The Supreme Court discussed my research on gerrymandering: some misconceptions

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/06/the-supreme-court-discussed-my-research-on-gerrymandering-there-were-some-misconceptions/

by clarkevans • 9 years ago

180 183 9 years ago

washingtonpost.com

djrogers• 9 years ago

I think the author may be getting a bit too defensive of his work here - not that he doesn't have a right to defend it, but he may be seeing attacks on it where they don't really exist.

It's exceedingly common for Supreme Court justices to ask controversial questions they think/know others will have, regardless of their own opinions - many times you will see them ask questions or dig in to areas that are in direct contrast to their leanings.

The reasons for this are two-fold. First, these are Supreme Court Justices; their opinions become law, and they have a responsibility to understand both sides on an argument. Second, they understand that it's best for the court and the country if controversial/questionable things are brought up and addressed in session rather than debated endlessly after their decisions are issued.

In short, don't read too much in to what questions the justices ask, or what aspects of a case they question...

relaunched• 9 years ago

Having one's work discussed by the supreme court is pretty incredible. It might just be a way to continue the conversation and raise awareness of what is undoubtedly a pretty obscure subject, that you've dedicated a significant part of your life to.

In that respect, "there were some misconceptions" seems to be the link-bait, white washed with integrity and civility.

djtriptych2• 9 years ago

This is sort of a silly argument.

While the average/composite justice might ask devil's advocate questions, most the coverage of this issue is also taking into account the individual personalities and histories of the folks asking the questions.

So, it means something different if Justice Ginsburg asks a question vs Justice Roberts.

In the age of Trump, I think it's far more dangerous to assume politicians and judges don't really mean what they say, than for this author to vigorously defend his work and opinion.

Having read the article, it's clear that Alito represented a fundamental misunderstanding of the author's research. It would be irresponsible for him not to respond and clarify.

eradicatethots2• 9 years ago

Probably it’s the job of whoever he was asking to correct him, not he himself?

stevenwoo4• 9 years ago

On examination of the evidence, the motive for a questioning supreme court justice is leaning to supporting the other side.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-justice-kennedys-s...

jessriedel2• 9 years ago

It's a surprisingly modest lean:

That data shows that Kennedy is no different from the rest of the court: You don’t want to be on the receiving end of his questions. When Kennedy votes for the respondent (which would be the Wisconsin Democrats, in this case) he directs 93.3 words to them (57.5 percent of his speech). When he votes against the respondent, he directs 102.0 words to them (61.1 percent of his speech).

Tasboo• 9 years ago

The questions a justice asks can often be an indication of where they stand on an issue. It's a way for them to tell the other justices their beliefs. If Alito is spouting off misleading or incorrect facts, then this person should feel compelled to defend their work.

sukilot6• 9 years ago

That's true for the statements justices make, not the questions. The two appear together in oral arguments

dcow4• 9 years ago

This is, in a nutshell, both why I love hackernews and what's so frustrating about discussing a topic these days. It's impossible to explore something you may totally disagree with without people generally reducing that exploration to a proxy for your worldview and consequently making character judgements or finding a way to get offended to the point where the identity politics card gets played and you get labeled a bigot for some conclusion you never supported but was obviously present in the undercurrents of your questions. The Supreme Court judges aren't special in that respect. Anyone should be allowed to question and explore a topic without having to issue trigger warnings or generally be expected to manage the "visceral" response their questions might evoke from a bystander observing the discussion or even the participants. The way you handle input into your personal biological process is your responsibility not mine. And society does not exist to protect you from malicious input, although you are free to choose networks where the chances frequency of receiving such input is relatively low.

cbhl• 9 years ago

This is tricky because there are lots of people who "ask questions" just to avoid admitting that they are a bigot.

If you are genuinely seeking new information, great! But you should do your homework first, which includes finding the right person to ask the question to.

pjc502• 9 years ago

However, if you're saying things which are indistinguishable from "malicious input", don't be surprised if you're flagged as malicious.

what's so frustrating about discussing a topic these days
you get labeled a bigot

You've just said in your own post that if a topic or the way it's discussed upsets someone, that's their problem. So the fact that you find this stuff frustrating is your problem, no?

eduren2• 9 years ago

One prerequisite to having those sorts of meaningful exploratory discussions is trust between the participants. When I was a member of my college's debate team, there were plenty of times I had to not only explore distasteful viewpoints, but also defend them. But because all participants (debaters, judges, audience) were participating in a structured activity there was less fear that my words would be tied to my worldview.

But in general social contexts, there are vastly different rules. When it comes to dealing with possibly distasteful words or actions, then the safest assumption is that the speaker means what he says (walks like a duck...)

Now, whether that has always been as apparent, I can't say. I didn't live in the golden years before the internet. But I don't like the automatic assumption that "these days" are somehow incapable of fostering well-intentioned rhetoric.

jancsika2• 9 years ago

Anyone should be allowed to question and explore a topic without having to issue trigger warnings or generally be expected to manage the "visceral" response their questions might evoke from a bystander observing the discussion or even the participants.

That's a non-sequitur.

The author is a researcher responding to statements he read/heard from a justice who isn't an expert in that particular field. His main point is the premises underlying the justice's questions reveal a misconception, quite apart from the justice's intent. He's also addressing a general audience in a newspaper, not the Supreme Court, so his intent to clarify misconceptions without regard to the Supreme Court justice's method of inquiry is perfectly reasonable.

Furthermore, each argument the author puts forward is not a "visceral response", but instead is supported by links to research. The only thing that could conceivably be different if the quoted justice were, say, Ginsburg, is the author writing a clause opining that she was probably playing devil's advocate.

But to shoehorn "trigger warnings", "identity politics", and false labels of bigotry into that discussion is as silly as talking about how the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.

cirgue• 9 years ago

reducing that exploration to a proxy for your worldview and consequently making character judgements or finding a way to get offended to the point where the identity politics card gets played

The problem with the internet is that you only get one comment to say who you are and what you believe. No one knows what else you think about the world, no one knows if you're trolling or for real, and no one can see you as a flesh-and-blood person with a perspective distinct from others unless they go out of their way to. They just see a string of text in among a bunch of other strings of text and react to it.

sukilot6• 9 years ago

Why do "identity-politics"-politics people drag "identity-politics" into every conversation?

jshevek2• 9 years ago

Historically, it seemed to me that many teachers (at all levels) took pains to prepare students to handle disagreement in a healthy way.

More recently, it seems that our culture has changed, and that students are being not just indulged, but even encouraged to respond in the unfortunate manner that you describe.

maxxxxx• 9 years ago

The same happens often when you report something to top management. I have been in meetings where the top guys took something I wrote and drew the totally wrong conclusions without me having the opportunity to clarify.

It can be frustrating but i guess that's how hierarchical organizations work.

lern_too_spel• 9 years ago

It becomes an issue if the justice writes this misunderstanding of the research into their opinion. I think the researcher is merely trying to get their story out ahead of that possibility, just in case.

illumin8• 9 years ago

The problem is that a supreme court justice, Samuel Alito, with a conservative agenda, is cherry-picking older papers that relied on research from 1970-1990, before partisan gerrymandering really picked up steam, and using that to try and muddle the waters.

Supreme court justices are supposed to be impartial - this is why the statue of justice has a blindfold on. It's frankly abhorrent that we have such partisan hacks in this role.

erentz2• 9 years ago

In this era, the whole idea of having many small winner take all districts is the problem. Gerrymandering is small by comparison and removing gerrymandering won’t result in much change.

The solution is to moved to STV and expanding the size of districts to elect 3 to 5 representatives instead.

stevenwoo4• 9 years ago

In this particular case in Wisconsin it was so egregious that the idea that gerrymandering as exploited here wouldn't make a difference is ludicrous.

How would you answer Sotomayor's question?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...

erentz2• 9 years ago

My answer would obviously be there is none. You may have misread my comment as some defense of Gerrymandering when clearly it isn't. Gerrymandering is a byproduct of a broken concept: having tiny little districts in a world where people live in one, work in another, eat lunch in a different district, visit their parents in a fourth district, etc. This made sense 200 years ago, but not today. And any fix to Gerrymandering doesn't overall make a dent in the problem of fair representation.

My counter-question might be something like:

"Could you tell me what difference fixing these individual cases of Gerrymandering would make to outcomes across our congress as a whole over the past 20 years? What helps our democracy more, fixing the technical problem of gerrymandering but not improving representation, or removing the technical feasibility of gerrymandering to exist and so doing provide a fix to the problem of representation?"

walshemj2• 9 years ago

STV has its uses but larger multi rep constituencies 1 breaks the relationship between voter and politician and 2 allows extremist parties to act as king makers see the DUP in the UK and much more so in Europe

tspiteri• 9 years ago

The DUP as king makers in the UK has nothing to do with STV; in fact it is an example of king makers with no STV. There are no STV or multi rep constituencies in British general elections. (In Northern Ireland, STV is used for local elections, but that's something else.)

criddell2• 9 years ago

Is there any reason to not remove gerrymandering?

creaghpatr• 9 years ago

Lack of an apolitical alternative.

andrewla• 9 years ago

This is a complicated question, because it isn't defining what the alternative is.

Redistricting is the process of setting the boundaries of districts. This has to be done for two principle reasons:

1. To adjust for population changes over time. This is undisputed.

2. It can be argued that this also makes sense to group together areas that have similar concerns -- in an extreme example, separating primarily agricultural districts from primarily urban districts. This is relatively uncontroversial.

Gerrymandering is a term that describes a third reason:

3. Redistricting with the intent of producing a bias towards a particular party. This is pretty uncontroversially considered bad.

It's difficult to prove that this is happening; that's what this whole case is about, or at least a subset of it. Namely, to establish the "efficiency gap" as a metric on a state-wide basis for saying whether the redistricting is trying to do #3 in the guise of doing #2.

Many proposed solutions to the redistricting problem attempt to take some basic heuristic and apply it in an objective way, but although it's possible to solve #1 pretty easily, solving #2 is inherently subjective and that's where the wiggle room for #3 is created.

trendia5• 9 years ago

The efficiency gap fails to guarantee or even optimize compactness, yet many gerrymandered districts are "thin slices" or strange shapes. (one simple defition of compactness is the ratio of perimeter^2/area)

What the author fails to do is explain why the efficiency gap is better than district compactness. If they are used together, then in what way are the two measures weighted? If not, why should we pick efficiency over compactness?

It should seem obvious that these two methods would result in different districts, but which mwthod to use is more a matter of personal values than objectivity.

weeksie2• 9 years ago

That's because compactness doesn't actually tell you anything about unfair voting, demographics, party representation, etc. . . . A district can be shaped like a busted IUD and still be perfectly fair and that's precisely why the efficiency gap is so much better at identifying gerrymandered districts. The gap shows the percentage of wasted votes, which is pretty much all that matters.

PhineasRex• 9 years ago

The efficiency gap is just a measure of the actual effect of gerrymandering in an election, it doesn't say anything about how to draw a district for future elections.

Compactness tells us nothing about the effects of gerrymandering. Less compact districts correlate with more gerrymandering but that doesn't tell us whether that gerrymandering was effective. Compactness could be a useful tool to limit the effects of gerrymandering when drawing districts.

ClayShentrup• 9 years ago

Here's a solution.

https://youtu.be/kUS9uvYyn3A

guelo2• 9 years ago

Republicans used their state-level gains from the Obama backlash in 2010 to implement extreme gerrymandering and capture Congress for a decade. But now that Democrats are set to gain from a Trump backlash leading up to the 2020 census all of a sudden there's a lot of movement to neutralize gerrymandering nationwide. I'm probably seeing conspiracy theories where there are none, but conservatives have always played a much better strategical long game working the refs, so to speak, to maintain power. Starting with the national-level gerrymandering from the 19th century where we ended up with bullshit states like Wyoming that permanently tip the scales in their favor.

wpietri3• 9 years ago

I was skeptical at the claims of extreme gerrymandering, but it really is shocking. E.g., this rendering of Wisconsin from 2008-2012:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

In 2008, Republicans had 44% of the votes and 47% of the seats. In 2012, they had 47% of the votes and 61% of the seats.

sumeno• 9 years ago

The movement to neutralize gerrymandering isn't coming from the Republicans so I don't think there is a conspiracy here

vanattab2• 9 years ago

Bullshit states? What is that? Is that just a state that does not constantly vote the way you would prefer?

guelo2• 9 years ago

Tiny states that were created specifically to gain conservative senators.

sukilot6• 9 years ago

Wyoming is a low population that gets 3.6 as much voting power per capita as California. Parent should have included Vermont alongside Wyoming for partisan balance, though.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_w...

j_s3• 9 years ago

Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with Geometry | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252 (Feb 2017)

What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751953 (Jul 2017)

Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group – Tufts University | http://sites.tufts.edu/gerrymandr/

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...

(re-post of mailing list link)

edit: To be clear, I don't have a pony in this race; I just believe the info and opportunity is important and may reach members of its intended audience here. The July article dug into the reasoning behind the efficiency gap and pursuit of mathematical models:

The efficiency gap is an elegant way to quantify the extent of partisan gerrymandering. But more than that is needed to win a case. The challenged plan must also be more biased than other maps, inconsistent with the state’s spatial patterns, and durable in its effects. And these elements can only be established by additional studies.

Another HN user shared a higher-level summary I will try to TL;DR here:

paulmd: SCOTUS turns based on which side of the bed Kennedy wakes up on (on most issues). [...] mathematicians heard [Kennedy might be open to striking gerrymandering down] And now the court cases are working their way back up to SCOTUS, only with the academic models that Kennedy has indicated he wants. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753909

trendia5• 9 years ago

Thanks for posting this. The efficiency gap completely ignores geometry.

jpfed3• 9 years ago

But why consider geometry itself to be important? Isn't geometry a mere proxy for something else that's desirable?

My own suspicion is this: that districting is an act of partitioning the social graph. The weights of this graph are not necessarily "who socializes with who" but rather "to what extent do these people share common interests". It is not necessarily the case that regions characterized by people of common interests will be shaped in ways that we can express easy geometric criteria for.

sukilot6• 9 years ago

Why does this project need research mathematicians to study simple statistical problems that have known solutions. It seems that they are recruiting "mathematicians just to provide an aura of authority to their work, in the one field where results can always speak for themselves.

j_s3• 9 years ago

simple statistical problems that have known solutions

Can you please share the key terms allowing further research of the known solutions?

ghaff• 9 years ago

Because they’re not in fact simple problems?

weeksie2• 9 years ago

Weird geometry is at best a flawed heuristic for gerrymandering. There are good reasons for oddly shaped districts (coastlines, natural features, "logical" constituencies in an odd layout, etc. . . .)

Some of the geometric approaches gloss around this stuff but none do what the efficiency gap does: actually identify unfair "wasted" votes.

The exciting thing about efficiency gap is exactly how unambiguous it is which makes it GREAT for basing a law on.

rayiner• 9 years ago

I don't think I agree with the author's characterization of Justice Alito's questions. The transcript is here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr....

The first quote comes from page 61-62:

JUSTICE ALITO: You paint a very dire picture about gerrymandering and its effects, but I was struck by something in the seminal article by your expert, Mr. McGhee, and he says there, "I show that the effects of party control on bias are small and decay rapidly, suggesting that redistricting is at best a blunt tool for promoting partisan interests."

The author edits out the italicized portion, but that's probably what Justice Alito was focused on.

The second point is addressed at pages 42-44. Justice Alito states:

And then a year later you bring this suit and you say: There it is, that is the constitutional standard. It's been finally - after 200 years, it's been finally discovered in this paper by a young researcher, who concludes in the end -- this is the end of his paper -- after saying symmetry and responsiveness have shown to be -- looked to be inappropriate, "The measure I have offered here, relative wasted votes, is arguably" - arguably -- "a more valid and flexible measure of -- of partisan -- of partisan gerrymandering."
Now, is this -- is this the time for us to jump into this? Has there been a great body of scholarship that has tested this efficiency gap? It's full of questions.

The author's response misses the point. Law is not science. It iterates, but it's not free to change the rule every year to get incrementally better results. What's at stake in this case is nothing less than peoples' right to self determination. Both on the side of each person's vote counting fairly and equally, but also on the side of elected, sovereign state governments being permitted to run their elections without undue federal meddling.

It's one thing to say that this standard is better than what's come before. But that's not what the Justices care about. They want a rule they can carve into stone and leave in place for decades if not centuries hence.

I happen to think that the Supreme Court should affirm the district court's invalidation of Wisconsin's redistricting plan. But Justice Alito was asking questions that needed to be asked.

wpietri3• 9 years ago

Regarding the "small and decays rapidly" bit, it appears that, at best, Alito didn't know what he was talking about: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fake-news-comes-to-t...

mikeyouse2• 9 years ago

Right. And the commenter that you're replying to coincidentally left the next paragraph off of the WaPo article:

The paper referenced by Alito drew on data from the 1970s through the 1990s. At that point, the impact of gerrymandering was, in fact, relatively small. I have since extended the analysis with more recent data, and the results indicate that the effect of gerrymandering is now much larger. In fact, the size and scale of partisan gerrymandering has accelerated rapidly in just the last two redistricting cycles, as voters have become more committed to their parties and the tools for drawing gerrymanders have become more sophisticated.

countryslicker• 9 years ago

Perhaps it would help you to look at who appealed to the Supreme Court. If you want to defend "sovereign state governments being permitted to run their elections without undue federal meddling" you should look at the decision of the highest court in the state of Wisconsin. Which argument actually represents the voice of the state?

mikeyouse2• 9 years ago

This is problematic since Wisconsin's Supreme Court is deeply corrupt largely due to the same forces that this case is examining.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-the-supreme-cou...

ouid• 9 years ago

As the author has mischaracterized Alito's intent, you have similarly mischaracterized the stakes. The peoples self-determination is the subject of the case, but it is not under any sort of existential threat from it. Not even close.

_petronius• 9 years ago

I find it really interesting that there's no political will in the US to create a non-partisan body like the UK's Boundary commissions in the US. Even if just for congressional districting, it would be a huge improvement over the current state of affairs. (I get that the US is huge, and in general there is a tendency to delegate these sorts of things to states for various reasons both political and practical, but it would seem to be a a straightforward if not easy solution to this issue.)

emodendroket3• 9 years ago

The party in power gets to set the districts which then keep them in power, so from a purely self-interested perspective such a thing would enjoy support mostly from people in no position to implement it.

sukilot6• 9 years ago

Most states have a system for citizen initiatives, though.

s73ver_5• 9 years ago

Districting is left to the States, so it would have to be a State thing. That said, California does have such a commission for setting districts. Given that most of the state legislators were upset at their results, and that they ended up having incumbents have to go against one another, I think they did a decent job.

r00fus• 9 years ago

There is at a state level - see how California moved to non-partisan primaries (jungle primaries) and non-partisan redistricting board.

The party in power (Democrats) agreed to this several years ago despite being the majority. The result ended up being that they got a subsequent supermajority, because I guess CA is really progressive/liberal in aggregate.

dragonwriter8• 9 years ago

The party in power (Democrats) agreed to this several years ago

No, they were both adopted by citizen initiative, and the California Democratic Party opposed both (the Republican Party supported the redistricting one, all six of California’s ballot-qualified parties opposed the jungle primary, which got put on the ballot as part of a deal to pass a budget back when the supermajority budget requirement made holding the budget hostage a regular occurrence.)

dragonwriter8• 9 years ago

I find it really interesting that there's no political will in the US to create a non-partisan body like the UK's Boundary commissions in the US.

Several US states have bodies like that (nonpartisan, of course, doesn't mean the members and the people setting criteria don't have political preferences that influence what they do, and there is no non-distorting way to assign single-member districts.)

The US as a whole does not because the US is a federal and not unitary state, and there is little appetite for transferring the detailed regulation of elections to the federal government.

emodendroket3• 9 years ago

Maybe I'm way off-base here, but I find it highly unlikely that Samuel Alito is going to rule in favor of reining in gerrymanders regardless of what he reads, and it seems much more likely that this is post-hoc reasoning on his part.

phailhaus6• 9 years ago

The efficiency gap is calculated by taking the number of net wasted votes and dividing it by the number of total votes. Every vote for a losing party in a district is wasted, as is every vote for the winning party over 50% + 1.

This metric was very convincing to me until I noticed one thing: if a district election is split 75%-25%, then it seems that the net wasted votes is 0. But a state where every district is split 75-25 is clearly heavily gerrymandered! Am I missing something?

smeyer3• 9 years ago

I don't think you're understanding the calculation correctly. If a district election is 75-25, then the wasted votes is 24 (75 minus the 51 required to win). I believe the computation of net wasted votes comes from looking across several districts.

Here's an example from another article:

Suppose, for example, that a state has five districts with 100 voters each, and two parties, Party A and Party B. Suppose also that Party A wins four of the seats 53 to 47, and Party B wins one of them 85 to 15. Then in each of the four seats that Party A wins, it has 2 surplus votes (53 minus the 51 needed to win), and Party B has 47 lost votes. And in the lone district that Party A loses, it has 15 lost votes, and Party B has 34 surplus votes (85 minus the 51 needed to win). In sum, Party A wastes 23 votes and Party B wastes 222 votes. Subtracting one figure from the other and dividing by the 500 votes cast produces an efficiency gap of 40 percent in Party A’s favor.

https://newrepublic.com/article/118534/gerrymandering-effici...

snarf213• 9 years ago

He is saying, if you could gerrymanderer every district at 75-25 the gap would be 0 even though it would be likely that couldn't happen without being heavily gerrymandered.

I think all districts being 75-25 is not really possible based on how communities grow and group together socially and economically.

snarf213• 9 years ago

What you are saying is true. However, it is probably hard to find a real example of being to divide a state (e.g.) into X groups that all have that 75-25 mix. Normally, the city vs country or ethnic groupings will leave certain areas in opposite mixes.

The gerrymandering that usually happens is that the group in charge wants to win 3/4 of the X seats at a small percentage like 60-40 and lose 1/4 of the X seats by a huge margin like 90-10. This would give them a huge seat advantage since they own most of the seats. In this case, the gap would be huge proving deliberate gerrymandering.

phailhaus6• 9 years ago

It doesn't matter if it's unlikely, the point is that the efficiency gap is being proposed as a measure of partisan gerrymandering, but it clearly does not do what it claims because it thinks a state with all districts split 75-25 is fair. But it's not: one party is getting 25% of the votes but 0% of the seats.

mjw10072• 9 years ago

Consider a state with twelve districts: six 75-25 A-B, six 75-25 B-A. Votes are even, seats are even; the state isn't gerrymandered.

So it isn't the case that a state where every district is split 75-25 is necessarily heavily gerrymandered.

On the other hand, if all twelve districts are 75-25 A-B then it seems like B has three fewer seats than it deserves, which does suggest that that definition of an efficiency gap is missing something.

phailhaus6• 9 years ago

Yeah, it seems like the metric can't tell the difference between the two situations...

a_t48• 9 years ago

Also interested to hear.

maxerickson• 9 years ago

It's not a district level measure. It is a measure of how a district plan affects the statewide outcome.

The worked example in the definition section of the paper lays it out pretty clearly:

http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

If you take 3 districts, with 2 going to A and 1 going to B, 300 votes at 75-25 would be split into 175 and 125. That's a reasonable outcome, the majority took 2 seats, the minority gets approximately proportional representation.

Compare to 300 votes going 51-49 (the most extreme efficiency gap). The ~1/2 minority gets 0 representation (153 vs 147 for that election).

indubitable3• 9 years ago

I never understand why at large proportional voting systems are never even considered. Even without gerrymandering, district based plurality elections are an extremely flawed system. Imagine we have a perfectly well distributed state - 35% democrat, 30% republican, 20% libertarian, 15% green. And we draw up perfectly fair lines for our 10 representatives. And this state now has their election. What any person would rationally expect would be about 3.5 democratic representatives, 3 republican representatives, 2 libertarian representatives, and about 1.5 green representatives. Instead we get 100% democratic representatives as they get a plurality of votes in each district. 35% of the support, no gerrymandering whatsoever, and 100% of the seats. I don't see how anybody can find this system defensible, let alone desirable.

And this is even more true now a days where geographic vicinity to a representative doesn't really mean much of anything. In the times these laws were drawn up good chunks of the population would have known their representatives personally, or at worst have a very minimal number of degrees of separation. So there would be some good argument for having geographically close representatives. In today's society we're very disconnected from our representatives, physically and metaphorically. There's no intimacy between constituent, so much as we can even be considered constituents anymore, and representative. They're simply the person we send our letters to and whom gets to respond with focus tested form letters.

brianolson• 9 years ago

All it takes is an amendment to a state constitution to change how one of the houses of its legislature is elected. Sounds lovely. Can even do this by direct democracy ballot initiative in a handful of states, let's do it!

vanattab2• 9 years ago

This is simply not true. The us constitution demands geographical representation of the House. State constitutions can not change this only us constitutional amendment can.

Edit: After rereading the parent again I think he might be talking about the state house not us house.

theseatoms2• 9 years ago

Sounds like a great way for a state to make itself politically irrelevant at the national level.

tormeh• 9 years ago

Most states already are irrelevant. Your vote in US elections don't count unless you live in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, or Wisconsin.

rndmize• 9 years ago

Agreed. There's been some movement towards better voting systems, but proportional voting seems consistently to be bottom of the barrel of priorities.

http://www.fairvote.org/ - Promotes IRV, and I think they were in favor of proportional representation, but I can't seem to find the pages now (go figure).

http://www.equal.vote/ - Promotes a customized score voting system, which seems more solid than IRV from my reading, but no mention of proportional representation.

It's too bad, really, I'd be hugely in favor if something like this came up in a CA statewide ballot/proposition.

stonesixone2• 9 years ago

Proportional representation is definitely a big part of FairVote's agenda. They have a bill in Congress right now around electing members of Congress from multi-member districts using STV -- of which IRV is the single-winner variant. It is called the Fair Representation Act:

http://www.fairvote.org/the_fair_representation_act_has_been...

sdenton4• 9 years ago

Geographical representation means that Congress critters have direct responsibility to a well defined set of constituents. So you can't make up for closing a factory on one side of the state by making new friends on the other side of the state.

Furthermore, you have to decide which reps stay on when an election reduces the number of reps. Who makes that choice? In parliamentary systems, the party does. But in the US, elections are (mostly for the worse, imho) ultimately about the individual representative: voters have a chance to say 'THIS guy is an asshole' and vote him out, instead of giving the party discretion as to whether to drop the entrenched asshole or kick out the newcomer...

infogulch• 9 years ago

You wouldn't decide that at the next election?

scythe• 9 years ago

Districts are popular when they work because local concerns may be divergent from state concerns, particularly in localities where the politics are at odds with the state as a whole, such as (conservative) eastern Oregon or (liberal) Atlanta, Georgia. While Oregon or Georgia might elect a contrarian representative in a PR election, such representative might not be as satisfying of a choice to residents of those districts.

I think the easiest "trial run" for proportional voting in the US is using two-winner elections (preferably Schulze but maybe traditional STV) to elect Senators, because this doesn't require any changes in representation. Unfortunately this is subject to game-theoretic problems because it tends to make the Senatorial output of a state less polarized (California might have one Republican and one Democrat instead of two Democrats), which could result in a political swing towards those states without proportional Senators (Wyoming might still elect two Republicans with FPTP).

dragonwriter8• 9 years ago

I think the easiest "trial run" for proportional voting in the US is using two-winner elections (preferably Schulze but maybe traditional STV) to elect Senators

The easiest trial run would be at the state level. Making each states Senators part of the same class instead of being from two of the three separate classes would require a Constitutional Amendment, since it would change the terms of some sitting Senators to something longer or shorter than the Constitutional 6-year terms.

It also (presuming Senate terms aren't changed besides what is necessary for transition) would mean each state would have six years between elections for the Senate rather than alternating 2- and 4-year intervals.

Unfortunately this is subject to game-theoretic problems because it tends to make the Senatorial output of a state less polarized (California might have one Republican and one Democrat instead of two Democrats), which could result in a political swing towards those states without proportional Senators (Wyoming might still elect two Republicans with FPTP).

This can be mitigated by increasing the number of Senators per state; even 3/state would probably make it a non-issue, it would make 2/1 splits common initially, so you wouldn't have most states even with the others 2/0.

bmm6o• 9 years ago

On the flip side, having each representative tied to a particular locality makes sense from a service delivery standpoint. If there are potholes in your street, you contact the city council member from your district. And if they aren't responsive to your needs, you vote for a replacement. I think it's a mistake to think that locality doesn't matter just because of improvements in transportation and communication.

durgiston3• 9 years ago

Several US states have in fact had a various times at-large representatives (most notably Hawaii and New Mexico since the time they were admitted into the Union). In 1967, the Single-Member Districting Mandate (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c) was passed to mandate geographically based single-member districts. One reason it was passed was because of fears that southern states would use at-large districts to dilute the black vote. The other is that at the time, Indiana was under court-order to elect all 11 of its representatives at-large unless it could come up with a satisifactory districting plan. This was an attempt by Congress to claw back some power from the judiciary after the 1962 Baker case declaring the one-person/one-vote principle that districts must be of roughly equal population. I think that it is an interesting debate and definitely doesn't get talked about enough (or at all!) in school.

ykler• 9 years ago

This is very interesting. Why was it thought that at-large districts would dilute the black vote? Blacks were a minority in every southern state, I believe, so naively one would think that they would stand to benefit from at-large districts and suffer from gerrymandering. The only way I can think this might not happen is if the plan were to only have a very small number of the representatives (like one) be at-large, but presumably the relevant proposal should be to have all representatives be elected on an at-large basis (?)

TheCoelacanth3• 9 years ago

Interesting. I had always thought that moving to a proportional system would require a Constitutional amendment, which seems like a virtually impossible bar to clear, but if that law is constitutional, would Congress also be able to mandate that all states elect their representatives at-large using proportional representation?

nathancahill• 9 years ago

At the risk of devolving the thread into political flamebait, the issue isn't geographic vicinity or physical and metaphorical disconnect. It's a financial disconnect: the money funding representatives comes outside the constituency. All of the other issues you described stem from that.

See: The refusal of representatives to hold town halls. They literally don't represent their constituents anymore.

durgiston3• 9 years ago

This is a different issue. No reason we can't also fix gerrymandering. Also, while outside money certainly is an issue, there is still research showing the limited effectiveness of money in politics. It only goes so far, whereas siloing opposing voters can be at least as effective, and more permanent.

mtgx• 9 years ago

Indeed. This is what FairVote has been fighting for in the past 5+ years, and it's already making some progress:

http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation

glaugh• 9 years ago

Germany has a very clever system of electing representatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Germany#Vo...

1. You vote both for an individual in your district and for a party.

2. Individuals win via a plurality of their district, like in the US

3. The rest of the Bundestag is filled up from party lists so that as much as possible the final proportion of parties matches proportion of party votes.

Applying it to your example and doubling the representative count, there would be 10 directly elected Democratic representatives. The rest would be distributed proportionately among Republican, Libertarian, and Green.

In practice you don't actually get the directly elected seats all coming from one party, so in reality you end up with a roughly 35%/30%/20%/15% breakdown in the end.

That way you can have some direct representation of your region, which I'd assert has some utility, without sacrificing proportional "accuracy".

(I'm skipping a couple subtleties here, but that's the gist as I understand it.)

chongli• 9 years ago

Doesn't this create a two tier system where the directly elected representatives hold a proper mandate and those on the party list are relegated to the back seats of power?

dragonwriter8• 9 years ago

I never understand why at large proportional voting systems are never even considered.

Party-list proportional systems reduce the accountability of individual representatives to the general electorate, transferring that accountability to those setting the party list.

You can get much better proportionality than single member districts provide without abandoning direct accountability (e.g., by using STV or a similar system in districts of, say, 5 representatives.)

The Supreme Court discussed my research on gerrymandering: some misconceptions

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