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What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

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Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#51

Post by Lagged2Death »

pc86 wrote: post #28
paulmd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To rephrase this a little more concisely: SCOTUS turns based on which side of the bed Kennedy wakes up on (on most issues). There are 4 solid liberal votes and 4 solid conservative votes and Kennedy in the middle. Kennedy indicated in a ruling a few years ago that in theory he's uncomfortable with gerrymandering and might be open to striking them down, but apart from "I know it when I see it" he doesn't know a neutra…

I was pretty much with you until the last paragraph. The efficiency gap for all plans[0] shows pretty clearly gerrymandering can occur for either party. In fact, the very pro-Democratic plans are more gerrymandered than the very pro-Republican plans, including the plan in question. There are four pro-D plans with the upper error limit above .2 while the plan in question appears to be at approximately -1.5 There's no…

In fact, the very pro-Democratic plans are more gerrymandered than the very pro-Republican plans, including the plan in question.

The chart shows districing plans with larger efficiency gaps but the article does not offer any of the really damning plan simulation or sensitivity test results for those plans.

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#52

Post by rgoddard »

andrewla wrote: post #37

I'm not convinced that the "efficiency gap" is a good metric. My main issue, aside from the difficulty in describing what a "good" map should look like, much less measuring it, is that it is sharply discontinuous around the "winning" criteria -- for a single district, in a 49-51 victory vs. a 51-49 loss, there's a 2% difference in the number of votes, but the wasted votes goes from -50 to +50. It's not difficult to s…

The measure by itself is not sufficient. Which is why all the additional analysis was needed.

1. Using the current district map the last set of elections show that Wisconsin had a large gap.

2. Compared to other state's the gap is an outlier.

3. By creating a large number of alternate maps within the state satisfying all the other requirements that gap was still an outlier.

4. Calculating the gap under different voting outcomes showed the result to be robust even under a 5 point swing to the democrates. (This is where the discontinuity would show up if there results were not robust.)

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#53

Post by [deleted] »

bluGill wrote: post #34
manyoso wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is Kennedy will punt and say there are two many models to choose from with no clear way to determine which one is best even though they are clearly better than what we have now.

To a large extent the court should punt. Congress - as the ones who make the laws - should decide which model is used, not the courts. The job of the courts is only to say if any particular model congress decides on is fair enough.

[deleted]

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#54

Post by kesselvon »

s73ver wrote: post #50
Spivak wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woo! Enshrining the current two party system in legislation. What could possibly go wrong?

So don't include them by name. Just say the two major parties. Doesn't matter, doesn't change a thing.

first two parties to finish in the last election would be just as good

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#55

Post by waqf »

opportune wrote: post #32
ChrisBland wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue that one race votes for one party over another, but the VRA goal was to ensure minority representation, regardless of the party affiliation. Full Stop.

That's a fair concern, but to me it seems like an "easy" yet flawed solution to systemic oppression, kind of like affirmative action. For starters, by drawing districts specifically along racial lines for minorities, you are de facto also drawing the other districts along racial lines for white people. I also think that more diversity in congressional districts is a good thing, as it avoids "lock-in" districts where…

What could replace it is a sufficiently advanced delegative democracy such as LiquidFeedback. The idea is that parties self-organize when sufficiently many votes are delegated to a single person or entity, but they can dissolve and reform at any time.

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#56

Post by [deleted] »

pyroinferno wrote: post #41
tzs wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of a tangent, but the discussion of voting systems reminds me of another modification to voting that I sometimes think might be reasonable: weighting votes based on voter age, with the weight starting off low for the youngest voters and increasing to a peak, and then dropping off again. What brought this on was thinking about the brexit vote over in the UK, which from what I read had very different outcome…

Something to think about, while young people and middle-age people have never lived under a non-EU ruled UK, old people have seen what the UK was like with the EU and not the EU around. They offer a unique perspective on this matter.

[deleted]

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#57

Post by anth1988 »

tzs wrote: post #18
mtgx wrote: post #13

A proportional representation voting system would also largely solve the gerrymandering problem (no district would be dominated by a single party anymore so exploiting the gerrymandering system wouldn't help much), along with having many other benefits for democracy: http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation > They complied with the Constitution’s one person, one vote requirement That line is interesting. How is th…

It's a bit of a tangent, but the discussion of voting systems reminds me of another modification to voting that I sometimes think might be reasonable: weighting votes based on voter age, with the weight starting off low for the youngest voters and increasing to a peak, and then dropping off again. What brought this on was thinking about the brexit vote over in the UK, which from what I read had very different outcome…

That's a ridiculous suggestion. It's blatantly ageist.

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#58

Post by bradleyjg »

mapmeld wrote: post #6
crb002 wrote: post #3

I wish SCOTUS would put out a Euclidian distance Voronoi metric, where the redistricting map presented with minimum error wins. You quickly get into non-linear territory by using travel time instead of Euclidian distance. Roads and bridges become weapons for cutting or connecting districts. Bad bad stuff.

Programmers like to come up with mathematical plans like this, but you would likely run into the Voting Rights Act! Many districts which aren't compact have been created as majority-minority districts, to prevent disenfranchisement of racial minorities. Plans which divide or erase one of these districts get stopped by the Supreme Court all the time. It's a 1960s approach to equality, but you can tell its effectivenes…

> Programmers like to come up with mathematical plans like this, but you would likely run into the Voting Rights Act!

More generally, many mathematically inclined people eventually come to the conclusion that we should have some sort of multi-member scheme but that too is bared by federal law -- 2 USC 2c (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c)

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#59

Post by bumblebeard »

s73ver wrote: post #15
bluetwo wrote: post #9

Personally I wish my state would enact a law that says representative districts must be drawn to cross as few county lines as possible. Yes, some manipulation would still be possible, but it would be greatly diminished.

Take the power to create districts away from the legislature. Give it to a non-partisan commission. 1/3 Democrats, 1/3 Republicans, and 1/3 other/no party. We did that in California, and almost none of the legislators were happy with it, which means it probably did a good job. The state still wound up with mostly Democratic representation, but that's more a product of California being heavily Democrat. I'd imagine th…

Iowa's redistricting commission is truly non-partisan: no politicians are allowed to participate.

Seems to work fairly well for them just looking at the maps and variety of results:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa's_congressional_districts

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#60

Post by maxerickson »

andrewla wrote: post #37

I'm not convinced that the "efficiency gap" is a good metric. My main issue, aside from the difficulty in describing what a "good" map should look like, much less measuring it, is that it is sharply discontinuous around the "winning" criteria -- for a single district, in a 49-51 victory vs. a 51-49 loss, there's a 2% difference in the number of votes, but the wasted votes goes from -50 to +50. It's not difficult to s…

You are stating the efficiency gap incorrectly in the single district case. There can never be one, because the seat goes to the party with more votes (the party with less votes should have 0 seats, no efficiency gap).

The simplest example you can work is with 2 districts.

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