic issues that affect the whole state.

As an example:

Our representative managed to snag a chunk of funding for a local park here which will benefit the community. Without being local, would he have even known there was an opportunity to build the trails and help fund this?

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#86

Post by dragonwriter »

dragonwriter wrote: post #27
mcguire wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At-large elections are also a good way to avoid having minorities elected to office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965

That's at-large FPTP elections, which basically guarantee the statewide plurality gets all the seats. At-large STV, guaranteeing that a faction which got floor(1/n+1)+1 votes in a district with n seats (to make balloting manageable, you probably want 3≤n≤7) provide representation to significant minority interests regardless of geographical distribution.

This may be clear, but:

> guaranteeing that a faction which got floor(1/n+1)+1 votes in a district with n seats

should be:

> guaranteeing that a faction which got floor(1/n+1)+1 votes in a district with n seats gets a seat

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#87

Post by not2b »

pessimizer wrote: post #66

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…

Districts drawn on natural boundaries as much as possible, that are geographically compact, will do a fairly decent job of representing people fairly as well as giving decent representation to minorities in segregated areas. Gerrymanders often are designed to violate this (for example, chopping up liberal Austin, Texas so that parts of it are in five separate congressional districts, each of which has a suburban majority).

It would also be an improvement to increase the size of legislatures to reduce the potential for gerrymandering. The UK parliament has 650 members, each representing 102.5k people. The US House has 435 members, each representing 754.5k people. The number is set by law and can be easily changed. Make it 1000. It would then be much harder to game things so one party can wind up with 80% of the seats with 50% of the vote.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#88

Post by jedberg »

We really need to get the cube root rule passed.[0] Gerrymandering wouldn't really be useful if each district were smaller, and then we'd get Representatives that have a similar breakdown to the people they represent.

For example in the US each representative would represent ~475K people instead of ~755K. So California would have 84 representatives instead of 53.

It's a lot harder to gerrymander when the districts are much smaller.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_rule

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#89

Post by jedberg »

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…

You may be interested in the cube root rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_rule) which strikes a nice balance between number of people represented and number of people in the House.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#90

Post by jedberg »

MengerSponge wrote: post #82

Any attempt to completely automate this process is destined to fail, for all the reasons given in this thread. Weighting factors matter, and it is naive to assume that nobody is going to attempt to subvert a nonpartisan board, when so much power is at stake. Don't despair! There's an alternative that generates an equitable outcome between two parties that are trying to screw their rivals: Cake Cutting. https://arxiv.…

But then you just further entrench the political parties.
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