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Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

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Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#21

Post by seanalltogether »

I've been wanting to play with code for awhile to see how effective a "huddle" algorithm might be. The idea being that people with similar interests tend to huddle together into areas of a large city or regions of the state they feel match their lifestyle.

I'm not sure exactly how it would work but I imagine some kind of flood fill where you start with a population center and grow outward from it. Those should fill up quickly and by the end you should have large rural districts to finish off the state.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#22

Post by ihaveajob »

vpeters25 wrote: post #16

I have been thinking on a "simple rule" that could mitigate gerrymandering: 1. No congressional district can span more than 1 partial city and/or county. This will force districts to be drawn to cover whole cities/counties and would stop ridiculous districts such as the Texas 34th which covers parts of at least 8 counties from the gulf coast up to San Antonio

This sounds like a good idea at first, but I'm sure you would run into issues of large disparity in the importance of each vote. Not that it doesn't happen right now, but this would exacerbate the problem by introducing a force granularity level (beside the state level).

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#23

Post by 24gttghh »

pmc1 wrote: post #12

We desperately need to get away from the hyper-partisan, two party system. An Either-Or system was not what the framers had in mind and is damaging. While not the most popular position, I ALWAYS vote for the 3rd party candidate with reasonable policies for the sake of our country.

An either-or system was not what Washington had in mind, but I am very sure there were a number of framers who did indeed seek this out and formed parties almost immediately after the Revolution ended.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#24

Post by TSiege »

Districting has time and time again proven to be a cat and mouse endeavor. Someone is always going to be able to create models to game the system one way or another. The real solution is abandoning districting for proportional representation like a true democracy. This Vox opinion piece is a great explainer, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/11/16453512/...

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#25

Post by maxerickson »

seanalltogether wrote: post #21

I've been wanting to play with code for awhile to see how effective a "huddle" algorithm might be. The idea being that people with similar interests tend to huddle together into areas of a large city or regions of the state they feel match their lifestyle. I'm not sure exactly how it would work but I imagine some kind of flood fill where you start with a population center and grow outward from it. Those should fill u…

Effective at what? One potential goal of gerrymandering is packing your opponents into as few districts as possible.

Which is ultimately the problem with algorithmic approaches; "fair" isn't an objective measure.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#26

Post by niftich »

I'm reading the paper, but the example on the webpage is pretty contrived. Yes, the resulting "nice looking" districts are mathematically simple to specify, but narrow triangle-shaped wedges won't pass the smell test for most people. Or any triangles!

The world underneath is full of other facts on the ground, like municipal boundaries, county lines, and the like. Districts that deviate too far from these other entities -- entities that are already being used for governance and administration -- then clearly some trickery is going on to deliberately cherry-pick people for some reason.

Tying districts to more closely resemble existing administration boundaries won't magically solve this issue -- packing, cracking, nonsensical groupings are still a danger -- but it's a sensible baseline expectation that can be used to build on. When applied together with nonpartisan redistricting, perceived compactness, and efficiency gap metric, as the article notes, it can produce reasonable results.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#27

Post by maxerickson »

unabridged wrote: post #20
pmc1 wrote: post #12

We desperately need to get away from the hyper-partisan, two party system. An Either-Or system was not what the framers had in mind and is damaging. While not the most popular position, I ALWAYS vote for the 3rd party candidate with reasonable policies for the sake of our country.

I used to think the same way about 3rd party, but now I'm beginning to view the 2 party system including the primary as just a 2 round playoff. If you really have enough support to contend as a third party, you can easily win the primary of one of the major parties. Your most important vote is in the primaries (especially in areas dominated by a single party), and I think the country as a whole is beginning to realiz…

Primaries should just not impact the names that appear on the ballot (parties could still endorse a candidate).

The reason that the parties have influence over the ballot is because they like it that way.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#28

Post by froindt »

For some more content on gerrymandering, I suggest FiveThirtyEight's "The Gerrymandering Project". Episode 1 goes through the two major ways gerrymandering gets applied, and also discusses that just because a district has a weird shape doesn't necessarily mean it is gerrymandered.

And because I've never seen a social media post about gerrymandering favoring democrats, I'd like to add the efficiency gap chart from [2]. 8/26 states listed on the efficiency gap chart here are listed as favoring democrats. I fully recognize right now gerrymandering favors republicans significantly, however I'd like to note in some areas democrats are favored.

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/ [2] https://www.azavea.com/blog/2017/07/19/gerrymandered-states-...

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#29

Post by mathfan2 »

niftich wrote: post #26

I'm reading the paper, but the example on the webpage is pretty contrived. Yes, the resulting "nice looking" districts are mathematically simple to specify, but narrow triangle-shaped wedges won't pass the smell test for most people. Or any triangles! The world underneath is full of other facts on the ground, like municipal boundaries, county lines, and the like. Districts that deviate too far from these other entiti…

> the example on the webpage is pretty contrived

That's true, but the point of the demonstration is simply that the snaky, salamander-looking shapes are not necessary.

There's every reason to believe that you can achieve stunning examples of partisan gerrymandering under various "nice shape" criteria. You are correct that the "n-1 split lines" is simply very easy to state mathematically.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#30

Post by mathfan2 »

garmaine wrote: post #15

Dammit. For some years now I have been pointing out to people who would listen that what we need are policy solutions rooted in mathematical analysis, my go to case being gerrymandering. It seemed quite obvious that we could use geometric smoothing to set district boundaries based on census data to remove people from the process and therefore gerrymandering. Guess I had an untested assumption which wasn’t true, which…

One proposed implementation of your suggestion is the shortest split line algorithm: http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html

The OP also uses split lines, but they are optimized for maximum partisan effect.

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