Many HN readers live in California, so it may be worth mentioning that redistricting in that state is handled by the independent California Citizens Redistricting Commission [1]. The commission was put in place by a couple of voter initiatives, which were opposed by many elements of the political establishment. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of the primary supporters of the two initiatives [2][3]; I consider the CCRC to be one of Gov. Schwarzenegger's most significant accomplishments.
Amusingly, it's possibly because of the CCRC that Democrats won a supermajority in the CA assembly as CA has shifted even more blue since it's been in effect.
However, the "jungle primary" also has an effect. Since the top two vote getters irrespective of party go to the general election, you can't just squeak by a primary and then cruise to victory in a safe district (the Tea Party tactic). The minority party gets to weigh in at the general, so if two Republicans or two Democrats go to the general, the more moderate one is going to likely pull more votes from the minority party.
This pulls people closer to center which tends to favor Democrats.
Can you give a specific example of a district where this effect was observed in a real election? i.e. where the Republicans would have won a seat because of a radical (of either party) winning a primary, but ended up losing the seat because of the “jungle primary”.
It's plausible under the assumptions that Democrats tend to field a moderate candidate in their primary and Republicans don't. That seems pretty reasonable to say right now, but might be less true in a few years as die-hard progressives mount our own "Tea Party"-style insurgency within the Democratic Party.
The thought experiment I've liked in the past is...
Say you have a 55/45 state, with 9 congressional districts. Roughly speaking, what is most fair? A 5/4 district split? Or, each district being 55-45, i.e. 9/0?
If I'm reading it right, it sounds like the efficiency gap would mean that 5/4 would be more fair, but that would actually require drawing districts in a way that pays attention to the political and demographic makeup of the geography.
I get that for many states, if the Democrats had the 55, then current gerrymandering means that they might only get 2/7, or two out of the nine candidates, which seems wildly off no matter how you look at it, but still, I have trouble identifying the principle of what fair actually is. And I don't like the answer of just arbitrarily picking a math formula that is used the same way everywhere. Because, in the absence of a principle behind it, it could be just as distorted. For instance, if 5/4 is more fair, then a geographically blind districting program could very easily end up with similar blended districts leading to a 9/0 state.
In Spain many are proposing to get rid of districts altogether, because they severely penalize parties that aren't the two biggest (except regionalistic parties). And this is in a country where the system actually allows third parties to get seats in Congress (even if harder) - the American system is very very ill of bipartidism. Congress should be 1 person 1 vote, no matter your political preference or where you live.
New Zealand has Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) where you vote for a local representative and also a party.
There are a fixed number of local representatives and the rest of the 120 available seats are made up by the total party vote. So if you won 10 seats but 25% of the party vote you would have 10 representatives and 20 list/party MP's.
It has also worked very well to give third parties more power and help keep the two main parties closer to the political center.
Districts should reflect the constituents that live in them.
Marginalizing groups by splitting and packing is an affront to a representative democracy. This has become pathological now that there is software that can nudge boundaries by a single neighborhood block to chose the desired voter distribution.
That's tautological - by definition, every district reflects the constituents that live in them, no matter how it is drawn.
But I think I know what you mean. But I also think that even if you don't split apart certain neighborhoods or regions that have very clear boundaries (which isn't universal), it's still very easy to go pretty far in the 5/4 direction or the 9/0 direction. So this standard doesn't really answer the question.
Well, ideally everyone is proportionally represented at every level of government. So you'd want a 5/4 split at the top level, where each person has a representative that they like.
You'd almost want gerrymandering, but of a different sort. Traditional gerrymandering makes some districts win by 100/0 and the rest lose 49/51 to marginalize as many people as possible.
But perhaps more fair would be perfect gerrymandering - every district ends up with a 100/0 split. This means you get 5/4 at the top level, while every citizen is represented by someone they voted for.
Yeah, those 100/0 districts are not going to be "in play", as the saying is - they're not going to be a competitive race, ever. That means that all the action will be in the primary. (Of course, with a 100/0 district, maybe that's appropriate...)
This is a real problem as it intersects with race; a lot of civil rights advocacy in the 60s promoted racial district packing, so that sizeable African-American minorities could have their own representation. This is in the Voting Rights Act... kinda (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-supreme-court-tackl...) In the long run, I think it's an argument for an unusual form of proportional representation.
>I get that for many states, if the Democrats had the 55, then current gerrymandering means that they might only get 2/7, or two out of the nine candidates, which seems wildly off no matter how you look at it, but still, I have trouble identifying the principle of what fair actually is.
Optimize the variance of election outcomes. If pundits and such can't predict how the election will go, then and only then can we say voters really spoke.
The most important and immediate change is to create an objective system, one which takes away direct-drawing from humans... because that's where the vast majority of unethical damage occurs.
Sure, algorithms can embed their own assumptions, but at least they'll be applied consistently based on known data. It's a "perfect is the enemy of good" kinda thing.
Districts should be drawn up without any regard to political affiliation. They should reflect population distribution and area. With the right mathematical model, districts could be optimized to be the most compact and regular shapes possible. This would be a boon for coordination of boots on the ground campaigns and it would reflect the geographic distribution of people.
If we optimize districts to minimize the efficiency gap we're just gerrymandering to a different measure. This is shoddy proportionality. We could have proper Proportional Representation[1] via a big at-large election using the Single Transferable Vote process.
We should either have locality based districts, or give up on districting and have some other identity based constituency representation.
The German system, mixed-member proportional voting, satisfies the desire for a single locality based representative while still having the overall legislative body be mathematically representative of the people.
It shares the lack of individual direct accountability to the electorate (for some members) that all party-list systems have; STV avoids this but practically requires looser partisan proportionality (but still far better than single-member FPTP districts.)
And STV works well for Ireland, and I think would also work well for state-level elections in the US. The only thing is that it doesn't scale up super well, and might not work quite so well for congressional elections, though IRV might work if they wanted to keep single-member districts, even if it's less proportional than proper multi-member STV. Regardless, it'd be an improvement on FPTP and reduce the spoiler factor.
> we're just gerrymandering to a different measure.
As long as we are using some objective measure rather than "how can we draw the lines to benefit ourselves.
Personally I think there should only be approximately straight lines throughout. I'm not exactly sure how you could enforce that with mathematical rules (and still get proportional coverage).
> We could have proper Proportional Representation[1] via a big at-large election using the Single Transferable Vote process.
Small multimember districts (probably around 5 members/district) work better for STV. You really wouldn't want one at-large STV district for California's representatives in the House of Representatives (53 members), State Senate (40 members) or State Assembly (80 members).
How about the CA State Senate? It's two waves of 20 members in overlapping 4 year terms. Electing a set of 20 doesn't sound so bad. Maybe the ballot winds up with 60 or 80 people on it, but you only have to care about two or five that you like, or if you're a real politics nut maybe rank 10-20 of them. The great thing about that setup is that statewide any group that can organize itself for 5% of the vote gets a seat. The Greens get seats. The Libertarians get seats. New parties that haven't been invented yet get seats. People will run independent of any party and get elected if they have a big enough following. This would really broaden the membership of the legislature. Keep the 80-member Assembly to small local representative districts.
> How about the CA State Senate? It's two waves of 20 members in overlapping 4 year terms. Electing a set of 20 doesn't sound so bad.
It doesn't? With only two parties, and assuming each only bother running 3/4 of a full slate,that requires voters to evaluate 30 candidates. But part of the point of STV is not supporting only two viable parties; realistically, 60+ is more likely.
With STV or a similar candidate-centered proportional-ish system, I think 5 member districts are about ideal. Sure, the partisan proportionality is weaker, but it keeps it in the range where there is room for reasonable attention to individual candidates, and if you don't keep that you might as well go to a party list system.
CGP Grey has a great series of short videos explaining Single Transferrable Voting, Gerrymandering, and other voting mechanisms - the fairness or unfairness thereof
Proportional representation gives undue power to small parties, who can make demands disproportional to their share of the vote in exchange for pushing legislation past the 50% threshold (it's even worse in a parliamentary system, where small parties are often king-makers).
The American system is more about representing the preferences of communities than directly those of individuals. When you look at it like that, things like the electoral college, the senate, and plurality voting make sense.
Then you have another scaling problem. If you increase the number of representatives to the level at the founding of the US (1 per 30,000 or so if I recall) then you'll end up with the House of Representatives holding 11,000+ members.
Or maybe acknowledge that 300M people is a lot to have under one rule of government and split the country apart according to the most sensible cultural borders.
I reckon we start by letting Texas secede. Then we bundle up California + Hawaii into its own little pacific paradise. Then we offer all the northern border states to Canada. And offer New Mexico to Mexico...
>Then we offer all the northern border states to Canada.
Living in New England, there are actually a fair number of people here who dream of applying to join Canada or the EU if we could get free of the rest of the USA.
Non-proportional representation is liable to majoritarianism, which is arguably a worse outcome. Parties tend to be populist rather than principled; emotions and identity politics come to the fore and rationality is subdued.
>The American system is more about representing the preferences of communities than directly those of individuals.
And by "communities" we mean "lines drawn on the maps decades to centuries ago". For example, New York City has one municipality with five boroughs, while the Boston metro area splits its urban core into five different municipalities (even though people in each commute to all the others). And the Bay Area in California? Well, let's not talk about the idiocies imposed by municipal boundaries in the Bay Area...
In the American system, the small parties making disproportionate demands are simply embedded within the larger parties and use the discipline of the two-party system to take it over.
All you need is a majority within a party that gets half the vote: 50% of 50% is 25%. This is why the Republican party has been taken over by an extremist who's unpopular with large chunks of his own party.
>All you need is a majority within a party that gets half the vote: 50% of 50% is 25%. This is why the Republican party has been taken over by an extremist who's unpopular with large chunks of his own party.
The plurality primary system actually makes it much worse than that. The total percentage of the registered voter population who nominated Trump, IIRC, was about 4.5%. It was 4.6% for Clinton, too.
Lots of other people voted in the primaries, but voted for losing candidates. So it actually turns out you need 4.5% of the total voting population to support you to get a major-party ballot line, at which point you'll basically receive 25% in the general election on "ham sandwich" grounds in your party's regional bases. Then you can concentrate on competing your way up to a majority vote in the general (or for Presidential races, the Electoral College).
What you're forgetting is that while the small parties are king-makers, they're not kings. They don't get to dictate the bulk of policy - they generally just get to get one favoured bit of legislation looked at.
Proportional representation is far, far, far, far, far better at representing a large modern democracy than the US electoral college system (which includes the ability for some electors to completely ignore the will of the people - not sure how that makes sense). FPTP only results in a two-party system over time. Prop rep and friends allow for multipolar politics.
Besides, if you're worried about the undue influence of small parties, the electoral college still sucks, because small states wield undue influence - votes beyond their population count.
> Proportional representation gives undue power to small parties, who can make demands disproportional to their share of the vote in exchange for pushing legislation past the 50% threshold (it's even worse in a parliamentary system, where small parties are often king-makers).
This is only true when larger parties can't cooperate.
The great advantage of coalition government is that it the partners act as a moderating influence on one another.
Also, you tend not to get 'grand coalitions'. Instead, you get a senior member with enough junior members to create a stable voting bloc. Grand coalitions only happen at times of perceived existential threat or national crisis. The closest thing to to a counterexample I can think of is Austria, but even then, those were to put a cordon sanitaire around far right and far left parties. The very fact that grand coalitions are seen as antidemocratic tends to keep their formation to a minimum.
In reality, countries that have lots of coalitions by virtue of their voting system (such as STV[1]) tend to have perfectly stable governments. It's only in countries whose voting systems tend to give a single party power that have issues with coalitions, because they have no idea how to handle situations like that. Witness the panic in the UK after the 2010 elections - here in Ireland, we were quite entertained by the panic as coalition governments are the norm here.
[1] Ireland, where I'm from, for instance, hasn't had a non-coalition government since the '50s. In that time, we went from being one of the poorest countries in Europe of one of the wealthiest in the world, so obviously our government was able to take some kind of meaningful action in all that time.
>Also, you tend not to get 'grand coalitions'. Instead, you get a senior member with enough junior members to create a stable voting bloc. Grand coalitions only happen at times of perceived existential threat or national crisis. The closest thing to to a counterexample I can think of is Austria, but even then, those were to put a cordon sanitaire around far right and far left parties. The very fact that grand coalitions are seen as antidemocratic tends to keep their formation to a minimum.
This kind of thing is why my ideal system right now is Mixed Member Proportional representation with an approval-vote. Represent small opinions, but strengthen the moderate blocs at the expense of extremist blocs.
I've mixed feelings about MMPR, mainly because it's subject to collusion via decoy lists, party splitting and the like, so it ends up devolving into parallel voting, which is susceptible to gerrymandering of constituencies. It works well in a lot of places (Germany, Scotland, NZ, &c.), but not so well in others (Venezuela, Hungary, &c.).
How would adding approval voting into the mix improve MMPR as you see it? It's an interesting idea for sure, especially as approval voting eliminates the spoiler factor in single seat elections you get in FPTP, and it's simpler than IRV.
Only in a parliamentary system, where a stable majority in the legislature is encessary to form a government. Otherwise, you end up with ad hoc per-issue coalitions.
I think such a low–latency boost to the fringes, as opposed to gerrymandering's high-latency boost to the fringes, is good for keeping people engaged in politics, especially in a place with so much pessimism and initeria like the US.
Why try to fix a system that denies most people the representative they prefer?
We'd be better off if we used proportional representation.
Imagine a court case where all parties to the suit first must pick ONE lawyer to represent all of their competing points of view. That'll work, won't it?
Like our representatives, lawyers would put a lot of effort into convincing the parties that they are the right lawyer. And, once elected, ALL the power is at the disposal of that lawyer. He controls the outcome. And he can start collecting bribes.
Because perfect really often is the enemy of the good. If a perfect system isn't practically achievable, in the near term at least, is there really no point in making any improvement at all? In any case sometimes the best route to an ideal or near-ideal destinations is one step at a time.
Yes, but there's no appetite for a change of that magnitude in the US today. But if PR is your goal, I think a more representative version of the current system is more likely to lead us to that than an increasingly less representative version of it through persistent creeping gerrymandering.
There's only so much appetite for change. I wouldn't want to waste it on a marginal improvement that only benefits people with similar perspectives if they live in the same area.
And the appetite for change goes up when there is something worth changing for. Helping a few people in a few districts doesn't do much for most people.
> Why try to fix a system that denies most people the representative they prefer?
Consider it a stepping stone, and the most effective first step: if you have gerrymandered constituencies, you can still end up with non-proportional results with a proportional electoral system. The effect is more proportional than you'd have with FPTP, but its still open to abuse.
Ideally, you really want both non-gerrymandered constituency borders and a proportional voting system. To understand why, take a look at the Hungarian parliamentary elections in 2014 and how, even with a proportional voting system, gerrymandering and other mechanisms were used to give a non-proportional result in favour of Fidesz.
I would prefer if political units were self-organizing and not arranged by leaders at all. In Switzerland, a part of a canton can form a new canton if it prefers or merge with a neighboring canton. This rarely happens, perhaps because the current arrangement is good enough. And the incentive to take an area for granted is minimal.
Given the current constitutional make-up of the US, it's a stepping stone. Swiss-style federalism would be a pretty radical departure, and likely wouldn't even be constitutionally possible.
The Constitution allows for many more representatives. Why don't we bump up that number, to say, 10,000 members in the HoR?
Logistical problems? Yes, there would be quite a few. As it is, any given member has to suck up to moneyed interests, just to be able to afford to become elected.
If any given rep only had to sway a few 10s of thousands, the barrier to entry is much lower.
Positions which are considered "fringe" would have some say, and there would be a lot more room for third parties.
I certainly think it would be a lot easier than some of the structural changes often proposed.
There is more merit to this than initially meets the eye. It could be argued that the democracy our founding fathers envisioned would, in fact, look like that - just compare the lower house head count to the population of the time versus the present ratio.
How much more connected to the government and better represented would you feel when your representative is really just another bloke from your neighborhood?
I'm for more representatives for sure! Include a certain percentage determined by sortition, and you might get a representative democracy that represents "the people" better than what we currently have.
There have been algorithms and even software implementations for a while now that fix or greatly equalize gerrymandered districts. Here's an article from the July 2014 Wash Post on one such solution, with example maps:
So many haters in this thread. I agree we should aim high, and I'd hate to be the incrementalist in the room but—more math for the courts and a solution to a problem that, if successful, is likely to lead to solutions to more problems? Hell yeah!
Let's have what I'd like to call double blind Gerrymandering:
- States package demographic maps WITHOUT party affiliation and send to an "independent commission" (whatever that means...) who does NOT open the maps (preferably is not able to for technical reasons). These maps only include only location of voters geographically. All geographic names have been stripped from this record. Maybe we even have a method to obfuscate the geometry of the maps but maintain the relationship between location and vote. Idea is: anyone who is not very familiar with the maps and American politics would not be able to tell what map they are looking at.
- Send this package of information to some independent contractors chosen by the commission. It would work best if these are people found living under a rock who had no knowledge of American politics but were magically also well educated in mathematics. These contractors would draw up the maps in some 'locality' based system and return them to the commission, who would forward them on to the states.
- The states have no way of knowing which state's information went to which contractor as this information is 'lost' at the 'independent commission'. The independent commission doesn't know which contract worked with which map so they have no way of influencing the process.
- We could also do plenty of more sensible things like Mixed Member proportional or any number of other reasonable ideas. I like this one because of how crazy it sounds...
The fastest and laziest way of gerrymandering is by strictly using party affiliation. One can correlate party affiliation with race/gender/household income/county tax rates. At the state level, all this information is available online to anyone so you may not get an exact number on party affiliation, you can make a very accurate estimate and use that data to draw district lines.
For a true non-gerrymandered district lines, you only need the population and make sure there's not a single gap between the districts.
I believe that a fairer method of districting would be to generate a Voronoi graph where the size of each cell is based on population data. Each cell should be centered around a population centroid and should contain approximately the same number of citizens.
That doesn't necessarily solve the problem - you can still gerrymander quite a lot by strategically placing the centroids. An effective solution has to ensure the vote outcomes are not skewed. Simple geometrical constraints aren't enough to guarantee this.
> This formula—called the “efficiency gap”—cites two types of “wasted votes” in the redistricting process: “lost votes” cast in favor of a defeated candidate, and “surplus votes” cast in favor of a winning candidate that weren’t actually necessary for the candidate’s victory. The efficiency gap is, in Stephanopoulos’ words, “the difference between the parties’ respective wasted votes in an election, divided by the total number of votes cast.”
> When both Democrats and Republican waste roughly the same number of votes, the efficiency gap is near zero.
Say there's an election and the candidate from party A gets 51,000 votes and the candidate for party B gets 49,000 votes. So, party B had 49,000 wasted votes (their candidate didn't win), while party A had 1,999 wasted votes (they weren't necessary to win).
So, we calculate the efficiency gap as (49000-1999)/100000, or 47.001%. That's really high, but there's not necessarily any gerrymandering going on. Presumably when a state has a lot of races, each party will win some and lose some, so the efficiency gap won't be so heavily skewed. However, supposing you had ten districts that were completely homogeneous and one party won all ten by a narrow margin, the efficiency gap would be the same very high value of 47.001%. Is it fair to call that an example of gerrymandering? If we labelled it as a result of unconstitutional gerrymandering, is that kind of like saying the voters the wrong way? Can there be false positives where the efficiency gap is high without gerrymandering?
Or am I just misunderstanding the description of the formula?
The process is poorly described. The Brennan Center [1] does a better job. The key point in the efficiency gap is that you don't calculate district by district. You calculate the efficiency gap for all of the districts in a state. Yes, if a single party won all districts by a 2% margin, it would be gerrymandering. It's not statistically believable for a party to win that many districts "by chance", especially if the vote margins are that narrow in each district. If Party A wins District 1 by 2%, I'd expect Party B to win District 2, etc. If Party A wins Districts 1-100 by 2%, then yes, I'd strongly suspect gerrymandering.
All of the problems with gerrymandering can be solved by eliminating districts and holding all elections at the national level.
As a thought experiment, assume a society that is ruled by a legislature of 29 people. Each year, society votes and elects a single individual, who then serves for 29 years. One person elected per year for 29 years gives you a legislature of 29 people. If all local, city, and regional voting districts are abolished (the districts still exist, but these are appointed positions, not elected) the public, and the media, are able to focus their energy on choosing the one best person each year. All elected leaders face a strict term limit of one term.
Advantages of the system:
1.) leaders serve long enough that they can enact meaningful reform. They can also carry out necessary, but unpopular, policies, without facing immediate backlash from the people.
2.) There are no districts, therefore there is no gerrymandering.
3.) There are no decisive elections. Unlike Germany in 1933 or the USA in 2016, there are no elections in which it feels like the entire regime has changed all at once. All change is gradual, and it happens at the same pace every year.
4.) Society finally gets the true benefits of the rule of law, which is freedom from arbitrary changes. No government made of mortal flesh can ever be ensured to be wise, so hoping for wisdom is not realistic, but the rule of law can offer us stability and freedom from arbitrary government.
Some of these ideas go back to Plato. His Council Of Wisdom was to be made of those leaders who would serve forever. Considering how much the West seems to admire Plato, it is odd that no Western nation has ever attempted to implement anything like his ideas.
>3.) There are no decisive elections. Unlike Germany in 1933 or the USA in 2016, there are no elections in which it feels like the entire regime has changed all at once. All change is gradual, and it happens at the same pace every year.
The funny thing is, USA 2016 didn't change everything at once. The Republicans already held Congress, and actually lost a few House and Senate seats. They unexpectedly gained the Presidency, but their seeming total power now comes only from their extreme willingness to use procedural tactics that other Americans regard as "bad sport". This turned a Presidential upset into a Presidential upset plus a free seat on the Supreme Court, similarly to how it turned the midterms in 2010 from a midterm election in which the opposition party usually gains seats into a semi-permanent Republican legislative majority throughout the 2010s (thanks to the gerrymandering described in TFA).
You have something kind've like this in the Australia system. A bicameral legislature, the lower house is up for grabs every election, but only half of the upper house is. This means senators are basically elected for two terms, and the turnover is slower in the upper house.
There is provision for putting all seats up for grabs in both houses - a 'double dissolution' - which can only be done if parliament is deadlocked. Apart from that, turnover of senators is slower than members of the lower house.
It doesn't have the effects you're after though - these senators are still party creatures. I'm not sure I'd like your plan anyway - people change a lot in 29 years, and you would need checks and balances against undue interference. Deep-pocketed lobbyists would only have to focus on one person per year, for example.
From the article: "The difficulty in curbing partisan gerrymandering has not been in convincing judges that the practice is unconstitutional—the Supreme Court has found that it is" where the part "the Supreme Court has found that it is" is a link that goes to this case: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1985/84-1244
That page then summarizes the Supreme Court case as follows:
Question
Did Indiana's 1981 state apportionment violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?
Conclusion
No. [...]
So... Am I misunderstanding something, or is the article's claim completely wrong? In which case, I'd guess that its optimism is unfounded.
I think they are trying to make the point that the specific ruling was that the state apportionment itself was fine, but that "The Court also ruled that political gerrymandering claims were properly justiciable under the Equal Protection Clause, noting that judicially manageable standards could be discerned and applied in such cases."
So I think they (not a legal scholar by any means) are saying that if the case is about gerrymandering specifically then they would be able to do something about it.
Gerrymandering is just one way the fundamental representation problem with single-member FPTP districts manifests. Eliminating gerrymandering doesn't eliminate the fundamental problem, it just makes it a little more opaque the particular manner in which it will manifest.
It's a huge piece of the problem. Better voting systems don't establish themselves, you have to bootstrap, and that's using the FPTP process to vote in folks who institute change and get us to IRV or Condorcet.
> Better voting systems don't establish themselves, you have to bootstrap, and that's using the FPTP process to vote in folks who institute change and get us to IRV or Condorcet.
No, it's bypassing offices elected by FPTP by using the citizen initiative process in the states, and proving reforms there. (And the representation problem is fundamental to single-member districts, so IRV and Condorcet aren't solutions.)
I had the opportunity to have lunch with a lead pollster at the Cook Political Report - I asked him whether he thought redistricting reform could decrease partisanship. He pointed to the Senate as a reason that partisanship still continues. The one thing that he said would make the biggest political impact might actual be open primary (top two vote getters move on to the general, regardless of party) - which would moderate folks. I'm still a believer in gerrymandering reform, but the tendrils of self-segregation run deep and gerrymandering reform is just one weapon against the hydra of partisanship.
I like the idea of a mathematical formula for determining politicization of redistricting. I'm not sure if SCOTUS would really impose a mathematical limit to wasted vote efficiency but maybe we could use more math and technocratic solutions to political problems!
I think besides the failure of the system and the people to keep the politicians in check for gerrymandering, the main issue is that the districting system hasn't done a good job of keeping up with population growth. Therefor my proposed solution would be to increase representation and more districts, albeit smaller ones.
The main problem with this I foresee is lack of room on Capitol Hill, but perhaps congress really doesn't need to be on Capitol Hill considering modern technology. With the added Benefit that Kstreet would have a much higher barrier to entry this way, and through a more decentralized structure, we would end up with a more egalitarian system.
Perhaps another possibility is the supreme court deciding that gerrymandering is illegal and establishing a rule by which district boundaries can be judged to be fair. You know, like the article mentioned...
All you need is an objective requirement for how districts are determined. Besides, gerrymandering could happen with just ideological differences in the total absence of parties.
That's completely untrue. You seem to misunderstand the entire issue.
Imagine 3 districts in an area split 55-45 Dem to Rep. If you draw the
lines so that 2 districts are (D to R) 40-60 splits, that leaves the other at
85-15, you
guarantee two Republican representatives and one Democrat. If everything were
evenly split-up, then there would be 3 Democrats. Gerrymandering COMPLETELY
undoes the democratic system. It's a primary issue in our system and 100%
voting turn-out would do NOTHING to stop it.
The extra 42% of voters are voting within lines already drawn. So the lines will continue to achieve their effect and keep the people who drew them in power.
Because if everyone voted, it would be prohibitively expensive to gerrymander down to small areas such as individual city-blocks. You may have a generally Republican area but a small area/block within would be Democrat because of (say) a respected church leader, for example.
Also, older people vote at much higher percentages than the young and are usually much more settled. If everyone voted, then gerrymandering would have to deal with a population much more in-flux, and the partisan areas would be much harder to identify and maintain.
If you had 1,000 people voting, it would be very easy to gerrymander; 330M people not so much.
"Because if everyone voted, it would be prohibitively expensive to gerrymander down to small areas such as individual city-blocks. "
Citation needed.
This is honestly a pretty trivial ILP problem.
Certainly you realize they already know each individual voter's political affiliation if they've declared one or votedin primaries?
The data set also includes their address,etc.
I've seen the data they used.
Heck, we were the only ones who asked the data providers to not include people's names or other PII (we just wanted to map street segments to political districts), and they pretty much laughed and said nobody had asked for that before.
OP actually has some sound reasoning in reply to parent comment. I'm not sure how convinced I am without evidence. Also stopping gerrymandering is way more politically feasible than mandatory voting.
Their argument isn't sound. Gerrymandering already provides extremely complex districts that are close to as ludicrous as considering particular city blocks. It's not an all-or-nothing thing. It's not like the 42% of non-voters are a random mix of people in such a randomly placed geography that it would hamper the efforts to gerrymander. Instead, we have every reason to believe that the non-voters are still segregated and partisan enough to be identifiable for gerrymandering. And the gerrymandering needs only to be partially effective to have a significant impact.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Citizens_Redistrict...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_11_(200...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_20_(201...