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?
#2Re-posting my comment on Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with Geometry | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252 4 months ago:
[...] a need for expert witnesses who understand the mathematical concepts applicable to gerrymandering. To meet that need, she’s spearheaded the creation of a five-day summer program at Tufts [the first in a series of regional trainings] that aims to train mathematicians to do just that
[...] over 900 people have indicated their interest by signing up for a mailing list
http://tufts.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7...
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Quoting from the end of that article, calling out the "efficiency gap" as the spark for work towards a mathematical definition of "compactness" satisfying districting requirements in a way that is convincingly explainable as fair:
Recently there was a big media sensation in Wisconsin around something called the "efficiency gap." It was a new metric of partisan gerrymandering that, for the first time, a court said they liked. The way it was devised was that the people who created it, they went back and they read all of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s written decisions about measuring gerrymandering. By reading his words and by reading what he said he found convincing and less convincing, they designed a statistic to appeal to him.
Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?
#3I 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.
Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?
#4I 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.
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Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?
#5Re-posting my comment on Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with Geometry | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252 4 months ago: [...] a need for expert witnesses who understand the mathematical concepts applicable to gerrymandering. To meet that need, she’s spearheaded the creation of a five-day summer program at Tufts [the first in a series of regional trainings] that aims to train mathematicians to do j…
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 neutral/nonpartisan way to actually detect it. And "I know it when I see it" doesn't work well as a judicial test, there needs to be a bright-line somewhere that lower courts can apply.
Well, a bunch of mathematicians heard that and said "challenge accepted" and have been working on mathematical models to quantify the level of gerrymandering. And now the court cases are working their way back up to SCOTUS, only with the academic models that Kennedy has indicated he wants.
Now we get to find out whether Kennedy's interest in neutering gerrymandering actually goes as far as being willing to strike down a gerrymander. Because it's easy to talk the talk, but at the end of the day Kennedy is still conservative-ish and gerrymandering heavily benefits conservatives overall.
Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?
#6I 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 effectiveness by how the House is much more representative of the US population's diversity than the Senate is.
Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?
#7I 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…
The nature of the institutions, not the district shaping, is what makes the House more diverse than the Senate:
* Many more seats in smaller districts mean more independent population "samples" * 2-senator per state rule means that ND has the same Senate weight as CA, regardless of population
Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?
#8Re-posting my comment on Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with Geometry | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252 4 months ago: [...] a need for expert witnesses who understand the mathematical concepts applicable to gerrymandering. To meet that need, she’s spearheaded the creation of a five-day summer program at Tufts [the first in a series of regional trainings] that aims to train mathematicians to do j…
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…
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.
Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?
#9Personally 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.
Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?
#10Personally 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.
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.