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Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
41–50 of 83 posts
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#42great idea to make Gerrymandle! congrats on the alpha US/California etc gerrymandering is dramatically illegal IMHO. I see the recent gerrymandering in the USA as a kind of political cancer actually....
Personally I've been very surprised with the public support for the increase in political gerrymandering. I know that people think it is worth it for the short term gains, but it still seems like a bad idea to me.
Both US Republicans and Democrats are successfully selling to their constituents that the other party is guilty of egregious gerrymandering, so those constituents will support aggressive redistricting efforts to "even things out".
I think the average member of either party generally understands gerrymandering to be bad, but with an redistricting arms race escalating nobody wants to be left behind.
I think gerrymandering generally is abhorrent and anti democratic. At this point we need a new, more fair redistricting aggressively enforced from the top down to change course, and I'm not sure how we can get that through when it would likely take a 2/3rds majority in congress to pass... but significant members of congress benefit from gerrymandering and would lose their position in the next cycle if it were taken away, so they are unlikely to support the measure.
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The House of Representatives is already a cacophonous, boisterous coliseum.
The House is a group of individuals that are so afraid to defy the president because the President can send a bunch of money to primary any one who disagrees with them. Big districts require a lot of money to run a campaign. Small districts mean you don't need a lot of money, and heck they might already know you. A larger house means more political independence from the bully-pulpit. And the House is MEANT to be caco…
Grouchy old political scientist here:
1. Due to geographic sorting smaller districts would be more intensely partisan than today, not less. A smaller land mass is going to be more deeply blue or red
2. A gigantic house would be less cacophonous and boisterous, not more so, because you'd need more hands-on party control to get anything done. It's deeply unrealistic that a huge mass of representatives are going to get anything passed on their own. You'd end up even closer to parliamentary-style party leader control of the House, which personally I'd like to avoid.
Combining these two points, you'd have even more ideologically intense & disciplined parties with smaller districts/a larger House- the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve I think
3. 'Objections based on convenience and space, are not serious in terms of the meaning of the House' this would be news to say Germany, which recently ended its famous 70+ year old MMP system precisely because their lower house kept expanding too much. They found the issue logistically too difficult to deal with, and are now moving to a more classic PR setup
Bonus extra point- the UK already has one of the world's largest lower houses, with relatively small districts and lots of local representation. Is the UK particularly well-governed, do you think? Small single member districts are rent-seeking machines- way too easy for a local rep to get captured by Major Local Employer (or NIMBY group)
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#44The controls are really frustrating on mobile. Clicking a new tile sometimes adds it to my district. Other times it makes a new district?
If a tile can be added to your district, it is added. Otherwise it makes a new district.
Since todays puzzle heavily relies on empty space, it can be a bit confusing. I'll try to make this a bit more clear for new players
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
By default, you work on one district at a time. Clicking adds tiles to the current district until the current district is full, then clicking will create a new district. District size is determined per round, described at the top as eg. "draw 5 districts of 4 populated tiles". You can also click a square in the "Districts" section of the header to switch to a different district, including an empty one to create a new…
I’m on mobile and that works for me sometimes but other times it just decides the district I’m working on is done and starts a new one. It’s not clear to me why or how to get that to not happen Cool concept tho! Would like to play it if I could only understand how
Districts are connected regions that can contain at most 4 houses. If you click on a house that is too far away from your started district, it might not be possible to span the distance. In that case it creates a new region instead
Sorry this isn't super clear. I'll try to think of a way to make it more intuitive.
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#46I won't let me complete the final district (YRBY+" "s) in today's puzzle. (firefox/linux) If I try to do it earlier it auto includes unwanted cells.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean, would you mind sending over a screenshot or video of where you are stuck?
[spoilers] https://snipboard.io/NZ8sa7.jpg
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#47I could see this being a great activity in a high school civics class. Very creative. One rule that tripped me up is: > If two parties tie in a district, nobody wins it. This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it. But the spirit of the gerrymandering concept is conveyed well enough.
In real-life, before the election there is a margin of error on the support of a bloc.
If you interpret a "tie" in this game as "either party could win within the margin of error", then it becomes a lot closer to solving the problem that gerrymandering algorithms try to solve in real life!
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#48There has to be a better way of representing a population than our current system. There is just no way you can represent real, complex, demographics in a fair and proportional way -- there are an unlimited number of ways to categorize people, and by grouping them one way you will often exclude grouping them in other, and perhaps not less significant ways. What you end up with is a very skewed representation of a population that's only bounded to reality through our notions of which category they belong to.
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean, would you mind sending over a screenshot or video of where you are stuck?
[spoilers] https://snipboard.io/NZ8sa7.jpg
That helps a lot, thank you! A district is a connected group of hexes. With the other districts you have drawn, there is no way to create a connected group of hexes containing all remaining colored ones
Re: Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
#50I could see this being a great activity in a high school civics class. Very creative. One rule that tripped me up is: > If two parties tie in a district, nobody wins it. This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it. But the spirit of the gerrymandering concept is conveyed well enough.
In real-life, before the election there is a margin of error on the support of a bloc. If you interpret a "tie" in this game as "either party could win within the margin of error", then it becomes a lot closer to solving the problem that gerrymandering algorithms try to solve in real life!
Have you played the game? The board today has three parties and the winning solution is to make sure your party wins one district and the other parties tie in the other four.
Under any real world system, you will lose this election if you rig it this way. You just can't predict who will win it instead.