How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/how-to-get-rid-of-gerrymandering

by lkrubner • 4 years ago

275 403 4 years ago

demodexio.substack.com

penneyd• 4 years ago

There is no political will to do anything whatsoever about gerrymandering. Sad state of affairs.

sky_rw• 4 years ago

Of course not. Both parties use it at all levels of government. Getting rid of it only helps non-politicians, ergo politicians will never support it (unless they are losing).

hannasanarion3• 4 years ago

Assuming you're talking an an American context, is is absolutely not true that "both parties use [gerrymandering] at all levels of government".

The US Democratic party has a national policy of non-gerrymandering at all levels of government. Maryland had a Democratic gerrymander in the 00s, but it was exchanged for a fair map in 2011.

The US Republican party, on the other hand, has a national policy of gerrymandering as much as possible. The national committee hired gerrymandering consultant Thomas Hofeller to draw Republican-maximizing maps for every state in 2009, and used those maps as the backbone of their REDMAP plan to seize permanent control of every state through extreme gerrymandering.

Loughla2• 4 years ago

When the party in power gets to decide how the lines are drawn, there is zero incentive to do anything to fix it.

I think the solution is really, really easy. Treat politicians like kids.

One gets to draw the lines, but they have to draw several different versions, that are at least XX% different, in terms of voter groupings. Then the other gets to pick which one gets used.

And when they can't get along, I get to send them to the naughty step.

rdw2• 4 years ago

This is written in such a way that it seems like it makes sense, but it ultimately takes its conclusion as an axiom and is thus essentially meaningless.

Gerrymandering is to draw districts according to political party affiliations. So of course if you only divide up your districts by political party affiliation (in rather extreme ways) you will discover that doing so doesn't lead to stable political systems. No shit, that's the problem with gerrymandering.

Any serious analysis of this problem needs to confront the realities of geographical location and migration.

kelnos4• 4 years ago

Gerrymandering is to draw districts according to political party affiliations.

That not really what it is. It's to draw districts in order to give a particular party an advantage. Usually the way to do that is not to draw them along party lines, but to mix voters of different affiliations in the same district such that your party comes out with a majority in as many districts as possible.

rdw2• 4 years ago

The practice of using political party affiliation as a criteria at all for drawing district borders inevitably leads to gerrymandering. This part of the article does seem apparent, which is why the solution, to _not_ do that, seems mysterious in its absence.

tunesmith• 4 years ago

I think this article is too absolutist in its conclusions (and its interpretation of Arrow's theorem). There are definitely ways to limit the worst effects of gerrymandering. We came close with a lawsuit from Wisconsin (I forget the details) and there was hope that Justice Kennedy was waiting for that to make it to the Supreme Court, but then he decided the other way and promptly retired.

EDIT: I'm thinking of the Efficiency Gap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote#Efficiency_gap

daenz5• 4 years ago

Congratulations, you've now created a totalitarian one-party dictatorship! The blues hold 60% of every district, so they win every district, so 100% of the national legislature is in the control of the blues, even though they only hold 60% of the vote.

I'm afraid too many people would be ok with this. There is a strong desire for "democracy" over "republic" (not a combination of the two), meaning 51% of your average voters can do whatever they want to the remaining 49%. Fundamentally, including a "republic" in the formulation means that some people get a prioritized say. I think a strong case can be made for that, but the idea itself is deeply unpopular.

jjoonathan• 4 years ago

If you donate to both sides, you can do whatever you want with 1% of the vote. Imagine the horror if the 99% could do whatever they want to the 1%!

daenz5• 4 years ago

I'm not sure how this is relevant to my point, please explain.

mastazi3• 4 years ago

I grew up learning that "republicanism" means that you are opposed to the monarchy so I'm really confused by your comment. It seems that you are using the term "republic" as an equivalent of "pluralism" or possibly of "indirect democracy"?

8ytecoder• 4 years ago

There's rule by majority and then there's individual rights. Pure democracy prioritizes majority rule and does not guarantee any right to individuals. A Republic has a constitution that usually lays out the fundamental rights of a person and laws are valid only if those rights are not violated.

daenz5• 4 years ago

I'm using "republic" here to point out that a district is acting like an elected representative.

wahern2• 4 years ago

"The United States is a republic, not a democracy" is a meme started by the John Birch Society that spread to the broader conservative movement and beyond, losing much of its coherency and substance. Now it's just become a hollow rebuttal to [often equally hollow] claims of anti-democratic policies or opinions. But those who have received the meme tend to understand "republic" as having a far more specific definition (centering on Birch Society political philosophy) than in general discourse, including historic discourse--the Founding Fathers used the terms "democracy" and "republic" more loosely, including giving republic the meaning you ascribe (which, I think, is the more correct literal definition), but also sometimes using them interchangeably or at least ambiguously.

Jensson5• 4 years ago

There is a strong desire for "democracy" over "republic" (not a combination of the two), meaning 51% of your average voters can do whatever they want to the remaining 49%.

This is the dumbest argument for first past the post, how is this better than "35% of your average voters can do whatever they want to the remaining 65%"? No matter how you count the votes you will have a winner, and that winner can abuse the loser. 51% winning just means you get the fewest number of losers, and any other protections you can get with first past the post can also be gotten in a popularity vote system. The only thing you now miss is that some votes become worth much more than other votes, instead you just have 1 person 1 vote, which I thought was the standard of modern democracy.

daenz5• 4 years ago

51% winning just means you get the fewest number of losers

That's the wrong thing to optimize for.

cato_the_elder2• 4 years ago

I'm not really an expert on the issue, but there's this suggestion that I kinda like: let people living in a district choose to vote in the adjacent districts if they want to do so. This "blurs" the arbitrary lines a bit.

Also, this is probably an unpopular opinion, but I actually kinda like gerrymandering. In the sense that I like the fact that it exposes the absurdity of counting votes and claiming that it somehow represents the voice of the people.

The outcome is clearly very dependent on what voting method is used, how the districts maps are drawn, who is eligible to vote, etc. It's all just vanity of vanities.

Loughla2• 4 years ago

it exposes the absurdity of counting votes and claiming that it somehow represents the voice of the people.

I actually 100% disagree with this sentence. I do not, honestly, believe it exposes that. My experience with people who vote is that they harangue about the "other side" gerrymandering, but when their preferred candidate wins their district, it's because voting works.

I genuinely believe people are either (a) willfully ignorant, or (b) pants-on-head idiotic when it comes to this issue.

hannasanarion3• 4 years ago

There is no "both sides" to be had here.

Republican candidates winning Staten Island sometimes is not gerrymandering.

The Republican National Committee hiring gerrymandering consultant Thomas Hofeller in 2009 to draw them maps of Wisconsin and North Carolina that will give them absolute supermajorities even if they lose the popular vote by a wide margin, and then using those supermajorities to strip incoming Democratic governors of all of their powers thus instituting permanent one-party rule forever, that's gerrymandering.

corrral3• 4 years ago

It's local lingo.

From Wikipedia:

A distinct set of definitions of the term "republic" evolved in the United States, where the term is often equated with "representative democracy."

The term "representative democracy" is typical in poli-sci circles and basically everywhere that's not the US, but I don't think that's actually the distinction the poster was looking for—some kind of constitution or other super-law that's relatively hard to change, plus strong rule of law (which is more about practices and norms than about what's written on some paper), seem much more important for preserving minority interests.

SemanticStrengh• 4 years ago

if you enable to choose districts freely this can be mass gamed.

no_protocol2• 4 years ago

Why do they need to only have single-member districts? How about having fewer districts with more members per district? It seems like Fix Gerrymandering is a solution aimed at the wrong problem when the entire problem could just be eliminated.

colechristensen6• 4 years ago

That's what the Senate is. This has neutralizing effect on tyranny of a single party by forcing that party to win in separate kinds of representation strategies.

no_protocol2• 4 years ago

It doesn't talk about a senate at all:

It is divided up into 10 districts, each of which sends one representative to the national legislature, which consists of 10 people.

They take this as a given and try to come up with convoluted ways to 'fix' the problem, when just fixing this axiom would solve it much easier.

kelnos4• 4 years ago

In the US, the Senate directly causes the tyranny of the minority that we're currently experiencing.

The House also has representation issues: since the total number of representatives in the House hasn't increased over time as population has increased, there's a "floor" on the number of per-state representatives that causes smaller states to have outsized representation.

The article doesn't really deal with any of this, though: it assumes each "district" has the same number of people in it, which isn't the case for House or Senate seats when you consider the entire country. The article is more about considering the representation within a single US state, based on its division into districts.

rtkwe6• 4 years ago

The senate is wildly antidemocratic giving power to a party just based on the amount of land/states they control. It's also effectively single winner from the party level because there are only 6 split senate delegations at this point.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

Yeah, I never understood really this district thing... Do they that often really represent only the certain area? Or would it be more sane to have larger districts? Maybe in some cases up to whole state where the winners were selected in proportional way.

Then again this would allow third parties to actually gain foothold and the corrupt duopoly can't allow that.

Also this whole electoral college thing. Why is there this idiotic winner takes all method? Why not also maybe have lists. So electors would be chosen in order of list and voters could pick a list endorsing certain candidate pair?

InitialLastName• 4 years ago

Larger districts give you less accurate representation, not more, as you lose the opportunity to granularly represent the populace. It also gives you more opportunity for individual representatives' personalities and opinions (rather than the policy interests of the electorate), and make it necessary for large interests to bribe fewer people. Lastly, larger districts (and party-defined proportional representation based on them) reduce individual regions' capacity to elect representatives who are responsive to local concerns; as much as the political commentariat would like peoples' policy preferences to be divided perfectly along party lines, that isn't how it works in real life and it risks making collaboration across party lines on any given issue more difficult (by making representatives more beholden to the party than they already are).

To some extent, I feel like Germany's system (where the legislature is elected based on local districts, but then members are added from party lists to achieve proportional balance) could be the solution that incentivizes the least political gerrymandering, but I don't have a finger on the pulse of Germany's political problems to see the drawbacks.

Why is there this idiotic winner takes all method?

So that slave states could count their slaves as 60% members of their populations for the purposes of gaining electoral votes without having to let their slaves vote.

yonran• 4 years ago

Yes. After observing San Francisco’s acrimonious supervisor redistricting last month (in which politicians and special interests lobbied the nonpartisan commission to move neighborhoods to one district or other to maintain or gain political power), this article has convinced me that the problem is single-winner district elections in the first place. Every map is flawed when only one person represents the district per election. And the solution is proportional representation where multiple people win in each election (although the exact method of proportional representation can be debated).

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfchronicle.com%2F...

rtkwe6• 4 years ago

Space partially, the US House of Reps is already pretty packed so to add enough to get to >2 members per district you'd have to add a lot. You also get into potential issues diluting power that much, with so many members things like committee memberships become the only people with real power on an individual level.

q-big2• 4 years ago

Space partially, the US House of Reps is already pretty packed so to add enough to get to >2 members per district you'd have to add a lot.

Then make the districts bigger to compensate for this effect.

dane-pgp12• 4 years ago

This article nicely explains the problem, but is a bit defeatist about the possibility of reforms that could mitigate it. To offer one reform, allow me to present the following:

Suppose in the hypothetical country, the total number of votes cast for Blue is some number "B", and the total for Violet is "V". Further suppose that the number of seats won by Blue is "C" and the seats for Violet is "W". A non-gerrymandered map would be one where B:V is approximately C:W (or at least there is no possible change to the seats result that would make C:W any closer to B:V).

My proposed reform, therefore, is that after an election, if those ratios are not as close as possible, the electoral officers would go down the list of seats that were lost by the under-represented party (from best performance to worst) and flip the result so that the under-represented party gains representation, until the ratio can't be improved any more.

Obviously this would feel hugely unfair to the voters in the districts where the result was flipped, but they should blame the people who drew the unfair map in the first place. Indeed, the incentive would be on both parties to draw districts which were most likely to produce a balanced result that doesn't need any flipping. This method has the added bonus that it would encourage parties to appeal to voters in "safe seats" just as much as "swing seats", since everyone's vote would count towards the B:V ratio.

The maths gets a little more complicated when dealing with more than 2 parties, and with independent candidates who don't belong to any party, but I don't believe these are insurmountable obstacles. Solving the problem of gerrymandering, unrepresentative legislatures, and voter apathy with this one weird trick (that doesn't involve changing the ballot papers or counting process) seems like such a big win that the cost of a few flipped seats has to be an acceptable price to pay.

quink• 4 years ago

Or you could just do IRV or multi-member electorates or any number of other things done in other more democratic countries that are at least harder to characterise as stealing votes.

dane-pgp12• 4 years ago

Like I say, my proposal allows the electorate to keep the same ballot papers, the same counting process, and the same number of seats in the legislature.

You're right, though, that if voters were prepared to sacrifice some of that familiarity, they could do much better than the system I proposed (which was somewhat inspired by the multi-member system I mentioned in another comment).

JacobThreeThree• 4 years ago

My proposed reform, therefore, is that after an election, if those ratios are not as close as possible, the electoral officers would go down the list of seats that were lost by the under-represented party (from best performance to worst) and flip the result so that the under-represented party gains representation, until the ratio can't be improved any more.

This seems like an implementation that would harm the trust in the system. If you're going to bother having representation by geography in a democratic system, it should be based purely on geography, not based on demographics within the geography.

I agree with the author of the post that the geographic element itself is the source of the issue and that there are perhaps other better ways of dealing with the "tyranny of the majority" issue that the founding fathers intended to handle via republicanism.

Jensson5• 4 years ago

Gerrymandering is very easy to fix: don't make voting districts matter that much. Have local seats in districts so they get represented, but also have popular vote seats to even out so each party gets seats corresponding to the total vote. Done, gerrymandering no longer matters enough for it to be a big deal.

dane-pgp12• 4 years ago

Yes, this is effectively the solution that Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP) offers.

The normal complaint with this is that it typically involves having closed lists of candidates who get a free ticket into parliament without any local accountability, and this is only slightly improved by having an open list system (although that requires teaching voters to mark extra ballot papers in unfamiliar ways).

Fortunately a better solution has been found and actually implemented in Baden-Württemberg, and they call it the Zweitmandat system. Basically, the "proportional seats are filled by losing candidates who won the highest proportion of votes".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zweitmandat

Jensson5• 4 years ago

Yeah, that seems reasonable. I'm all for giving more power to people to pick the candidates they want instead of having political parties handpick the last ones.

david_draco• 4 years ago

"Gerrymandering is universal in any political system that has geographic units that demand representation." A unstated assumption here is a winner-takes-all election system, which is common in the US and UK, but not other countries, where parliament is proportional, and coalitions are common. It works.

A more interesting question would be how to build incentives in a winner-takes-all election system towards reducing gerrymandering, and to discuss what it would take to change away from a winner-takes-all geographical election system.

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

"A unstated assumption here is a winner-takes-all election system"

In terms of the math, increasing the number of representatives from each district is the same as making the districts smaller. As the essay said:

"As the districts get smaller, then the size of the shift needed (to punish the previous majority party) describes the asymptote of the tangent, converging towards the reality of what the public actually wants."

Increasing the number of representatives from each district is the same thing, as the number increases, the shift needed (to punish the previous majority party) describes the asymptote of the tangent, converging towards the reality of what the public actually wants.

But there remains some distortion, however small. You eventually get into infinitesimals that have no practical impact, but it is still there. If you have districts that only have 1,000 people each, and each district elects 1,000 representatives (everyone in the district) then the distortion disappears, but if you have districts with 1,000 people, and they only elect 999 representatives, the distortion reappears, however small that might be.

Also, from the essay:

---------------------

Some nations have fine-grained representation of land but course-grained representation of ideas

Some nations have fine-grained representation of ideas but course-grained representation of land

You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.)

StillBored• 4 years ago

  You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.)

I think as one of the comments on the article mentions, that this concept is far too easily dismissed. A large part of creating a functioning democracy is actually gridlock when a strong majority can't agree. There are a _LOT_ of advantages of expanding the US house of representatives back out to not only 5k members but maybe 15-20 thousand to match the 30k-50k people per representative that the country was founded with. Starting with the fact that it would cost large organizations a _LOT_ more money to lobby them, vs the amount of lobbying that an individual could perform, and gerrymandering suddenly is a lot more difficult, a representative could actually meet all their constituents, etc.

Many of the difficulties are simply wiped out by the fact that we have computers to count votes, and the ability to record and stream multiple debates at the same time. And of course nothing says that any given representative needs to vote on smaller issues that don't affect their district/etc, and it becomes harder to have country wide parties because local ideals are allowed to express themselves.

Basically everything suddenly has the option to become finer grained, and the difficulties that presents are mostly actual advantages.

oxnrtr• 4 years ago

Agreed.

Despite the author namedropping some other places, the whole piece is struggling to gain the validity it seeks due to pretending the US is the only country on earth and no one else could have figured out some solutions.

Also, the wrong use of "gerrymandering" makes me wonder how much the author actually knows about the topic.

nitwit005• 4 years ago

The rules don't need to be perfect. The fundamental issue with gerrymandering is that we want politicians to compete by appealing to voters, rather than competing by toying with election rules.

And while I agree there are tradeoffs involved in having geographic representation, these bizarrely shaped districts don't really provide that. They don't align with any administrative or cultural borders.

Msw2423• 4 years ago

This is dumb. We could just vote for parties instead of candidates, then have the party choose representatives, or have party members vote to choose representatives to fill their slots.

Not everything is first past the poll, vote for your candidate, etc.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

Or you could have situation in between. Have people vote for candidate and share the votes between party and then rank those candidates in order of votes received.

Would mean that winners would first be the most popular and the extra votes would still go towards the party. And the unpopular in terms of votes received candidates of party wouldn't get elected.

Msw2423• 4 years ago

Basically a delegate system? Sure

bumper_crop3• 4 years ago

Live in California? The candidates for (Republican|Democratic) parties are wildly different in their ability and likelihood to do a good job. A 30 yearold candidate of the same party as a 50 yearold are going to have vastly different social networks, favors to lean on, money, appearance, etc. Picking the person is a much better choice to make than the party.

Msw2423• 4 years ago

And the people who are good at winning elections are different from the candidates who are good at governing. So you're screwed either way.

At least with parties, the members of the party get to choose the boundaries of their concerns. E.g. the working families party in NY is a powerful presence in the state democratic party, and that is in a FPTP system.

If you vote for parties based on platforms, and then parties coordinate with one another to build coalitions, then you might just end up optimizing for governance.

Not perfect, but less flawed.

mandmandam• 4 years ago

If you're going to call a system dumb, maybe at least try to get its name right. Jeeze man.

RappingBoomer• 4 years ago

gerrymandering has the potential to increase homogeneity of voting districts...more homogeneity means that the electorate is more united and can therefore force the politicians to do what the voters want.

pavlov• 4 years ago

Gerrymandering and a first-past-the-post electoral system can result in parliaments where a clear majority of all voters chose party X, yet the majority of seats are held by party Y. (There are several examples of these in the American states.)

That doesn't seem to represent "what voters want" very well.

kelnos4• 4 years ago

That only works if the elected official from a particular voting district has complete say over the law in that district, which they do not. They go on to represent their district in a larger body, which may then vote against that district's wishes.

totierne2• 4 years ago

Swiss canton? We prefer blood than clocks...

saxonww• 4 years ago

That's not what gerrymandering does. No districting scheme forces the elected representative to do what the voters want. Once they get elected, they have their term, and can vote however they want barring expulsion or recall.

Gerrymandering is where you draw up districts such that the voting power of people who won't vote for you is minimized. It doesn't have to result in homogeneous districts. The point is to maximize your party's voting power as durably as possible.

onphonenow• 4 years ago

Very quick solutions that at least drive politics towards the middle vs extremes:

Open primaries with ranked choice voting.

Top two to general.

Done.

The current model, in a "safe" dem seat (45% R / 55% D) whoever wins D primary wins everything. This means the D primary (with 20% of voters - most activist) are deciding things. Same on the right.

With open primaries, you will get 2 D's potentially in general, but now the R vote actually matters. This drives towards the middle.

Additionally RCV in the primary (ie pick 3 in order) also allows votes for less well known folks without as much wasted voting.

Another method is RCV with a multi-seat election. So you rate 5 candidates and their are 5 winners in the larger geo area. This tends to give even groups with let's say 20% makeup of voter pool a seat at the table. Traditional winner takes all does not.

chrisseaton2• 4 years ago

Open primaries

I don't get the idea of open primaries - why should someone who is not a member of a party get to vote on who the party wants to represent them?

Imagine there was a Women's Equality Party party (there is in the UK.) Should a large number of men, with no interests in women's equality, be able to come along and tell the Women's Equality Party who will represent them in an election?

birken• 4 years ago

edit: was describing a jungle primary

aidenn06• 4 years ago

Given that parties don't restrict membership in the US, in places that are majority one party, you effectively get an open primary. I'm registered as $MAJORITY_PARTY_IN_MY_DISTRICT because the primary election is essentially the only one that matters.

derbOac2• 4 years ago

I am someplace that has open primaries and nothing like you are concerned about transpires. The reason is that if you participate in one primary you lose the ability to participate in the other. In some sense the threat of each side doing it keeps people from doing it.

Also you can't really in keep people from registering for a given party, so enforcing a non open primary isn't feasible in practice.

cjsplat3• 4 years ago

The point is that the party has no intrinsic right to a slot in the general election.

The WEP can put whoever they wish up to represent them, selected however they wish, in a process funded by their party resources.

Then the primary is a voting population wide decision to winnow the field to a reasonable final competition.

A state funded primary that is locked to a party selection process is an interesting use of public funds.

silisili• 4 years ago

I can think of two reasons -

1 - Most voters are not a Republican or Democrat. So they're stuck choosing between what those at political extremes want at election time.

2 - Some cities/states will always vote R or D, pretty reliably. Choosing someone you dislike less has its advantages in such areas.

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

The current iteration of primaries, and the government paying for them, got going in the USA during the 1960s. It was the start of the populist revolt, and part of the goal was to weaken the political parties. Progressive reformers were motivated by the outcomes of struggles such as Fanny Lou Hamer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Lou_Hamer

Civil Rights leaders wondered why ultra-racist white men got to represent the Democratic Party in Mississippi, when someone like Fanny Lou Hamer seemed to have broad based support in her district. Why were ultra-racist Democrats able to make a backroom deal and nominate some staunch segregationist, instead of allowing someone to stand for the Democrats, chosen democratically?

The goal of the primaries was to weaken the political parties, which is why you might find them confusing. At the time, a number of scholars pointed out that weakening the parties would increase the influence of money, and also allow untested demagogues to step forward and become the leaders of the weakened parties. These concerns seem to have been borne out by events.

panick21_6• 4 years ago

In a voting system that is not insane a party doesn't get punished for running more then 1 person.

So you could just have 3 people from the WEP run and then voters decide.

If the party has enough power over its member to force only 1 candidate, then they can do that. However once parties get larger enforcing that is difficult and other people will just run.

abirch3• 4 years ago

I'm with you on the ranked choice voting, but I would say that the general is the duopoly. This can enable more viable parties and the death to the duopoly.

And having more representatives (districts) will help immensely as well. The current limit is capped by statute and can be changed, this would especially help counter the over-representation of unpopulated states.

drewcoo• 4 years ago

I, for one, think that extremely D and extremely D and even somewhere in the middle are all equally problematic.

As long as 3rd parties are not electable, we're stuck with some right wing, corporate-backed politician regardless of who wins.

All the talk of gerrymandering is just a partisan distraction.

pessimizer2• 4 years ago

It's also Democratic Party excuse-making. They act as if Republicans invented and have a greater propensity to gerrymander than Democrats, when they both aggressively and energetically gerrymander when they're in the position to. The constant discussion of it is to distract from Democrats being completely wiped out in state and local elections over the past 20 years, giving exclusive gerrymandering power to Republicans.

cjsplat3• 4 years ago

As soon as 3rd party candidates become viable, they will become owned by special interests also.

And calling all politicians "right wing" is pretty unclear on the concept.

Perhaps they are when compared to your opinions, but if you can't see daylight between your options you have been manipulated to extreme cynicism by corporate forces that benefit from your disengagement.

dragonwriter4• 4 years ago

Very quick solutions that at least drive politics towards the middle vs extremes

This is a very good goal if you want to replace duopoly which alienates a large number of people with monopoly which alienates a larger number of people.

What we need is almost the opposite: a system that, to the extent possible without compromising things like manageable legislature size and personal electoral accountability, provides proportional representation so that governing compromises are forced out in the open between parties in government, rather than done behind the scenes within parties so as to attempt to attain a minimal winning coalition leveraging limited substantive choices in the general election.

(Using Single Transferrable Vote, or a similar system, in small multimember districts, say 5 members per district, would do this quite well.)

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

Can you say why you were prefer STV over simple approval voting where the top 5 vote getters win? Substantial distortions are still possible with STV, and it is complicated. By contrast "50 candidates are running, the voters get 50 votes, the top 5 vote getters win" will have distortions similar to STV, but the math is simple and everyone can understand it. What benefit does STV have?

dllthomas5• 4 years ago

RCV encompasses a lot of different systems, but the most common instantiation is something resembling instant runoff, and I am skeptical that it drives towards the middle.

If we believe that the appropriate compromise is no one's first choice, the first thing IRV does is throw away any "appropriate compromise".

ChadNauseam• 4 years ago

Yep. Actually the behavior of IRV is extremely unintuitive (despite how nice it sounds). Even using very simple models that assume every voter has political opinions completely described by a 2d political compass, prefers candidates that are closer to them on the compass, and that voters are normally distributed around a central point, you get very strange behavior! Here are some diagrams that illustrate the effect: https://rangevoting.org/IEVS/Pictures.html

interestingly, IRV is not even monotonic! It's easy to construct a situation where converting people to have the same ranking as you causes you to get a candidate you like less. (The concave parts of the voronoi diagrams describe areas where this happens.) If you're curious about this, a few years back some friends and I tried to make a video describing this phenomenon: [0]. (Our editing and presentation skills are nothing to write home about but I think the video is interesting.)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m7vtt9jXpM

abirch3• 4 years ago

Most US districts are not competitive. E.g., there's an almost zero chance that AOC, MTG, Cawthorne, etc. loses in the general election. You have a higher probability of losing a primary than a general.

If a moderate of their party runs, it'd be easy for their own members to vote for the moderate as #1 ahead then #2 the more extreme person, and not for the awful evil other party person. The opposition can also vote for the moderate of the dominant party, #1, their candidate #2, and not for the aweful extremist.

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

"If we believe that the appropriate compromise is no one's first choice"

The winner in RCV will always be someone's first choice.

BeFlatXIII• 4 years ago

Why not simply run something other than FPTP in the general and eliminate primaries altogether?

yucky5• 4 years ago

Open primaries with ranked choice voting.

Primaries aren't part of the official voting process though. They're entirely defined by parties and in fact parties can completely do away with them if they want. Primaries aren't actual elections and election laws don't really apply so there is no mechanism to force them to be open.

The solution it would seem, is to do away with political parties completely. Just like George Washington suggested from day one.

macintux• 4 years ago

How do you define parties in such a way that you can effectively outlaw them? And would that not make fundraising even more important to individual candidates, when there’s no party mechanism to provide support?

theptip2• 4 years ago

I think Top-2 is a dead-end. It bakes in the assumption of parties as the ultimate power brokers, and further entrenches FPTP.

Even simpler option: implement STV. Then primaries are optional as you can essentially bake the primary candidates into the main election if you like.

I think it’s quite repugnant to offer Republicans the choice of two Democrats to vote for. (I’m not a Republican). Top-2 admits that FPTP with party primaries is broken, but declines to actually fix the problem beyond a band-aid.

lettergram2• 4 years ago

Easiest thing is to ban party affiliation in ads and on ballots

thathndude• 4 years ago

Doesn’t work very well with judges, which are elected in many states.

I like this commenters suggestion of ranked voting. Would lead to more centrist candidates.

For example, i believe that’s what we saw play out in France, essentially. Center-left Macron got most votes. Far-right Le Pen got second most votes. And far-left candidate got third most votes. Once it was down to the top 2, Macron handily won.

twic• 4 years ago

This would be an improvement, but i think it illustrates the paucity of thinking in American politics.

You shouldn't be using single-member districts at all. It's basically impossible to represent people fairly with them. You should either have proportional election of entire legislatures (or state delegations to federal ones), or at least proportional election of a smaller number of multi-member districts.

sidewndr464• 4 years ago

Enshrining the two party system in law is something that even the current power system in the US hasn't managed. By doing "top two to general" you'd be converting a de-facto duopoly into an actual duopoly.

At that point we might as well just skip the entire election process to save money and let the parties work out a power sharing agreement where it alternates every so many years.

karatinversion• 4 years ago

I don't think so – France uses this exact model, and their party system has just in the last 15 years or so transitioned out both of the former top two parties (PS and LR).

If anything, I would expect this model to reduce duopoly. An unpopular republican might be overtaken by a candidate from the libertarians in the first round, giving them a shot at victory which they could hardly get if the ghost of "wasted votes" on third-parties was haunting them.

spaced-out2• 4 years ago

Enshrining the two party system in law is something that even the current power system in the US hasn't managed. By doing "top two to general" you'd be converting a de-facto duopoly into an actual duopoly.

Just the opposite, the top two candidates, regardless of what party they're from will appear on the ballot, this would allow people to vote for a 3rd party candidate in the primary without worrying about "wasting" their vote. If the 3rd party candidate is one of the top two they'll appear in the general, if not that voter can still pick the lesser of two evils in the general.

panick21_6• 4 years ago

Ranked choice voting in general is a real bad idea. Its better then first past the post but that's it.

If you are gone change the voting system, why not just go for the much better score voting, or Star vote.

RCV leads to incredibly very strange and non-intuitive outcomes in some situations. Score voting beats it in pretty much every way while also being far, far simpler for people to actually use.

In general you need to eliminate all per-elections and make districts larger as well.

Then you are starting to approach something actually good.

samatman5• 4 years ago

The problem posed by gerrymandering is a social problem, not a math problem.

There are all kinds of geographical and legal boundaries in a country, with varying levels of affinity to them. Defining gerrymandering precisely isn't possible, it isn't even a know it when you see it thing, and in practice it's a Russell conjugation: they gerrymander, and we redistrict so that people get proper representation.

However, social problems can be solved with maths, law could require something like this to be performed after every census:

https://sites.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/uw_1034.pdf

I think this has considerable advantages, the biggest being that it's objective, the next being that just looking at a Voronoi diagram makes it clear what's going on.

This essentially removes human factors from redistricting, and says you get the Congressional district you get when the population heatmap is relaxed in the simplest way it can be into the appropriate number of partitions.

Remember there's nothing about this which is 'fair', except for the part where people could perhaps be persuaded to abide by the results.

crowbahr2• 4 years ago

Perhaps the best way to district is more about maximum contention in a race? Voroni partitioning so that the maximum number of "purple" districts are achieved makes sense to me.

SamBam4• 4 years ago

But then you're maximizing the number of "loser" voters in each district, who don't feel that their representative in government accurately represents them. Is that the goal of a representative democracy?

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

From the essay:

-------------------------

Hmm, okay, so what would be fair? Perhaps we want to give each party a fighting chance in each election? Isn't that fair?

2 districts each hold 100,000 blues

8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets

So now the violets have a 50% chance of winning 8 districts. The blues are granted two districts automatically, but that is fair, since they are more popular than the violets. Each party has some chance of winning.

However, in this model, if 1 blue voter in each district changes their mind, then the violets end up with 80% of the legislature. We’ve engineered a system that is very unstable! If Katechon is like the nation of Hungary, where a 2/3rds majority can amend the constitution, then Katechon is now vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover, much like what happened in Hungary after 2010. And that's because 8 people out of a 1,000,000 changed their vote.

zackees• 4 years ago

“Gerrymandering” is baked right into the constitution.

It’s a good thing. You want the representatives drawing the districts because they are closest to their constituents. You also don’t want random district allocation, you want the representatives to match with your constituents in a 90/10 split, not a 50/50 split where nothing gets done.

The barrels of ink used to slander redistricting is being supplied by very powerful money interests. They do this because it’s one of the last impediments to the NWO globalist government that is incrementally being setup.

The removal of representative redistricting, along with the installation of the horribly complex rank choice voting system the media elites are pushing everywhere effectively ends the American democratic experiment.

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

I am not a very powerful money interest.

tptacek3• 4 years ago

it isn't even a know it when you see it thing

I'm glad you said this. One of the more infamous gerrymanders in the US is in Chicago --- the notorious "earmuffs". You can just look at it and see that something's hinky.

But what's really happening there is that there are in fact very well-defined Latino neighborhoods in Chicago, and the earmuffs capture a bunch of them neatly: Pilsen, Little Village, Cicero, Belmont-Cragin. If you know Chicago, you know these places, and you also know what the boundary between, say, Belmont-Cragin and North Austin is like; however artificial it looks on a map, it is a real border. That these communities are where they are is also not purely happenstance: a lot of very unfortunate social engineering took place in the early-mid-20th century to put those neighborhoods (and all the other neighborhoods) where they are now.

That's not to defend gerrymandering writ large, or even necessarily the earmuffs, but just to second your point about the complexity of the problem.

shkkmo3• 4 years ago

I think a lack of fairness is a inherent problem with districting first past the post elections.

We could solve the problem by moving to a proportional system with much larger or no districts. The more proportional representatives you have per district, the less value you get for gerrymandering it as it gets harder to ignore voters.

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

As with software, whatever the real goal is should be decided and then approached directly. Any effect that is brought about as an accidental side effect of an unrelated architectural decision should be regraded as a flaw in the system.

If we want better local representation, we can strengthen local government, or create governments smaller than a city. We can eliminate geographic districts, as units that elect representatives to some higher level of government, but we can still have excellent local government.

If we want cultural representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular culture, and then vote for members of that culture.

If we want religious representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular religion, and then vote for members of that religion.

If we want racial representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular race, and then vote for members of that race.

If we want language representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as speaking a particular language, and then vote for members who also claim to speak that language.

Again, the same rule we apply to software architecture should apply here. Whatever kind of representation we regard as important, we should approach the matter directly, and not try to achieve the effect accidentally, as the side effect of some other architectural decision.

Indeed, many of the problems we see in our political system are exactly because too many goals are being overloaded on too few institutions. If this was a legacy software app, and I was brought in as a consultant to clean it up, I would immediately suggest that a dramatic increase in both encapsulation and polymorphism was needed, and could only be achieved by introducing new branches of government.

To a limited extent, I implied as much when I wrote about the division of labor and the need for highly specialized committees:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-have-politics-in-the-us...

jeherr• 4 years ago

That's likely due to the Voting Rights act which requires what they call majority-minority districts. It prohibits redistricting to disempower racial minorities. It's another complication in the whole gerrymandering debate that makes it a lot harder to solve, because it requires districts that will look gerrymandered in a lot of cases.

GavinMcG4• 4 years ago

it isn't even a know it when you see it thing, and in practice it's a Russell conjugation: they gerrymander, and we redistrict so that people get proper representation

There are absolutely situations where it is obvious, most notably when those drawing the maps say they're motivated by partisan power. The situations at issue in Rucho v. Common Cause, for example, were not ambiguous in the least.

mpalczewski• 4 years ago

The rural populations seems would not like a redistricting where every district is dominated by its largest population center. Essentially this voronoi type redistricting would push more power towards cities at the cost of rural areas.

jchanimal• 4 years ago

In the USA that is an unambiguously good thing.

samatman5• 4 years ago

Correct, as I said, it isn't fair, merely objective.

It isn't possible to get fair by drawing lines around people which are smaller than the actual sovereign boundary under discussion. You can hand that power to the government, an 'independent commission' (the government with extra steps), or an algorithm run by the government, those are your options. All outcomes will fail fairness, this has been extensively studied.

edbaskerville• 4 years ago

I agree that algorithmic redistricting based entirely on population density would be the best way to do strict single-member geographic representation. But even neutrally drawn districts give more power to the party that is less concentrated geographically.

Proportional representation solves this, but if you still value the notion that local communities should be able to have their collective power represented, then you need a solution that combines the two.

As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, multi-member districts with proportional representation are a good way to do this without needing to change the Constitution. The gist is, split states into a smaller number of larger districts, each of which gets multiple representatives. The representatives are allocated proportionally to the vote in each large district. So if the district has 5 representatives, party X gets 63% of the vote, and party Y gets 37% of the vote, then party X gets 3 members and party Y gets 2 members.

Political scientist Lee Drutman is actively promoting this approach, and recently founded Fix Our House (https://www.fixourhouse.org).

If I could rewrite the Constitution, I'd get rid of the rounding error by weighting the votes of individual members of Congress. E.g., if there were only two candidates in a district, candidate X got 60% of the vote, and candidate Y got 40% of the vote, send them both to Congress, with X getting 0.6 of a vote and Y getting 0.4 of a vote.

Of course all of this is better when combined with instant runoffs (aka ranked choice).

xahrepap• 4 years ago

I haven’t ever heard of this. Seems really interesting. Thanks.

Another thought I’ve had for a long time: why not just lift the limit on Congress? My understanding is that Congress set a law to cap it (as opposed to the constitution specifying it) Which made sense 100 or even 50 years ago when members of Congress needed to be physically present to vote in DC.

But today in a world of the internet, video conferencing, etc. it seems like that limitation is arbitrary. Much smaller districts would exists. Making gerrymandering harder. Making a the house look a lot different than the senate. It would make the House more like … a mayor who writes and votes on laws in DC instead of locally.

maxerickson• 4 years ago

Your 'rounding error' solution just moves the circus to ballot access. Here in Michigan the parties decided that since they are well organized and have gotten people on previous ballots, they should have lesser requirements for getting on future ballots, so it isn't really hypothetical that it would happen.

Just increasing the number of representatives would have some impact on gerrymandering.

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

"if you still value the notion that local communities should be able to have their collective power represented"

Your town assembly can take care of the concerns of your town.

Your regional assembly can take care of the concerns of your region.

Your National Assembly can take care of the concerns of your nation.

We can get rid of gerrymandering and still have different levels of government, each devoted to a particular level of localism.

Indeed, having one level of localism interfere in the affairs of another level of localism seems like a violation of encapsulation, in the sense that a software developer would understand the concept.

thaumasiotes3• 4 years ago

The gist is, split states into a smaller number of larger districts, each of which gets multiple representatives. The representatives are allocated proportionally to the vote in each large district. So if the district has 5 representatives, party X gets 63% of the vote, and party Y gets 37% of the vote, then party X gets 3 members and party Y gets 2 members.

Note that in order for this approach to be coherent at all, you need to abandon the idea that it's possible for a voter to vote for a candidate for office. The only kind of vote this system acknowledges is a vote for a political party.

autoexec• 4 years ago

But even neutrally drawn districts give more power to the party that is less concentrated geographically.

There's a certain appeal to that too however. As long as the advantage/disadvantage isn't overwhelming anyway. Perhaps it would help to encourage more diverse communities or give a disadvantage to political groups that isolate themselves while giving an advantage to groups who demonstrate they're both willing and capable of living and working in diverse environments. It might even help to reduce the amount of political and cultural divide.

BbzzbB• 4 years ago

The root of the issue is that the US doesn't separate elected lawmakers from district distribution. The fact[0] elected officials can redraw their own electoral map is just beyond belief, in a tough competition with Citizen's United for the worst political bug (well... feature) in the US. Cherry on top is calling/dubbing one such major and catastrophic instance of gerrymandering "REDMAP". So brazenly rubbing it in while openly chipping at US democracy.

As long as that holds true, theoretical solutions don't really matter when those using them will pry any model into their favor. Not that a mathematical solution even makes sense for a district map that accounts of cultural ties for local representation (short of going for proportional elections, which I think is desirable with some form of local representation).

In Canada, and I presume most countries of the G7, it's an independent entity[1], which one would think goes without saying. That's not incorruptible of course, but I wager it's held it's own for over 60 years here, modern district maps are quite reasonable.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

1: https://www.vox.com/2014/4/15/5604284/us-elections-are-rigge...

tialaramex6• 4 years ago

It's crazy that local elected legislators end up able to manipulate this, but you can't really prevent the government of the sovereign entity, in this case the Federal Government (which will presumably be elected in a democracy otherwise what's the point) from being able to seize this power if it determines to do so. If it can't then it's not much of a sovereign government.

For example in England an independent Boundary Commission draws these lines. But, they only exist because the government allows them to exist, Parliament can (and often does) ignore what the Commission says, indeed it's perfectly normal for a party who expect to lose seats to complain that it's unfair, and if that party happens to be in government they will stall boundary reforms. In practice the Commission acts as some sort of bulwark against gerrymandering overall, but it's for local stuff that this is more important, because local government just can't seize that power for themselves. That's where the US approach is crazy.

The extra crazy thing in the US is that its sovereign government acts as though it is permanently beholden to dusty old documents (a written "Constitution"), or rather, to the very modern interpretation of those documents by partisan hacks in its "Supreme Court". This makes no sense, and Americans shouldn't put up with it.

johannes1234321• 4 years ago

In Canada, and I presume most countries of the G7, it's an independent entity

Most countries have a proportional system, not a winner takes it all system.

With a proportional system where X% of the votes results in X% of the seats (corrected by 3% or 5% barrier and rounding effects) gerrymandering in some cases can effect who exactly is the MP for a region, but party association matches the vote.

In France two weeks ago they elected the president and the guy who in the second round got most votes nation-wide got the job. No counting per state/depardement/region. No electoral college, simple summing up.

In Germany there is an interesting system that a each electoral district has a candidate elected and then parliament is filled up to match proportion. Some gerrymandering there can lead to some party benefiting from direct mandates, but that has little effect in the end. (There is some weirdness as direct mandates are supposed to be 50% of seats, but if a party gets a lot more direct mandates than proportional weight the compensation is weird)

Generally the issue with giving districting away is that such commission have no democratic legislation, so if citizens are unhappy they have no way to vote them out. The University of Manitoba president is "unreachable" by the electorate. These core issues of core elements of the state (similar to rules for parliamentarians, election of supreme court justices, ...) are always problematic and rely on responsible individuals ...

PolygonSheep• 4 years ago

The key difference is that Canada's commission members are all nonpartisan — they're mostly judges, political scientists, or retired civil servants.

Judges don't strike me as particularly nonpartisan these days...

rayiner10• 4 years ago

It’s funny that you link an article about Canada “ending gerrymandering” when in 2019 Trudeau’s party won the election while losing the popular vote!

You actually just proved the article’s point that gerrymandering exists in any political system that uses geographic districts. Given that fact, maybe SCOTUS wasn’t so dumb in kicking that futile exercise to the states

treeman79• 4 years ago

It’s not possible to separate.

Most everyone has a political opinion. Only those loyal to a party are going to be in a position to make decisions.

Expecting those people to be neutral is absurd. Best you can hope for is appearance of neutrality.

Remaining options is for one side to try and be perfectly neutral usually the weaker side. The other side will definitely take advantage of this.

Or both sides will try and get as much as they can without it being too blatant.

In a tug of war game. It’s all of nothing.

suifbwish• 4 years ago

Allowing politicians to own property is a big mistake. If someone wants to be the president or a similar high up office, permanent lifelong loss of property rights should be required. Upon rising to a high governmental office, all property is sold and donated to charitable causes. This helps weed out selfish people.

karpierz• 4 years ago

I don't think objective is the word right word to describe this. It's algorithmic and deterministic. But it's not objective in the sense that it's objectively correct to group people like this. You're baking in a lot of implicit assumptions about how representation should/should not work by choosing this particular grouping algorithm.

It also doesn't remove the human factors from redistricting; humans would have to choose and approve this method. It's just laundering the gerrymandering through an algorithm to give it credibility.

But if you're the party that stands to benefit from changing redistricting laws, then the system loses credibility because you picked this method.

And if you're the party that stands to lose from changing these laws, then you're unlikely to self-sabotage yourself by doing so.

samatman5• 4 years ago

I think you're wrong. An algorithm which will produce the same results every time you feed a set of numbers into it is objective.

I don't respect your attempt to make objective mean something it doesn't.

SamBam4• 4 years ago

It's a funny thing, because the point of representation is that you want to group the people together by something so you can accurately represent them, but the only thing pretty much every nation has settled on is to group them by geography.

Why is that? How much of a connection does a rich white socialite in New York have with a poor custodian from an immigrant family? Sure, their representative may be trying to bring money into their district, but beyond that is it really possibly to represent both of their interests?

What if representatives could represent based on other factors, like sex or wealth or race? What would that do to the idea of representational government?

Or what if, in the online age, you could simply decide which representative represented you, no matter where they were from? Each representative could have no more than [US pop./num. districts] constituents, but they'd hail from anywhere, in some complex series of elections?

Thought experiments, of course.

runarberg3• 4 years ago

This is a completely valid concern, and is the reason why many people believe single person electorates fail to offer equal representation. Luckily there is an alternative: proportional representation. Meaning your district would be represented by multiple people. In my opinion a well represented district should have at least 30 members (but ideally closer to 300). For example if you are of the working class, and want representation from someone to represent you that also belongs to the working class you can vote for—say—the workers party, and if your district had 100 members, that party would only need 1% of the votes and you’ll have your preferred representation.

In fact in many democracies with proportional representation so often had special women‘s parties which were voted into the national assembly when women were fighting for equal representation back in the 60s-80s

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

Many democracies vote for parties, not representatives, and many have no geographical subdivisions that are represented at the national level.

But I agree with your point about groupings on other dimensions. I call that demotmimata. The USA used it wisely during the land reform the military forced on Japan 1946-1949. I’m working on an essay about that.

If we want cultural representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular culture, and then vote for members of that culture.

If we want religious representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular religion, and then vote for members of that religion.

If we want racial representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular race, and then vote for members of that race.

yes_really2• 4 years ago

Why is that? How much of a connection does a rich white socialite in New York have with a poor custodian from an immigrant family? Sure, their representative may be trying to bring money into their district, but beyond that is it really possibly to represent both of their interests?

Both of those vote Democrat. The middle class vote Republican.

wolverine876• 4 years ago

There are all kinds of geographical and legal boundaries in a country, with varying levels of affinity to them. Defining gerrymandering precisely isn't possible, it isn't even a know it when you see it thing ...

One way to define the problem is to maximize the number of competitive elections.

somenameforme• 4 years ago

Interesting idea. Mathematically it seems that it would on average create a perfect distribution. But it'd also lend itself to some substantial variance.

Imagine you have a 650-350 voter lead in a state with 10 districts. The way you maximize the number of competitive election is by packing 3 districts 100-0. The party with 650 voters now has the same number of voters remaining as the party with 350, for the next 7 districts.

Mathematically this works out perfectly because the party with 650 voters has an overall seat expectation of (3 + 7 * 0.5) = 6.5, but if you run the math further here's how it looks. The party with 35% of the representation gets (assuming a 50% outcome per competitive election):

===============

0 seats = 1%

1 seats = 6%

2 seats = 16%

3 seats = 27%

4 seats = 27%

5 seats = 16%

6 seats = 6%

7 seats = 1%

===============

samatman5• 4 years ago

That would be wonderful for betting markets on the outcome of elections.

Would it produce good governance do you think? I think, perhaps, the opposite.

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

From the essay:

-------------------------

Hmm, okay, so what would be fair? Perhaps we want to give each party a fighting chance in each election? Isn't that fair?

2 districts each hold 100,000 blues

8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets

nemosaltat• 4 years ago

Remember there’s nothing about this which is ‘fair’ except for the part where people could perhaps be persuaded to abide by the results.

With a kid on the way, I’ve been looking for a succinct explanation of life and politics. Thank you

hexo• 4 years ago

The problem posed by gerrymandering is a social problem, not a math problem.

Nope, it's "stupid broken laws" problem. Nothing else.

mcv3• 4 years ago

The real problem isn't even gerrymandering, it's having a district system at all. Gerrymandering is merely one of the symptoms of a district system.

Having a district system will tend to reduce the number of viable parties to two. The article doesn't even question the fact that there's only a blue and a violet party in the example. In reality, lots of people feel badly represented by even the best of those two parties. For as long as I've talked to Americans about politics, they've complained about voting for the lesser evil. Why not vote for a party you actually agree with? Because it's not viable in a two-party system.

If you've got 3 parties: Green, Yellow and Pink. 40% of the people vote Green, 30% vote yellow and 30% vote Pink. However, Green is supported all over the country, whereas Yellow and Pink are more regional, so in every district, Green gets 40% of the vote, whereas one of Yellow and Pink gets the other 60%, while the other gets none. Despite being the largest party, Green gets no votes.

Or let's say Green and Yellow each gets 40% of the vote and Pink gets 20%. All votes are distributed reasonably evenly, so about half of the districts are won by Green and half are won by Yellow. This sounds reasonable, until you realise that the Pink voters get no representation at all. It's possible to have a system where even a majority of voters wouldn't be represented, as long as the two largest parties manage to keep the smaller parties divided.

And in the US, that situation has devolved to the point that many voters don't even bother to vote for the smaller parties anymore, because they'd be throwing away their vote. And instead, they vote for candidates they disagree with because the only other viable candidate would be even worse.

Just use proportional representation. That's the only way to ensure that all political opinions get represented. It's not perfect, because nothing ever is, but at least the system is flexible, and voters can vote for completely new parties if they disagree with all existing parties, and those new parties can actually win seats.

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

Author here. Some people, who wrote comments in response to this essay, were focused on the intentional dishonesty of gerrymandering, and they wrote things like this:

"You can easily get rid of gerrymandering simply by proscribing an algorithmic process for districting."

There were several people who said this, here and on Reddit and on Hacker News. I believe they are defining gerrymandering as a deliberate and intentional act. By contrast, I was using the word "gerrymandering" to refer to the fact that any geographic boundary will establish a gap between the will of the voters and the final result of voting. So even if an algorithmic process is followed, and the damage done is accidental and unintentional, I am still referring to that as "gerrymandering." Indeed, the whole point of my essay is that if one group does its best to be fair when drawing lines on the map, and another group is evil and immoral and corrupt, and does its worst when drawing lines on a map, the damage done by both groups will be about the same, over the long-term.

JJMcJ2• 4 years ago

Square state, two Congressional districts, relatively uniform population distribution but one party clustered in one section of state.

Sometimes you get different outcomes if you divide state in half north-south vs. east-west, depending on how the cluster is divided between districts.

elicash• 4 years ago

Part of why partisan gerrymandering has become such a problem is that the tech makes it easier to gerrymander.

But mostly, political party matters much more than ever before. The electorate is more ideological and the candidates for office are much more loyal to the party platform. In an era where political party mattered less than, say, geography, then partisan gerrymandering was less of a national problem.

Of course, there are several types of gerrymandering and this is just one of them. The best summary of possible solutions and their limitations I've seen was done by 538 as part of a larger gerrymandering project: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-probably-not-possib...

maxwell• 4 years ago

You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.)

Madison said the same thing, but we didn't have contemporary communication tools. My company's Slack has over 5,000 people and works just fine. Why is it unrealistic to repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 and increase membership in the House by an order of magnitude?

aidenn06• 4 years ago

Increasing membership of the House has the effect of reducing the advantage less-populous states have (both in the house and in the electoral college). That might make it politically infeasible to pass.

rootusrootus2• 4 years ago

politically infeasible to pass.

Probably true. But I would hope that argument could be deflated easily, since it was the senate that was supposed to give smaller states a disproportionate amount of influence.

lifeisstillgood2• 4 years ago

Because it might be possible to stand out in a crowd of 500 but not 5,000. And it certainly is not possible to do deals other than "this is good for everyone".

It would almost certainly end political parties. Lead to good ideas being debated openly by people who have no chance of hanging together long enough to force a direction.

My god man what are you thinking !

(/s)

rootusrootus2• 4 years ago

(/s)

IMO we should just drop this notation altogether and just let angry people get angry, and ignore 'em. Sarcasm is better when it doesn't have to be labeled.

christkv• 4 years ago

Why stop at 5000 make it 50 000 to make it even harder. It would mess with everything from party discipline to lobbying.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 4 years ago

Lead to good ideas being debated openly by people

Do you have examples of any ideas at all being debated openly by 5000 people?

cato_the_elder2• 4 years ago

Madison said the same thing

Interesting, I didn't know that. I looked it up, and I really liked this Madison quote:

In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

(from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._55)

spaetzleesser3• 4 years ago

How many people in your company with 5000 slack users are the real decision makers ? I highly doubt it’s more than a few. If you had 5000 people in the legislature they would most likely still vote party line based on the decision of a few.

imiric2• 4 years ago

Exactly. Why do people need representatives in the age when everyone has a voice? Education is still crucial, and not everyone can have an opinion on all matters, but the current first-past-the-post and representative system is blatantly corrupt. It's unlikely those in power would give it up easily, but we need a new system that's truly of the people, by the people, for the people.

Flux[1] was a step in the right direction, but unfortunately seems to be recently disbanded. The idea of everyone voting for issues they care about, where leaders are subject matter experts, is a sound one. It's ludicrous to think that a single person can politically represent thousands or millions of people on all matters. Modern politics is a reality show where charismatic and unscrupulous power-hungry egomaniacs compete for the top celebrity spot.

[1] https://voteflux.org/

yucky5• 4 years ago

Why do people need representatives in the age when everyone has a voice?

Because people are capricious, easily manipulated by emotion and generally refuse to acknowledge their ignorance on matters in which they insist on having opinions about.

Using the Twitter/Reddit voting model to run the world is absurd.

photochemsyn2• 4 years ago

National referendums on major political issues where the vote goes direct to the public would be a welcome addition, too.

yucky5• 4 years ago

Direct democracy is an awful idea. Picture Twitter deciding policy. No thanks.

dane-pgp12• 4 years ago

the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.

Perhaps one solution would be for those 5,000 people to be entrusted with the job of picking (for each bill being considered) 100 "second-level representatives" to go forward and do the hard work of debating and evaluating proposals and reaching consensus.

These SLRs could be a mixture of subject matter experts and people good at political logrolling, so that the legislation which passed would reflect the priorities of the 5,000 representatives (and their voters) while still allowing a meaningful discussion to take place and shape the result.

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

Are the 5,000 people on Slack in leadership positions? I'd bet that when a decision needs to be made, it is made by smaller groups.

not2b2• 4 years ago

While Germany is mentioned in the article, they don't mention the best features of the German system: two choices -- one for the candidate who will represent your district, one for the party you prefer. So you get someone who truly represents the district, and you also guarantee that the party that wins the most votes gets the most seats.

seunosewa2• 4 years ago

MMPR. There's a balancing step to enforce proportional representation.

not2b2• 4 years ago

Overhang seats. The size of the German parliament is variable to make everything come out right. If some party wins more first-past-the-post seats than their share of the second (party) vote entitles them to, extra seats are created to give the other parties more until things balance.

bumper_crop3• 4 years ago

The crux of this is that the majority/plurality system is a winner-takes-all outcome. I would like to propose a completely fair (and totally unacceptable) Voting system:

Blues and Violets each get a single vote. On election day, everyone puts their vote into a big hat, and one of the ballots is pulled out. Whoever is on that ballot, gets a unilateral victory. This system has numerous good properties:

1. Power never falls into a state where the majority party can stay in control. Gerrymandering is a non-issue.

2. Every vote counts. Instead of a single, tie breaking vote changing the outcome of the election, each additional vote increases the odds. If there are 40% violets and 60% blues, the likelihood of a violet leader is still 40%.

3. Extreme minority votes still matter. If 99% of the population is blue, and 1% of the population is violet, violet supporters still feel their voice can be heard.

4. (edit) Political spending is massively reduced, since there is a diminishing return to spending ever more money trying to tip the 49% into being 51%.

noduerme• 4 years ago

Assuming that the 1% extreme minority wants to turn it into a dictatorship, you'd be guaranteeing that sooner or later the democracy would fail.

bumper_crop3• 4 years ago

Sure, but we could have separate rules for changing how the voting works, compared to the day to day operation of the groups. Also, on the good end, maybe the 1% have some amazingly good ideas that the other side would never implement otherwise.

Supermancho• 4 years ago

Assuming that the 1% extreme minority wants to turn it into a dictatorship, you'd be guaranteeing that sooner or later the democracy would fail.

Luckily a single election isn't enough to make a dictatorship, in the US.

There is never a guarantee that a government will stand forever.

winstonewert12• 4 years ago

If used to elect something like a president, yeah, that could be problematic. But if used to elect a legislative body then its not really a problem. Sure 1% of the body would be pro-dictatorship, and occasionally a bit more due to the randomness, but its not a serious risk that a majority of the body would turn out to be pro-dictatorship.

edflsafoiewq2• 4 years ago

This is called random dictator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_mechanism#Random_...

bo1024• 4 years ago

A variant on this is to pull 3 ballots out and take the majority (if none, keep pulling until there is a plurality then stop).

This would make the extreme outlier results less likely, but still maintain most of the properties you said. For example, if there are 40% violets and 60% blues, then chance of a violet winner becomes only 35.2%. If there are 10% violets, their chance of winning is only 2.8%.

Depending on how risky you want to be, you can replace 3 with 5, 11, 31, or 101. For example with 11 ballots, 40% violet in the population, their chance of winning is 24.6%; with 10% violets, their winning chance is only 0.03%.

edflsafoiewq2• 4 years ago

Reminds me of of the cache eviction strategy 2-random (pick two entries at random and evict whichever is oldest).

jonnycomputer• 4 years ago

Amend this so that the time in power is proportional to their vote.

colinmhayes6• 4 years ago

Proportional representation has many of the good qualities listed here but is probably more politically feasible.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 4 years ago

Extreme minority votes still matter. If 99% of the population is blue, and 1% of the population is violet, violet supporters still feel their voice can be heard.

Why do they feel this?

notriddle2• 4 years ago

Or just use approval voting: you're allowed to checkmark as many candidates as you want (instead of just one), and whoever gets the most points wins.

1. No spoiler effect. If you really want Green to win, but you think Blue is the lesser of two evils, voting Green and Blue at the same time is strictly better than voting only for Blue.

2. It's about as easy to understand as FPTP. No funny business where politicians mislead people about how the voting system actually works. Approval voting has a few downsides, but they are obvious downsides, so everyone is on equal footing.

3. You can still use those nice scantrons and hole punches.

4. No weird questions about "should I give the candidate I want most a 1, or should I give the candidate I want most the 10?"

5. It's a majority rules system and not a dictatorship.

winstonewert12• 4 years ago

I don't really get the love that approval voting gets.

Approval voting requires the voter to decide whether or not to approve the lesser of two evils. It seems to me that this isn't a simple question it depends on the odds of different outcomes, level of preference between two evils, etc. To me that seems like it would make voting harder for most people, and politicians would absolutely be trying to mislead people about the appropriate strategies for who to approve and not approve.

winstonewert12• 4 years ago

I think an additional neat property is that the representation of a particular district would be proportional in time. I.e. 40% red, 60% blue district would be represented by a red member 40% of the time and a blue member 60% of the time.

dragonwriter4• 4 years ago

Power never falls into a state where the majority party can stay in control.

That usually only happens when power gained by elections is used to change the system, often outside of the formal rules of change. Obviously, no election system can safeguard against this, since it is an effect outside of the electoral system.

Every vote counts.

Only one vote counts. This is literally the textbook example of a system than fails the non-dictatorship criterion.

Extreme minority votes still matter

Well, again, since only one vote matters, it's only an extreme minority of votes that matters, but it's extremely unlikely to be one from an extreme minority position.

winstonewert12• 4 years ago

Only one vote counts. This is literally the textbook example of a system than fails the non-dictatorship criterion.

This depends on how you state the non-dictatorship criterion. Wikipedia's discussion refers to a "single pre-determined person's preferences." But since the dictator is selected randomly, they aren't pre-determined.

Further, every vote counts in the sense that every additional vote for a candidate increases the odds of them winning the election. The candidate has an incentive to get additional votes no matter how many votes they currently have. You don't have the situation where its futile to vote because the outcome isn't going to be close.

marricks• 4 years ago

Don’t some European counties like Germany have the number of delegates forced to roughly equal the total vote totals for a party? So if you have “60% violet party and 40% teal party” but the seats are split 50/50 10 closest seats move over to violet?

Theres no perfect way to solve it but the ultimate problem is social: one party is willing to gerrymander to win and the other doesn’t because they don’t have to but would if they actually saw any gain in it.

Krisjohn• 4 years ago

Anyone should be able to submit new boundaries to break up a large area into the required districts. It should be accepted automatically if; the populations are equal based on the last official census, no boundaries pass through a residential property, the total length of all the boundaries is less than the current divisions.

q-big2• 4 years ago

Why not solve the problem of gerrymandering by getting rid of the "winner takes all" property?

E.g. instead of having 100 districts selecting 1 representative using the winner-takes-all principle, which are very sensitive with respect to gerrymandering, make 10 districts where each one sends 10 representatives, where the distribution of representatives approximates the distribution of the submitted votes.

This should decrease the problem a lot.

spaetzleesser3• 4 years ago

That would be my preference. Or split between a number of representatives selected by winning a district and a number of representatives selected by the popular vote. Germany has a system like this.

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

From the essay:

Some nations have fine-grained representation of land but course-grained representation of ideas

Some nations have fine-grained representation of ideas but course-grained representation of land

colinmhayes6• 4 years ago

Why do we need both? It's not like my house rep gives a shit about what I think even though I'm in his party. Having "your" rep seems incredibly overvalued.

smw• 4 years ago

NZ has both geographic seats and list-based proportional seats?

spaetzleesser3• 4 years ago

I think the US needs some form of representation based on the popular vote and not by winning districts. For example if a certain percentage of the House would be allocated to parties based on the popular vote, districts would be less important and third parties would be viable.

Basically we should reduce the importance of districts and give the popular vote more weight. In my view everything else doesn’t have a chance to solve the real issues.

Mountain_Skies2• 4 years ago

Probably would be better to split the Congress into three, one that represents the states (Senate), one that represents communities (House of Representatives/Communities), and one that represents ideologies (House of Values) and then come up with a new balance between the three.

Keeping a geographic based house is necessary because sometimes people of a wide variety of values still having needs in common due to shared local geography. Both rich and poor are impacted if the dam above their town breaks and a flood doesn't care about your race, gender, sexual preference or anything else. House of Values wouldn't even need to be based on each state but rather could be something like "One representative for every 250,000 votes the group receives nationwide". Maybe even allow people to split their vote between groups. Perhaps under this arrangement the Senate could go back to being appointed by governors and state legislatures as the earlier issues with corruption would not necessarily apply (depending on how laws get passed between the three houses).

The above of course would require near universal support from the public as it would be a change to the basic working of our representative democracy. Not sure if we're capable of getting that level of agreement on pretty much anything anymore.

magpi3• 4 years ago

Congratulations, you've now created a totalitarian one-party dictatorship!

This is not true. It totally discounts independents (38% of American are independent), and districts obviously evolve and the popularity of the party in power tends to wane as that party either fails to fulfill its promises or abuses its authority in some way. It is no coincidence that in modern times whenever a party has control over all three houses in the U.S., they lose that control in the very next election.

dmasi• 4 years ago

I'm not understanding this math can I get a hand?

1,000,000 people that can vote

600K : blue & 400K : violet

4 districts hold 400K : blue

6 districts hold 33.3K : blue & 66.6K : violet

if that's all of the districts... then isn't that only 500k?

revscat2• 4 years ago

These people like the TFA’s author who come up with good-faith solutions to problems caused by those acting in (very) bad faith…

I mean, bless their hearts, but they just seem so completely naive. No policy will ever be pursued by the US government that gives more political or economic power to the poor and middle classes. Not ever.

GavinMcG4• 4 years ago

That's historically not true, and especially in that light, such extreme pessimism seems irresponsible—by convincing people they're disempowered, you're just encouraging the result you hope to avoid.

revscat2• 4 years ago

Name something that has benefited the poor or middle class that has passed within the last 50 years. Because what I see is… dick. Nada. What I see is never ending transfer of wealth upwards, without exception. Maternal leave? Get fucked. Universal health care? Lol no. Hell, legalized marijuana at the federal level? Fiiiiilibuster.

Nah. I’m “encouraging” nothing. Just pointing out historical — and contemporary — reality.

0xbadcafebee2• 4 years ago

Yep. The first US Constitution was actually scrapped because it gave too much power to the people. The founders knew that would only lead to disaster, so they drafted a second one that reigned in democracy and empowered oligarchy.

peacefulhat• 4 years ago

The only solution is removing geographic districts entirely. The focus is on how squiggly the district lines are rather than the underlying issue that your vote is worthless in almost any election.

armchairhacker• 4 years ago

Does the author argue for geographic representation? I don't think so, but I already know why it's important: the cold north whom has 60% of the population votes to ban air-conditioning, leading the 40% in the hot south to suffer.

I think that ultimately, the best solution wrt. fair elections is to enable free movement across regions and countries. Then people can choose to live in their own communities of like-minded people. Nobody has to be a minority at least in the issue they care about most, they can just move. Also, even if you do gerrymander, if the oppressed 30% blue just move to the 90% blue regions it becomes ineffective.

Unfortunately free movement has its own problems re: the migrant crisis, housing prices, etc.

throwaway0a5e• 4 years ago

I think that ultimately, the best solution wrt. fair elections is to enable free movement across regions and countries.

This sounds good but you just get the people with the means to do so constantly migrating away from the fallout of their bad policy every decade or so.

Some ability to flee is definitely a good thing but on the other hand if you make your bed you should sleep in it.

Jensson5• 4 years ago

the cold north whom has 60% of the population votes to ban air-conditioning, leading the 40% in the hot south to suffer.

This is solved by better legislated states rights not by creating a less undemocratic voting system. There is no reason why the fed should be allowed to ban something like air conditioning or showerheads. But now they did, people in low water states complained that saving water is important since they lack water, so now even in very water rich states it is illegal to sell high throughput showerheads. So the current system doesn't protect against such shenanigans at all.

almog• 4 years ago

As someone living in a country that uses proportional representation for its electoral system, my first introduction to gerrymandering was this episode on the Data Skeptic podcast which I highly recommend: https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2021/gerrymandering

bironran• 4 years ago

Some countries, such as Israel, have purely party based parliamentary systems with no geographic representation ... Some nations have fine-grained representation of ideas but course-grained representation of land

Before putting this on a pedestal, it's worth noting that Israel:

  1. Has smaller some power blocs which have non-proportional power at the parliament due to being the "swing vote".
  2. Had other smaller political parties completely eliminated (voter desertion) due to ineffectiveness.
  3. Had 4 elections in 2 years due to inability to form a ruling government with more than 50% of the parliament approval.
  4. Had a government average run-time of 2.5 years since 1999 due to "no confidence" votes that force re-election.

Less than ideal. The American system, with its flaws, significantly more stable.

EdwardDiego• 4 years ago

In NZ, MMP is doing us well.

There's still electorate MPs (members of parliament), but there's also MPs determined by their party's percentage of the party vote.

So at election time, you vote for your preferred local representative, and then you vote for your preferred party.

hvusslax3• 4 years ago

The Netherland has pretty much the same system as Israel, there is slight geographic representation but nationwide party votes do dictate the composition of parliament.

All the Nordic countries also use a proportional system with multi-member districts and measures to make the overall party representation in parliament align with their national share of the votes.

Maybe the problems with Israel are just problems with Israel rather than their particular system of voting.

mcv3• 4 years ago

From what I understand, Netherland has practically the same system as Israel. There's no regional representation at all, you vote on the party, and although you do vote on a specific candidate from that party, seats are assigned in the order of the list that the party determined, unless a candidate receives enough individual votes to reach the threshold for a seat on their own (which is rare for anyone not on the #1 or #2 spot for their party).

As a result, Dutch parliament currently has 16 parties, and the senate 13. And although governments do fall, and sometimes have trouble forming a new government, the system is very stable. Every government is a coalition, a compromise between enough parties to hold 50%+1 seat in parliament, and that means you generally see the same big parties in government. Sometimes one of the big parties loses popularity and thus seats, and doesn't govern. Other, possibly fairly new, parties can take their place. Parties that most other parties think are terrible (like the racist parties) still won't be able to form a government even if they're large, because nobody wants to work with them.

scythe• 4 years ago

You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical.

Australian five-member STV districts beg to differ. As does MMP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repre...

And DMP:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-member_proportional_rep...

And PR-OAC:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2778867

One of the biggest problems we run into is not that there are no options, but there are so many possibilities that people who study the problem in detail end up arguing with each other rather than forming a coalition for a single reform! I also designed a system based on a simplified CPO-STV, but I keep putting off writing it up.

umeshunni• 4 years ago

Whenever I read some article like this about politics in the US, I wonder why they never look at how the world's largest democracy deals with these problems, instead of looking at trivial countries like Hungary or New Zealand with like 5 people.

Is it ignorance? Racism? Some "stuck in the 60s" notion that third world countries are run by dictators?

brianolson• 4 years ago

I've studied redistricting and gerrymandering for 15+ years ( https://bdistricting.com ), and yes the punch line is that people don't even want geographic districts at least half the time. Sometimes you want 'your local rep' to talk to about local and regional issues, but all the argument is about ideological representation (party, culture, pet issue, etc.).

My best guess solution is a two part legislature, one house of small local districts, one house elected in at-large Proportional Representation.

lkrubner32• 4 years ago

Your town assembly can take care of the concerns of your town.

Your provincial assembly can take care of the concerns of your province.

Your National Assembly can take care of the concerns of your nation.

We can get rid of gerrymandering and still have different levels of government, each devoted to a particular level of localism.

Indeed, having one level of localism interfere in the affairs of a higher level seems like a violation of encapsulation, in the sense that a software developer would understand the concept.

sidewndr464• 4 years ago

My "local" representative at the state level is a several hour drive to another city which has nothing in common with the city I live in.

moosey• 4 years ago

I think we should fill most elected positions basically at random, and eliminate the presidency.

Populations make great quantitative judgements, but not qualitative. It seems that selecting at random would be best to get voices of folks experiencing homelessness and poverty. Rich folks would still get a couple of seats.

My guess is less war, more money for anti-poverty and education programs.

colinmhayes6• 4 years ago

The problem is that most people are idiots

textbookrental• 4 years ago

I fail to see how elections rectify that problem.

rland• 4 years ago

Sortition!

I really do think it is the only way. Everything else gets distorted.

People say, well, most people are stupid. But I'm not so sure. Juries are a sort of pseudo-sortition, and they actually fare pretty well (far better, I would argue, than legislative or even judicial bodies).

I think many positions would be admirably served by random appointment.

theptip2• 4 years ago

Phrasing this in terms of two tribes each with precisely one candidate and geographically homogeneous support bakes in some assumptions that I think break the model quite fundamentally.

In the real world:

* Rural vs. Urban produces a very strong polarization in party/policy support. So you simply cannot get the result described where you have one party winning all districts.

* There are many candidates both within a party and between them that would receive approval from a given voter beyond their first choice.

* Currently because of the structure of the system there can only be two serious parties. (A serious third party splits the vote and prevents either from being successful). But if you had more parties you’d probably get better representation.

Basically, I think this model is both oversimplifying to the point where it is useless for making claims about what would happen in our current system if we eliminated gerrymandering, and also not interesting as a model for other voting systems.

For what it’s worth I think Single Transferrable Vote and Approval Voting are both interesting options that get round most of the problems in our current system.

beloch• 4 years ago

An interesting and related problem is over-representation of swing-vote regions in public policy and the alienation this can cause in other regions. Let's use an example from the post:

2 districts each hold 100,000 blues
8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets

In this situation, the government is considered to be unstable, since a small number of people changing their minds in the eight swing districts can decide elections.

This is an example that closely matches reality in which some regions tend to be "strongholds" while others have swing ridings. The strongholds always vote for the same party, so their parties are motivated to to ignore their interests and, instead, pour all their efforts into competing in the regions with swing ridings.

Why don't neglected regions gradually turn into swing regions? Sometimes they do, but sometimes the parties involved make region a part of politics. Say that, in the above example, the 2 districts with 100,000 blue supporters were in a regionally distinct part of the country. The violets discover that there is an undercurrent of mistrust about that region in the 8 other districts, and demonize the blues by claiming they have a secret agenda from the blue region.

This gives the violets an edge when it comes to winning in the 8 swing-vote districts, but it also frees up the blues to almost completely ignore the interests of their stronghold. Sure, citizens in the stronghold are free to vote for the violets, but if the violets actively demonize them in elections, why would they?

Instead, they might become disaffected from politics entirely, since elections are decided entirely in the other 8 districts according to the concerns of those districts, and not theirs. Even though the blues are more numerous overall in the country, there will frequently be governments with strong violet majorities in which the blue strongholds are completely neglected. It's easy to see how this can lead to alienation and even separatist sentiments.

If this seems far-fetched, take a look at "Western alienation" in Canada. Most Western provinces tend to vote overwhelmingly CPC on a consistent basis. The LPC has won majorities and now controls a coalition minority government with a smaller share of the popular vote because the East is dominated by swing ridings. In the past, they have smeared CPC leaders by saying they have "hidden Western agendas". The result today is disaffection from federal politics in the West, alienation, and, yes, some separatism.

Hence, getting rid of geographic representation might actually help reduce geographic alienation. Of course, in the case of Canada, why would people in swing-ridings, who currently control the outcome of elections, ever vote for candidates who are actually serious about electoral reform that might reduce their influence?

0xbadcafebee2• 4 years ago

You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical.

Worked for Athens.

"Estimates of the population of ancient Athens vary. During the 4th century BC, there might well have been some 250,000–300,000 people in Attica.[4] Citizen families could have amounted to 100,000 people and out of these some 30,000 would have been the adult male citizens entitled to vote in the assembly."

"There were three political bodies where citizens gathered in numbers running into the hundreds or thousands. These are the assembly (in some cases with a quorum of 6,000), the council of 500 (boule), and the courts (a minimum of 200 people, on some occasions up to 6,000)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy

Athenian eligible voters to boule ratio: 60-to-1

US eligible voters (233M) to 5000 representatives ratio: 46,600-to-1

US eligible voters to House + Senate (435+100) ratio: 435,514-to-1

Let's not discount the possibility.

cryptonector• 4 years ago

There is nothing wrong with gerrymandering. It's not me saying it, it's Sandra Day O'Connor, whose words I'll be paraphrasing (from memory; maybe later I'll dig up the actual opinion).

You can gerrymander to make your party's representatives' seats more secure, or you can gerrymander to have more seats for your party. In the former case your overall majority will be smaller when you win all the elections you expect to win, while in the latter case your overall majority will be bigger, though in each district the popular vote majority will be smaller. Either way your party can lose badly in the event of a wave election, either because few seats need flipping (in the first case), or because popular preferences change enough to swamp your large majority of small majority districts (second case).

We've had one anomalous period of 62 years of no wave elections in the past 100 years in the U.S.: 1932-1994. Since then we've had these wave election years that flipped the House or greatly enhanced the majority party's majority: 1994, 2006, 2008, 2010. That's... quite a few wave elections. That's in spite of the democrats having had 62 years to gerrymander before 1994, and despite the mid-cycle gerrymandering of the 00s. We can expect more wave elections.

Gerrymandering is self-limiting.

coward1232• 4 years ago

We've already got states, and under those states we have counties. I don't understand why we can't mandate that congressional and legislative districts must conform to county boundaries (which is fundamentally where people live, vote, are regulated, etc anyway). My guess is this would result in a simple and fair answer and that couldn't possibly work because politics.

uneventual2• 4 years ago

Well to take the most obvious problem, each California congressional district has to have roughly 750k people but Los Angeles County has 9.9 million.

coward1232• 4 years ago

I get that, and yet the root of my observation is simply that there are are already existing valid political boundaries. The core problem with legislative and congressional districts is that they are utterly arbitrary and subject to change based on political whims (yes I understand there is also a nominal census reasoning as well). My point then is simply: could there be permanent, non-arbitrary boundaries that would no longer be subject to political manipulation?

flavius29663• 4 years ago

Another approach is to do what Romania is doing. They tried implementing FPTP, but it failed in the referendum, so they implemented it half-way: you still have FPTP, so you get a representative from the local community, but the national votes that are "wasted" get redistributed nationally to each party , such that the popular vote matches the seats closely. The only thing is: your party needs to clear 5% of the popular vote nationally, and it will have guaranteed seats. It's a bit more complex, but that's the crux of it.

This system allows for parties to be created and destroyed very easily, we had 2 new parties in the last 10 years that at some point got 15-20% of the votes

User23• 4 years ago

Gerrymandering is irrelevant because elections are irrelevant. The USA isn’t a democracy or even a representative republic[1].

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

dboreham• 4 years ago

Hmm. This is interesting because I've always wondered about using mathematics to generate a "gerrymandering-ness metric" from a given population/boundary distribution. The idea being that instead of having the supreme court scratch their heads wondering if a boundary assignment was unfair, you could just compute the metric.

But this article seems to imply that this metric can't exist.

Ok so now I wonder about the corollary: use an algorithm to generate the boundaries. If the article has a proof that all boundary assignments are unfair, then presumably an algorithmic boundary generator can be made to be randomly unfair one way or the other, balancing out the unfairness overall.

dane-pgp12• 4 years ago

I think the "gerrymandering-ness metric" you are looking for is called the "Efficiency gap". The problem, of course, is getting everyone to agree what the acceptable range is for this value, and to make it the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote#Efficiency_gap

pacaro• 4 years ago

I believe that sortition is a solution to this. Being a politician should be like jury duty, there's a low but significant probability that you can lose the lottery and have to be a representative for a couple of years. The same mechanism should be uses to select peace officers also. There are certain roles that society appears to need, but that the kind of people who want to fill those roles are likely to be the worst people to do the job (i.e. anyone with a hint of megalomania). Sortition solves this problem.

a_imho• 4 years ago

Absolutely.

Some people (especially the ones profiting from the current system) do not want to change the fundamentals though. In those cases shortening the feedback loop by cutting the cycles could also mitigate the problem. Also reducing the obscene amounts of power we put in a selected few hands could help.

perryizgr8• 4 years ago

Gerrymandering is bad, right?

I know TFA is not addressing this point intentionally, that's ok. You can choose what you want to focus on.

But does anybody have a logically sound argument that supports this assertion?

ouid• 4 years ago

The answer is easy. Instead of electing officials, we give them our votes to cast. No one is disenfranchised.

locallost• 4 years ago

I notice a lot of the discussion can't think beyond the current two party "system" - if we do this then A will always win, do that and B always wins... but actually other than the US, democracies that I know (Europe at least) have multiple parties. And these, if they can't win, can at least take away enough votes to shift the power. Other than that, some countries have a combination of "first past the post" geography based voting, and seat distribution based on vote totals. Which I think is a good system.

thomasahle• 4 years ago

Simple solution to get rid of gerrymandering: Create a pool of extra mandates, not assigned to a specific district. Distribute them to the parties however needed to make the overall vote proportional.

This way districts still have a representative, but there is no insentive for gerrymandering.

This is a commonly known as Overhang seats in MMP: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhang_seat

jakub_g• 4 years ago

I'm not an expert but the mixed system is used in Hungary, and the result is that Fidesz (Orban's party), with ~50% votes, gets ~68% seats (just above 2/3 they need to have infinite power), third time in a row

hvusslax3• 4 years ago

The Hungarian system is basically two separate elections at once where the results are just added together. There are single-member districts where the candidate that wins the plurality of votes in the district is elected (almost always a Fidesz candidate). Then there are party list elections in larger multi-member districts where the party affiliation of the MPs elected is roughly proportional to the votes to each party in the district. There is no effort in this system to make the final results proportional.

Germany, New Zealand and devolved legislatures of Scotland and Wales use a different sort of system where the party lists are used to achieve proportionality. In a system like that, Fidesz wouldn't get a lot of seats from the party listes because they are way overrepresented already in the single-member districts.

ur-whale• 4 years ago

the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic

why is it not realistic?

bambax• 4 years ago

Hmm, okay, so what would be fair? Perhaps we want to give each party a fighting chance in each election? Isn't that fair? (etc.)

This is trying to solve gerrymandering with (more, different) gerrymandering. That's not the way it should work.

Districts should represent something from the real world, outside of political affiliation.

It's natural for the political "color" of a district to change over time, because people move, and sometimes get older and change their mind. This should not result in a change of the shape of the district.

kohlerm• 4 years ago

Do I miss something,but isn't the real solution for this to elect using proportional representation?

TheJoeMan• 4 years ago

I was hoping the “math” might be a Euclidean analysis of how … concave? … or dumbbell-shaped? … a district boundary is. I don’t see how a district that narrows to 100 yards wide in the middle could be fair.

ggm• 4 years ago

Interesting to read the spread of opinions on multi member seats here, and a strong element of "doesn't work" from people who I think haven't experienced it.

Gerrymandering made a single party run Queensland for 19 years. it was very real in Australia, but the downside of democratising the election method was dis-enfranchising the rural voter. Multi Member would fix this.

No matter what, I think the vast majority of people here agree the US system is particularly bent out of shape in many respects.

vannevar• 4 years ago

I think this article is more damning of a simple two-party system than it is of re-districting. How does the math change if you simply draw arbitrary boundaries of roughly equal size but have multiple parties and ranked-choice voting?

dathinab• 4 years ago

The solution is not having any form of "winner takes it all" voting for anything with a lot of power.

Due to the dynamics it creates "winner takes it all" is fundamentally undemocratic.

Through that would be a fundamental change in US politics on all levels, so it's a bit too much to ask for.

And a bit tricky wrt. the president.

How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising

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