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Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

autoredistrict.org

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Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#71

Post by dane-pgp »

sudosteph wrote: post #57
ablerman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gets to decide which groups "should be ignored". The pig farmers certainly don't agree. The whole point of competitive districts is that the groups who should be ignored will be eliminated by competition. Your whole premise seems to set up all districts with functional lifetime appointments rather than elections.

In competitive districts, politicians are far more dependent on campaign funding. Competitive elections are extremely expensive. So the group that gets ignored is just the group that has the least money to throw at candidates. It's the average person that always loses in that case. That's not fair either. I would certainly prefer term limits, but if a population thinks their representative does a good job representin…

> In competitive districts, politicians are far more dependent on campaign funding.

If we're dreaming big here, how about we try fixing campaign funding too? To give a concrete suggestion, the US should pass a constitutional amendment which allows Congress to limit expenditure on political advertising (but not other forms of political speech). Here is one such approach:

https://www.movetoamend.org/amendment

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#72

Post by scarmig »

totalZero wrote: post #38
spankalee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horribly. States borders are one of the worst districting systems imaginable, and the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Senate makes it a huge, and basically insurmountable, problem.

The advantage of state borders is that they are static and precede many years of polity shift and demographic migration. Districts, on the other hand, are drawn to serve the drawer.

States are also drawn to serve the drawer. Why do we have a North Dakota and a South Dakota? It's not because we had a North Dakota Territory and a South Dakota Territory; it was because they would enter the Union as solidly Republican states, cementing Republican dominance in the Senate and in the Presidency, and admitting two states instead of one doubles the effect.

There's no particular reason to treat the current boundaries as holy writ.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#73

Post by andrewla »

scarmig wrote: post #65
andrewla wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be very cautious with this approach. The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office, but an individual that you hold personally accountable for their political actions. Removing districts means that you are moving to statewide elections, and then it becomes a statewide office rather than a local office, which is not the intent. The better solution is to make the scarc…

> The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office The "intent"? Whose intent? Regardless, that's not how modern elections work. The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation. Candidates (on both sides!) who are known for exceptional constituent services are regularly voted out for faceless party hacks. When people do switch their votes, it's a consiste…

> The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation

I mean, I guess I think this is a problem, rather than something that we should encode structurally into the system.

I personally would prefer reforms that push back in the local direction. Right now there is a very small number of heterodox senators (Manchin, maybe Sanders, any others?) and a larger number of heterodox reps. To lower those barriers to make it more feasible for people to run for national office as a representative would be a vast improvement.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#74

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

chris123 wrote: post #19

Pretty sure the politicians don't want it fair. Politicians don't do fair. It's the worst of humans that are attracted to politics and surviving politics, after all.

The more you believe this, the more you guarantee its truth.

If you want it to be otherwise, you have to believe that it can be. You have to believe that we can have political systems where people who actually care about issues, about people, about the welfare of other people, about justice, abdout the future can play a role.

If you really don't believe that's possible ... I don't want to be you.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#75

Post by scarmig »

andrewla wrote: post #73
scarmig wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office The "intent"? Whose intent? Regardless, that's not how modern elections work. The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation. Candidates (on both sides!) who are known for exceptional constituent services are regularly voted out for faceless party hacks. When people do switch their votes, it's a consiste…

> The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation I mean, I guess I think this is a problem, rather than something that we should encode structurally into the system. I personally would prefer reforms that push back in the local direction. Right now there is a very small number of heterodox senators (Manchin, maybe Sanders, any others?) and a larger number of heterodox reps. To lower those…

I don't disagree that creating a much larger House would lead to better representation and better constituent services. It's also probably one of the most feasible approaches we could take to electoral reform. So, pragmatically we see eye to eye.

I predict it wouldn't change the tendency toward governance by party hacks, though. That's an effect, not a cause. The root cause is that residents of geographically contiguous regions don't represent a shared interest in the same way they did in the past: there are different dividing lines nowadays.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#76

Post by scarmig »

pessimizer wrote: post #66

I don't think that political parties or race should be included in redistricting plans, especially since I think that this could often accidentally result in optimally "cracking" or "packing" minority districts. Neither political parties nor races should be intentionally institutionalized. The defining characteristic of a district is that it is geographically contiguous. A defining specification for districts is that…

Physical commonalities are easily gameable. You could divide a city into east-bank/west-bank, or upstream/downstream, or even near-bank/far-bank. Give me enough factors and write me a large enough check, and I can give you whatever kind of partisan results you want.

I do find watershed democracy (legislative district boundaries defined by watershed) kind of an interesting thought experiment. At the very least it'd help to solve water politics.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#77

Post by tshaddox »

sudosteph wrote: post #48
tshaddox wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds nice, but who gets to choose what attributes of populations are the right ones to group together into districts? You suggest grouping by population density, which certainly makes sense for grouping together certain political interests (like zoning). And yet by doing that, you've essentially maximally fragmented people by gender, which is another attribute that makes sense for grouping together certain pol…

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. What does gender have to do with population density? I chose population density, because it was the only value that I could think of that closely correlated with culture and that was not a protected status (ie, not race, religion, sex, etc). If it's done algorithmically, it doesn't seem like a bad measure. Anyhow, the "who gets to choose" thing is tough. Right now legisla…

My interpretation was that you chose to group together areas with similar population density because there are important policy concerns directly related to population density. And indeed that's true: water rights, zoning, building codes, pollution and noise restrictions, and more ought to depend highly on the population density of the area, and it doesn't seem necessary or even moral for rural voters to have much say in how dense cities set those policies.

But my point is that there are plenty of other policies which don't (or shouldn't) vary based on population density, and thus grouping districts based only on population density might give very little influence to interest groups for those other policies. Civil rights are the extremely obvious example, but there are others.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#78

Post by tshaddox »

cabalamat wrote: post #43
tshaddox wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds nice, but who gets to choose what attributes of populations are the right ones to group together into districts? You suggest grouping by population density, which certainly makes sense for grouping together certain political interests (like zoning). And yet by doing that, you've essentially maximally fragmented people by gender, which is another attribute that makes sense for grouping together certain pol…

> but who gets to choose what attributes of populations are the right ones to group together into districts? Let the voters decide. Allow them to group themselves into self-selecting affinity groups, i.e. have proportional representation.

How would that work with representative democracy? With direct democracy that's pretty straightfoward: one could vote with conservationists on land policies, libertarians on drug policies, progressives on welfare policies, etc. instead of having to vote for a representative who probably disagrees wildly with at least one of those views.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#79

Post by phnofive »

ogre_codes wrote: post #47
phnofive wrote: post #45

Are geographic districts required by the Constitution? State and Federal laws certainly follow from this assumption, but could a state simply assign registered voters at random (per election, roughly in line with ballots being finalized) to each of its districts? Single-seated states already enjoy this luxury.

It is good to know who your representative is and for a representative to be able to visit their district and have community meetings so they can (in theory) represent the interests of the people in that community. If the district is spread across the state like avocado on toast, you aren't really representing anyone.

I get the idea, but if you can live across the street from another district while living in the same neighborhood, I don’t think it bears out.

It would also make a two-party campaign schedule impossible, so it’s unlikely to gain traction. Just wondering aloud.

Re: Auto-Redistrict – automatically creates electoral districts

#80

Post by scarmig »

arrosenberg wrote: post #70
WorldMaker wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that gets to the question of what are we optimizing our k-clusters for? The idea of geography-based representation spurs from the ideal that a representative should be able to "shake hands" with everyone they represent, right? That a townhall with one's representative might be isomorphic with one's "neighborhood meeting"? In those cases things like "compact" serve a purpose in going back towards that "neighb…

The important thing about geography is that cultures tend to develop along with it. That matters a little less today than in the past, but someone in Fresno is still going to have more in common with someone from Los Angeles than someone from Louisiana. We also already have systems of representation along other lines that feed into geographically-representative government - consumer groups, interest groups, lobbyists…

> someone in Fresno is still going to have more in common with someone from Los Angeles than someone from Louisiana

I question this. Someone from San Francisco is likely to have much more in common with someone from Portland or even NYC or London than they would someone from Bakersfield or Shasta. You can see that in lots of different areas, from migration patterns to election results to what they do on Sunday morning to which media people consume.

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