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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?

#81

Post by [deleted] »

opportune wrote: post #27
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…

I don't think it's unreasonable for voters over a certain age to have restrictions put on their voting. My grandfather died at 94 and for the last ten years of his life he was extremely misinformed, and I don't mean just because he voted in a way that I wouldn't, or got his news elsewhere. He lost the ability to properly understand news from the television/newspaper; he would frequently ask my family if we had heard…

[deleted]

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

#82

Post by s73ver »

bluetwo wrote: post #36
thaumasiotes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As possible given what constraints? There's no requirement that they have equal population; it seems like your rule would always require districts to cross zero county lines.

If it could be drawn while crossing zero lines, then yes. But even then it is likely several different options would exist, and each party would try to pick one that favors them. I'm OK with that as a solution.

Then why not make the county the de facto district, and subdivide the county as needed when populations rise?

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

#83

Post by mbrameld »

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…

How do the current Democratic districting plans fare in terms of the efficiency gap? Can't tell by that graphic, and if the gerrymandered Democratic plans at the top are historical then do you see how Kennedy's conservative leanings would be relevant?

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

#84

Post by bradleyjg »

pmoriarty wrote: post #68
pyre wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this lower court opinion would have in effect (but not technically) stood as a nationwide precedent modifying existing Supreme Court decisions. I think this is the part that matters. It's possible that the Supreme Court would rather that the judgement came from them rather than the lower court. Leaving it as-is would modify existing Supreme Court ca…

"Leaving it as-is would modify existing Supreme Court caselaw, but the decision itself wouldn't have come from the Supreme Court, which could lead to a bit of ambiguity. If the Supreme Court itself weighs in, even just to agree with the lower court, it eliminates that ambiguity. No one is left wondering "What if it had gone to the Supreme Court" about the decision." Doesn't this reasoning apply to every case that com…

Doesn't this reasoning apply to every case that comes before the Supreme Court, even those it refuses to hear?

There's are several answers to your question.

1) To a certain extent it does apply to every case the Court doesn't hear. Although such denials of cert aren't supposed to mean anything you will nonetheless see in briefs something like:

"The Ninth Circuit held blah blah blah. Doe v. Smith 108 F.3d 1147 (9th Cir. 2012), cert. denied, 112 S. Ct. 60 (2013)."

The intention is to imply that a majority of the Supreme Court at least didn't strongly disagree with the Ninth Circuit.

2) Most cases come up to the Supreme Court from the Court of Appeals, not a special three District Court judge panel. The uses and limits of CoA judgement in their own circuits and in other circuits are well understood because it happens so much. That's not the case for these kind of judgments.

3) The nature of the decision itself is unusual. Most cases are fact bound, even most cases that are dealing with precedent work around the edges of existing cases.

The precedent the court below was dealing with -- Vieth v. Jubelirer -- is really unusual. In it four judges would have held that partisan gerrymandering cases are always non-judiciable (i.e. courts shouldn't hear them) four would have held that the such cases are judiciable. Justice Kennedy wrote a solo concurrence that represented the decisive vote. In it he wrote that such cases were as of then non-judiciable because there were no judicially manageable standards that could be applied. But he left the door open for such standards to appear in the future.

The court panel below held that the standard proposed by the plaintiffs was the standard that Justice Kennedy had been looking for all along. Leaving that in place without comment would have looked more endorsement than usual.

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

#85

Post by erikpukinskis »

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…

Conservative means resisting change. Gerrymandering, which benefits incumbents over challengers, is then inherently conservative.

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by throwawaymanbot »

I'm so glad this is happening. Gerrymandering is for 2nd rate banana republics, not the greatest Republic of all time. This IS a national security threat.

I would add which party is mostly responsible, but apparently mentioning the party, although factually correct, would lead me to get in trouble here. Which is Grand, coz im really Old, and I dont like to Party... anymore!

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

#88

Post by bluGill »

manyoso wrote: post #39
bluGill wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you think the very people who unfairly have benefit from this partisan gerrymandering should be able to choose whether to continue it? Let me guess, you happen to politically side with the benefiting partisans?

the courts benefit too. Liberal justices looking to retire tend to wait for a liberal president, and vice versa conservative justices wait for a conservative president.

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

#89

Post by andrewla »

maxerickson wrote: post #60
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.

The efficiency gap, as described, is the number of "wasted" votes for one party, minus the number of wasted votes for the other party, summed over all districts and divided by the total voting population.

So fundamentally it's just a normalized version of the wasted votes metric. Wasted votes is the thing that concerns me as a metric, and it has the discontinuity noted.

Notably, if you have a circular uniformly populated state that is exactly 50-50 -- let's say the north of the state is 100% Republican and the south is 100% Democrat, and we restrict our districting to straight lines through the center. Then there are two solutions that minimize the efficiency gap, the line going from southwest to northeast, and the one going from southeast to northwest, because both of those result in 75/25 districts (that have 0 net wasted votes). This seems really odd to me.

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

#90

Post by TheCoelacanth »

opportune wrote: post #25
ChrisBland wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the ugliest looking district ducklings are beautiful swans in the eyes of the courts. For example, the Illinois 4th Congressional District drawn in the 2000's decade is often called the "earmuff" district for obvious reasons. The western portion of this district actually travels along the northbound lane of Interstate 294! But, this district has a very important purpose. It was initially created in the 1990s…

But isn't that gerrymandering for democrats instead of republicans? I am open to the idea that districts could be drawn based on more than geography, but to me this just sounds like "helpful" gerrymandering simply because it assists the democrats instead of the republicans. There's no reason for congressional districts to be based on race, IMO.

It's more gerrymandering to get a black Democrat and a Latino Democrat instead of two white Democrats. That type of district doesn't really benefit Democrats as a whole.

I agree it's not a very good solution to minority representation, though. I think multi-member districts with transferable votes would do a better job of allowing minorities to get representation naturally instead of having to be intentionally grouped together.

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