Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts • Hacker News Board

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#111

Post by ndiscussion » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 2:59 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #108

ndiscussion wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're certainly more educated on the history than I am. My main point is that the smaller states would have never agreed to a representative democracy which made their desires 100% irrelevant. There's enough small states like that to get some leverage. WY is one example, but there's many more. And as we saw in the civil war, states and people were willing to go to war to defend their interests, whatever those intere…

> this nation was clearly intended to be a federation of states with independent control Appeals to history like that don't work for me. You could just as easily say: "this nation was clearly intended to be a place where only white men got to vote" or "this nation was clearly intended to be a place where slavery was legal and a slave was counted as 3/5 of a human being" The emancipation proclamation, and later civil…

Nice chatting with you, thanks for humoring me. If we don't modify the constitution legally, how do you propose we do it? I am aware that the constitution doesn't mean much of anything in the courts these days. But how is this different from the law of the west? The powerful make the rules with no accountability.

Historically, people have burned the government to the ground and started with a brand new document. I suppose that's what most people are advocating when they wish to change the constitution in a way which it does not allow.

If not by law, how is it decided? Can I decide? I suppose I can if I become a supreme court justice or someone like Bill Gates.

The founding fathers certainly knew that the constitution would be hard to change - that's the whole point. They saw what happened to past governments with wimpy foundations. I really can't see the point of keeping the constitution at all if we are going to violate it due to "current sentiments" - it's all a sham.

Perhaps they would have voted for becoming a state even without their 2 senators, but that seems far from certain to me. Like the American Revolution itself, I just can't see Wyoming people sitting down and taking what's given to them.

Of course, my predictions about the future of America are different from most. I think we've only just begun to hear the rumblings of a deep conflict. This election was not the climax, but the prologue.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#112

Post by bobthepanda » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:25 AM UTC

minot wrote: post #104

arrosenberg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Personally, I think fully proportional meaning getting rid of districts is the best idea. The entire state is one district, parties publish a ranked list well before the election, and based on the votes everyone got, the top n people from the party's list get elected. We still have a problem though: how many seats does each state get? Do we still continue to apportion seats each state gets every ten years on a census…

> We still have a problem though: how many seats does each state get? Do we still continue to apportion seats each state gets every ten years on a census?

This seems to work and nobody has an issue with the high-level apportionment.

The only criticism I've heard of it is the 435 cap, which is kind of arbitrary, and now one rep represents way too many people.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#113

Post by benrbray » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:37 AM UTC

etrabroline wrote: post #106

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…

My African American friends are always very excited when a black politician wins an election. I can't imagine they would accept having even fewer black voices than they do now just so that every district can have the same "local weather patterns". That's actually pretty insulting now that I think about it to suggest "proximity to major land features" is more important that having representation for every community. I…

Look more closely into how gerrymandering happens and you'll see it's not necessarily a good idea for all e.g. black voters in a certain area to be lumped into the same districts, since it might neutralize an "excess majority" that could otherwise change the results on another district.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#114

Post by ttyprintk » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:54 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #15

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.

What's really needed to fix this is to switch from first the post to range voting: https://rangevoting.org/ Then where you draw the district lines doesn't matter nearly as much because no matter where you put them, the candidate that pleases more of the voters in their district has the advantage, which makes it hard to disenfranchise anybody. By removing spoilers from the equation you can have two highly similar cand…

rangevoting.org also provides interesting redistricting boundaries: https://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html

Colorado is an interesting case because it accidentally reveals a degenerate solution. Geography and population form boundaries in the denser areas, but not the sparser ones.

See the special section on rangevoting.org and the follow-up link: http://bolson.org/dist/

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#115

Post by SubiculumCode » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 4:11 AM UTC

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…

We have not shaken hands with our representatives because we capped the size of the House of Representatives because they felt it would be awkward to have so many Representatives in a single hall, or some such. Hard af disagree for me. I want to know my Representative, and in the modern era, there is no reason why we can't have a house of 1,000s of members, or some such. Our congressional districts are much too big.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#116

Post by pessimizer » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 4:17 AM UTC

etrabroline wrote: post #106

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…

My African American friends are always very excited when a black politician wins an election. I can't imagine they would accept having even fewer black voices than they do now just so that every district can have the same "local weather patterns". That's actually pretty insulting now that I think about it to suggest "proximity to major land features" is more important that having representation for every community. I…

> I don't really follow your argument in the last paragraph. Could you simplify it a bit?

I'm not a great writer:) Political parties are private organizations; we shouldn't draw districts with the intention of either assigning half of the districts to each of them or assigning half of each district to each of them.

As for race, the way you fix historical wrongs is by fixing them, not through trying to tweak the system until everyone who has equal resources will get a fair shot regardless of race. Groups historically discriminated against by law don't have equal resources.

I'm also black, from the south side of Chicago, and don't care about "representation" in and of itself. I'm not insulting me.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#117

Post by ttyprintk » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 4:25 AM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #76

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…

Physical commonalities are easily gameable. You could divide a city into east-bank/west-bank, or upstream/downstream, or even near-bank/far-bank. Give me enough factors and write me a large enough check, and I can give you whatever kind of partisan results you want. I do find watershed democracy (legislative district boundaries defined by watershed) kind of an interesting thought experiment. At the very least it'd he…

I would argue that it’s more important for watersheds to align on jurisdiction boundaries. Representative government doesn’t need to fall on the same lines as local policy decisions on pollution rules, water rights, and emergency prep. In the same way that some districts are richer than others, water is produced in some watersheds and consumed in others. Strongly aligning politics to those watersheds might not promote the cooperation you expect.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#118

Post by pessimizer » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 4:27 AM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #76

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…

Physical commonalities are easily gameable. You could divide a city into east-bank/west-bank, or upstream/downstream, or even near-bank/far-bank. Give me enough factors and write me a large enough check, and I can give you whatever kind of partisan results you want. I do find watershed democracy (legislative district boundaries defined by watershed) kind of an interesting thought experiment. At the very least it'd he…

They're absolutely gameable, and would lead to a lot of debate. Maybe we should work on standardizing and democratizing the redistricting process rather than just skipping to the end.

I'm just saying that I think we should take gerrymandering more seriously than pretending that it's a map coloring problem. There's certainly a lot of math involved, but the properties that are theoretically desirable in a district are not straightforward.

I fear this recipe (especially for the political party balancing) might be optimizing for strife. The only people who would win would be local TV/radio and direct mail in an endless election cycle.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#119

Post by rayiner » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 4:59 AM UTC

For all of the talk about gerrymandering, it’s worth noting that it had almost no net effect this year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Re...

Democrats won 50.8% of the House popular vote, and 51% of seats.

Or in 2018: Democrats won 54% of seats and 53.4% of the vote.

It had a modest effect in 2016: Democrats won 45% of seats but 48% of the vote.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#120

Post by rayiner » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:07 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #93

sudosteph wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I appreciate the concept of a state as a culture. But like the concept of a state as a community, that means nothing without people. I grew up in a country (long, long ago [0]) that takes it culture so seriously that it frequently forgets this association, and believes that culture has some kind of existence above and beyond the people who might (or might not) share it. NC, relative to the UK, is a young place, and i…

I think people underestimate how much state ties people have. My wife’s family has been in Oregon for 150 years. They all still pretty much live there, a couple of hours from where their family homestead used to be. There’s a strong separatist (secessionist) streak in Oregon too.

Even here in Annapolis, an hour from DC, it seems like everyone is from here.