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Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

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Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#51

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…

Agree with your analysis, sentiment.

It's still necessary to contest every race. Because of down ballot races. Moving the needle 5 points in a statewide race can mean winning a lot of local elections. Ditto putting initiatives on the ballot, which motivate your base to turn out.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#52
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…

The Thirty Thousand project aims to fix the problem gradually by scaling the number of representatives to the population:

> As shown above, in 1804 each Representative represented approximately 40 thousand people. Today, the average population of congressional districts is nearly 700 thousand and growing.

> In order to restore the House to the citizenry, our total number of federal Representatives will have to be increased substantially. Achieving this goal is essential to extending the ground of public confidence in our government and ensuring the beneficent ends of its institution.

http://www.thirty-thousand.org/

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#53
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.

Proportional voting is the only way to eliminate gerrymandering. Approval voting is great but single winner elections are always going to have gerrymandering issues.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#54
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Proportional voting is the only way to eliminate gerrymandering. Approval voting is great but single winner elections are always going to have gerrymandering issues.

See other comment. TL;DR: Approval Voting for executive races, eg mayor, governor.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#55

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.

Efficiency gap is a decent objective metric of fairness.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We shouldn't have to go through one of the 2 major parties to contend as a third party candidate. One way to solve this could be putting caps on campaign financing which would level the playing field for smaller 3rd parties. But that would never happen because the major 2 parties make the rules and that would hurt their dominance. By voting for either party we are essentially enabling the either-or system to continue

>By voting for either party we are essentially enabling the either-or system to continue

I used to agree, but the parties have no ideology attached to them. Their names are just generic terms regarding democracy and you can see how much their platforms have changed and moved over the last century. At this point they are just the Urban and Rural divisions of our election playoff.

They are just the ideology of the people elected. If you change the candidates of the party, you have changed the ideology of the party. Trump figured this out and instead of sticking with the Reform party, he just took over the Republican nomination.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#57
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.

It's doubtful whether that still exists as anything more than a foil/justification though, given Congress's expansion was stopped a century back, and each Representatives now stands in for at least half a million people (RH has the lowest number of citizens per rep' at 530k) and up to a million (Montana, population 1042520, currently has a single rep'), with the average closing in on 740k (up from ~710 during the last census).

Can a rep' really vouch for the specific needs of 700000 people any more than a proportional delegation would?

It's unclear to me that the House of Commons manages to do that, and they've got 650 MPs for 65 million people (or ~100000 people per MP on average, though the average electorate is lower, and it has very extreme low ends, Na h-Eileanan an Iar has an electorate of under 22k).

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Efficiency gap is a decent objective metric of fairness.

It's not an algorithm for drawing districts though, it's a score computed for a given plan.

And it depends on selecting binary sides. How do you objectively deal with a popular moderate?

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#59
While I'm as angry as anyone about the way that districts have been gerrymandered in the US, it also bugs me when I see critiques about gerrymandering that try to provoke outrage by showing the shapes of the districts and implying that districts should be square or otherwise simplistically shaped when viewed aerially. Humans don't fly, so the aerial view seems irrelevant and disingenuous to me.

It reminds me somewhat of a program on The History Channel called "How the States Got Their Shapes." And one of the really interesting parts was how states in the eastern part of the country had their lines drawn before the railroads and most in the west after the railroads. And so you see many more rivers, mountains and other natural features affecting state borders back east and a lot more straight border lines in the west. There's a very good reason (the Potomac) why Maryland's border looks the way it does, but if you just showed people the shape and told them it was a congressional district, it wouldn't be hard to convince them it was the result of gerrymandering.

I wonder whether there's a better way to visualize voting districts, perhaps using Google Maps transit data to visualize public transport/drive times to polling stations. There would still be the issue of deciding where to place polling stations, but it seems like once that's been decided, a district's shape should be derived from including all addresses that are most easily able to travel to those polling places. This would naturally create odd shapes, especially along freeways, bus/train lines and such. But making it as easy as possible for people to vote seems, to me, more important than having a simple shape.

Re: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

#60

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.

The Republic of Ireland's constitution guarantees a member of the Dáil (Lower Parliamentary house; similar to the US House of Representatives) for every 20-30,000 people, and districts are redrawn and reapportioned frequently.

This seems to be a pretty ideal number to me - it's about the size of the township I grew up in. Many people in their district would have personal ties to their representative, as a further detriment to attempts at lobbying/corruption.

The US constitution used to have a similar provision, but this was abandoned by the ammendment process in the late 1920's.

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