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Comment by whoopdedo | Hacker News Reader

The only "hacking" going on in the election was done when voting district boundaries were drawn. Gerrymandering is an endemic problem in the U.S. as most recently evidenced in Wisconsin[1]. And it's a more effective way to steal an election than any behind the scenes subterfuge involving individual ballots.

[1] http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/307176-court-strikes-do...

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Gerrymandering is probably the single most important issue in our democracy.

It makes the House unrepresentative: democrats routinely win a higher percentage of the total vote cast for the House than their representation by number of seats (in 2014 republicans won 52% of the vote but controlled 57% of seats, couldn't find a number for this election season sadly). Effectively, democrats aren't democratically represented in the House.

It contributes to extremism: in 2014 only 16 of 247 republicans in the house won by less than 10 percentage points. In that scenario, the only real election is the primary, where you're competing against someone of your own party. Typically only the most committed (usually the least moderate) voters come out in primaries, so you're more likely to lose to someone more extreme than to someone more moderate. As a result we get people that are completely unwilling to compromise, and government grinds to a halt.

We can't have good government without two (or more, but never gonna happen in the US) reasonably functional parties that are willing to compromise to get stuff done. Partisan gerrymandering massively impedes that objective by reducing effective representation and increasing extremism.

This guy also seems to think it's pretty important: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/10/17/...

Those boundaries are fairly irrelevant to the presidential election process. I believe only Maine assigns electors based on who wins a particular district versus who wins the overall statewide race.

I was just curious whether there was any historical evidence that the state borders themselves were ever a result of gerrymandering. Then I remembered an exhibit over at the Oakland Museum of California about proposals for the borders of California at the time of its statehood, which included debates about the effects of including lots of Mormons to the east (or not). A discussion summarizing some of these debates, but with a slightly different emphasis, can be found in

http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/row/landsurveys/Study_material/Stat...

It might be possible to interpret some of the proposals for the shape of the California-Nevada border as reflecting a kind of gerrymandering or considerations of political strategy. Maybe that's historically true of other U.S. state boundaries? (But the states haven't generally redrawn their boundaries in response to demographic changes over time.)

I have no background in this area, but saw an interesting allusion to your idea the other day[1]

    Republicans in Congress passed the 1862 Homestead Act, offering free land to settlers who would move to territories 
    that would eventually become states — creating more Senate seats and Electoral College votes for a Republican Party 
    eager to keep government control away from Southern Democrats. They even managed to divide the Dakota Territory into 
    two states, worth twice the political power.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/upshot/as-american-as-appl...

In business when someone wants to talk details, it means they want to f@@@ you.

That is true, but don't forget that those boundaries also come into play wrt polling place count and convenience. And that's been a clear attack vector this year in states like NC.

Nebraska too I think, but yeah pretty rare.

>The only "hacking" going on in the election was done when voting district boundaries were drawn.

While gerrymandering is a indeed an effective way of "hacking" democracy, claiming it is the only hacking going on is unwise and is the antithesis of infosec.

"There are two types of enterprises in the world, those who know they've been hacked, and those that don't."

Gerrymandering does nothing about presidential elections, which is what this is talking about.

The bigger problem is voter suppression through things like ID laws, eliminating early voting, and eliminating or moving polling places.

Instead of complaining about ID laws which help protect legitimate voters (and prevents their votes from being suppressed), how about we complain instead about why nothing is being done to make it easier to get ID's?

Yeah, it's weird how it's a national scandal that people have to present ID to vote, but not to drive a car, rent an apartment, open a bank account, buy cold medicine, get federal assistance, enter a courthouse...

The scandal is because certain states have repeatedly tried to pass laws that are totally for preventing voter fraud but just happen to disproportionately target minority voters.

Meanwhile the evidence says that voter fraud isn't really a problem.

and having to present ID to get cold medicine is fucked up.

> Instead of complaining about ID laws which help protect legitimate voters (and prevents their votes from being suppressed)

Protect them from nothing, while effectively disenfranchising others.

Even india requires an id to vote.

I can't tell if you are being subtle or not. But, if those are the bigger problems, they are directly influenced by gerrymandering, no?

The second is cleaning voter rolls on the allegation of fraud.

Unless the attacker is a foreign state, who can't gerrymander but can bring Stuxnet level of hacking resources.

As a remote foreigner, I'd much rather find out that Putin got Trump elected than US voters did. The latter saddens me so much.

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