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Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

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Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#41

Post by OliverJones »

In an two-stage election system, rigging the districts to make the second stage irrelevant to the outcome, well, makes the first stage relevant to the outcome.

When the first stage elections are contested among isolated ideological subsets of the electorate their results tend to extreme positions.

What I'm saying is this: it is inevitable that the REDMAP project that yielded the kinds of district-level results shown in this article will continue to generate more and more extremist election results.

Ryan and McConnell, and the whole US federal house of representatives, have bought and paid for their dysfunction with this systematic gerrymandering. The situation isn't going to improve as long as this holds.

Pouring money into contesting the general elections in these districts is entirely a waste. It enriches nobody but robocall and television companies, and doesn't affect the outcome.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#42

Post by mathfan2 »

gumby wrote: post #6

Redistricting commissions should recruit go players. There can be an amusing side-effect to aggressive gerrymandering. Let's say a state has a small majority of party A, but districts that are strongly partisan (let's say 80%) for A or B. You only need 50% to win your district -- that extra 30% is "wasted" and would be more valuable if those voters were pushed into one of B's districts. Which is one of the things par…

> something close to algorithmic probably ends up the least controversial and most comprehensible in the long run

One suggestion in this direction 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 rather than minimum length.)

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#43

Post by specialist »

CivBase wrote: post #32

Gerrymandering is a problem because we have a poor voting system. I'm not sure if a single transferrable vote (STV) is the best system, but it would significantly reduce the benefit of gerrymandering (and probably result in better candidates from both parties). CGP Grey did a great video on STV: https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI

FWIW, I now advocate Approval Voting because a) superior election integrity prospects and b) nearly ideal fairness.

Score Voting and Instant Runoff Voting are a bit more fair than Approval Voting, but much more difficult to implement, execute, audit, describe / educate, etc.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#44

Post by OliverJones »

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…

> clearly some trickery is going on to deliberately cherry-pick people for some reason.

Yah think? Read David Daley's book Ratf*cked. http://www.worldcat.org/title/ratfucked-the-true-story-behin...

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#45

Post by specialist »

taoistextremist wrote: post #14
openasocket wrote: post #11

OT, but there's another really interesting, related problem at the intersection of mathematics and politics, which is apportionment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap... ). The US House of Representatives has a certain number of seats (currently 435) and, based on the results of the census, those seats are assigned to the 50 states according to their populations. But the proportions don't…

It's actually one topic I've grown to agree with my extremely conservative father on, that they should have never fixed the seats at 435. This was done long after the founding of the country (relative to the age of the country, that is), but if we had kept the original apportionment we'd have one of the largest legislatures in the world. It wouldn't solve the apportionment problem, but it would make the unfairness of…

I think of it as a scale problem. A Representative's front office is basically a call center & triage operation. The embodiment of the Politics of Attention (squeaky wheel gets the grease).

What's the ideal size for a constituency? To maximize responsiveness, accountability, effectiveness? 100k? 200k? 400k?

I don't know, but I'd like to find out.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#46

Post by patrickmay »

openasocket wrote: post #38
TSiege wrote: post #24

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/...

"proportional representation" is a generic term for a wide variety of possible representational systems. And each system has their own advantages and disadvantages. Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but can mean quite a lot in very l…

> Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but can mean quite a lot in very large states.

The solution to that, however politically difficult, is to break the larger states into smaller ones. New York City, for example, shares very little politically or economically with the rest of New York. Similarly with the various regions of California -- Silicon Valley and Los Angeles are as different from each other as both are from the areas north of San Francisco.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#47

Post by specialist »

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…

Huddle? Like the phyles in Stephenson's Diamond Age?

I'm very political, partisan. I'm seeing first hand the rise of interest group organizing as the political parties continue to decline. This sea change is making me very optimistic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyle

The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado http://a.co/gQ7VIS7

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#48

Post by specialist »

maxerickson wrote: post #25
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.

I'm warming up to the idea of voter efficiency.

And the various form of elections are absolutely more or less fair, eg FPTP vs Approval Voting.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#49

Post by taoistextremist »

specialist wrote: post #45
taoistextremist wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually one topic I've grown to agree with my extremely conservative father on, that they should have never fixed the seats at 435. This was done long after the founding of the country (relative to the age of the country, that is), but if we had kept the original apportionment we'd have one of the largest legislatures in the world. It wouldn't solve the apportionment problem, but it would make the unfairness of…

I think of it as a scale problem. A Representative's front office is basically a call center & triage operation. The embodiment of the Politics of Attention (squeaky wheel gets the grease). What's the ideal size for a constituency? To maximize responsiveness, accountability, effectiveness? 100k? 200k? 400k? I don't know, but I'd like to find out.

Around the founding of the country, there were arguments of some range between 30k to 40k. Obviously that wouldn't be practical nowadays, that would create 10k representatives and the ability of the government to respond to an urgent issue like war or economic depression would be severely diminished. It could also decrease public turnout because they feel like not just their vote, but their representative can't make a difference.

But yeah, I think at a few hundred thousand, though that would likely mean over one thousand representatives, could probably work.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#50

Post by patrickmay »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #18
MBCook wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with only two real parties if things were drawn to maximize competitiveness then at least the parties would be forced to play towards the center instead of their more extreme bases. Not ideal but much better than what has been going on since the 2000s.

I don't see how it maximizes competitiveness. Even in a perfectly split district, the primary generally has to play towards the base, and it's easier to get more members of your base to vote than to convert someone from the other party. The bipartisan attempt to neutralize other parties helps with that, it's easier for a Republican to turn a Libertarian voter to their side than a Democrat voter.

> it's easier for a Republican to turn a Libertarian voter to their side than a Democrat voter.

Maybe in the Reagan years, but it's become more difficult since then. Orwell said "The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." Both Republicans and Democrats have grown increasingly more authoritarian over the past 20 years.

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