Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts • Hacker News Board

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#111

Post by raldi » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 7:42 PM UTC

thephyber wrote: post #110

raldi wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The T district doesn't even look problematic to me. Nor does the other California letter, X, which is made up of a combination of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California%27s_8th_congression... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California%27s_14th_congressio... ...both of which seem like textbook examples of what a good, non-gerrymandered district should look like.

I think it was a dig at Texas, especially since the gp didn't mention the third CA letter.

There isn't a third. There are two, T (made up of one district) and X (made of two).

If the point of this project was to call attention to ridiculously-shaped gerrymandered districts, these are some of the last districts that should ever be considered for inclusion.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#112

Post by jellicle » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #39

jascii wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not quite sure I follow you, could you elaborate?

One of the arguments in favor of the electoral college is that it boosts the voice of people who are in areas with lower population density. This is to ensure that minority interests are respected and taken into account by presidential hopefuls. Without this protection the voices of people who live outside the 5 major metropolitan areas simply wouldn't matter and candidates would have no reason to listen to their iss…

Can't we make the exact opposite argument?

In the unbalanced system which currently exists in the USA, rural voters are given huge, disproportionate advantage in electoral power, leading to national decisions being made that favor them (have some more farm subsidies!) and ignoring the voices of the millions of citizens who happen to live in large cities and populous states.

Why are rural people better than city people? Shouldn't it be.. equal?

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#113

Post by matt_holden » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 7:47 PM UTC

clmckinley wrote: post #97

runarberg wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My bigger question is when the political split is more like 80/20 case should the 20 be guaranteed representation? Yes they should. They should get around 20% of the representatives.

So then without making other more fundamental changes we would have to gerrymander. In fact a number of strange looking districts are gerrymandered with creating a majority minority district as the stated goal. I believe we need structural changes to really solve this problem but absent that, I think having a computer algorithm that has the following priorities in the following order: 1) Compact (ie smallest circumfe…

The focus on compactness (or other geometric properties) as a goal is misguided.

The districts don't exist to look pretty or have nice geometric properties. They exist to translate the will of the voters into a representative government.

538 compared maps gerrymandered for various goals [1]. Prioritizing compactness has the effect of a) skewing political power toward rural areas away from cities, and b) reducing the expected number of non-white House members (for similar reasons).

The problem with compactness is it doesn't take into account the political geography of where people live. Increasingly, Democratic majorities are concentrated in cities, while Republican majorities are outside of them. Drawing compact districts has the effect of packing Democrats in fewer (urban) districts, resulting in more wasted votes. This gave the Republican party about a 30 seat advantage in the 538 map, compared to a more proportional one.

The Senate and Electoral College already unfairly skew political power toward rural voters. Compact maps would do the same in the House.

The efficiency gap (your #3) is a much better measure of partisan fairness to focus on than compactness.

[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-maps/#alg...

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#114

Post by souterrain » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 7:50 PM UTC

tunesmith wrote: post #40

toddsiegel wrote: post #24

It says tweet your reps. To be clear, you should probably contact your state rep about this (and send an email, not a tweet). They have the power to do something about it. This is very important, esp. in light the recent US Supreme Court decision on this subject[1]. Gerrymandering creates safe districts that make primaries hold increasingly more weight then general elections, which is leading, in a significant way, t…

More competitive? Or more representative of the overall population? Because those two things are at odds. Say you have a state that is split 55/44, and has nine districts. Do you want nine districts each at 55/44, meaning 9-0? That's more competitive, but less representative of the state. Or do you want five districts for one, and four for the other? That's more representative of the state, but less competitive. Redi…

I want at-large representatives for the entire state, based on general election polling rank. This is unlikely, of course, because it threatens the two-party hegemon.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#115

Post by ehsankia » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

toddsiegel wrote: post #24

It says tweet your reps. To be clear, you should probably contact your state rep about this (and send an email, not a tweet). They have the power to do something about it. This is very important, esp. in light the recent US Supreme Court decision on this subject[1]. Gerrymandering creates safe districts that make primaries hold increasingly more weight then general elections, which is leading, in a significant way, t…

The more interesting part is that we now have pretty good computational models to measure gerrymandering. IIRC correctly, there was two different models developed by different teams and they both actually found very similar results.

One of the two basically ran a Monte Carlo simulation, exploring a subset of all possible configurations, and comparing the average results to that of the current configuration. The other one I believe used a more mathematical approach.

Here's one of the papers: http://cho.pol.illinois.edu/wendy/papers/talismanic.pdf

EDIT: Here's a Daily episode explaining it: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/podcasts/the-daily/gerrym...

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#116

Post by jethro_tell » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #39

jascii wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not quite sure I follow you, could you elaborate?

One of the arguments in favor of the electoral college is that it boosts the voice of people who are in areas with lower population density. This is to ensure that minority interests are respected and taken into account by presidential hopefuls. Without this protection the voices of people who live outside the 5 major metropolitan areas simply wouldn't matter and candidates would have no reason to listen to their iss…

This is why we have the senate, two votes per state even though alaska has less people than the city of Seattle.

The point of the electoral college was that news travels slowly so voting for a rep to vote for you to represent your district was the right thing to do. Now, everyone can vote for themselves and probably should and we can have it counted in a day or two.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#117

Post by undersuit » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 8:01 PM UTC

raldi wrote: post #111

thephyber wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was a dig at Texas, especially since the gp didn't mention the third CA letter.

There isn't a third. There are two, T (made up of one district) and X (made of two). If the point of this project was to call attention to ridiculously-shaped gerrymandered districts, these are some of the last districts that should ever be considered for inclusion.

>these are some of the last districts that should ever be considered for inclusion.

Maybe there were, and the author had to use them for their relatively sane shapes compared to calling Maryland's 3rd District the X.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#118

Post by zhoujianfu » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

jascii wrote: post #95

Spivak wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the arguments in favor of the electoral college is that it boosts the voice of people who are in areas with lower population density. This is to ensure that minority interests are respected and taken into account by presidential hopefuls. Without this protection the voices of people who live outside the 5 major metropolitan areas simply wouldn't matter and candidates would have no reason to listen to their iss…

I thought that the electoral college and gerrymandering were to separate issues, how are they related?

They are, although you could consider the electoral college as an unintended gerrymander for president...

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#119

Post by UncleMeat » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 8:04 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #39

jascii wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not quite sure I follow you, could you elaborate?

One of the arguments in favor of the electoral college is that it boosts the voice of people who are in areas with lower population density. This is to ensure that minority interests are respected and taken into account by presidential hopefuls. Without this protection the voices of people who live outside the 5 major metropolitan areas simply wouldn't matter and candidates would have no reason to listen to their iss…

Except this is blatantly not supported by evidence.

Presidential candidates want to win Florida. Badly. The state has a popular vote for the presidential candidate. If "popular vote encourages candidates to ignore everything except for population centers" then we'd see candidates campaigning in Florida exclusively target major cities. But we don't. The candidates themselves show up in small towns in Florida as part of their campaign efforts.

If we don't see this behavior at the state level, then why would we expect to see if at the national level?

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#120

Post by zhoujianfu » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 8:05 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #39

jascii wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not quite sure I follow you, could you elaborate?

One of the arguments in favor of the electoral college is that it boosts the voice of people who are in areas with lower population density. This is to ensure that minority interests are respected and taken into account by presidential hopefuls. Without this protection the voices of people who live outside the 5 major metropolitan areas simply wouldn't matter and candidates would have no reason to listen to their iss…

This is untrue, in a national popular vote scenario, politicians would spend an equal amount of time and effort on winning each vote, regardless of location. And each person’s vote would be worth the same, regardless of location, as every other election in the U.S. works.