Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with Geometry
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On one hand, republicans have waged a legal campaign against the voting rights act, drafted various pieces of legislation aimed at disenfranchising minorities and college students, and chosen for their attorney general a prosecutor who viewed mintority voter registration a felonious offense. This isn't mentioning a president who has not wavered from the view that the 3 million vote margin he lost the popular vote by is the byproduct of fraud.
On the other hand, you have a former president and possibly the most popular/powerful politician in America signal this will be his primary focus, an opposition party looking to expand use of the efficiency gap metric as a tool for enforcing fairness, and possibly a justice system willing to step embrace these concepts (the wisc. decision). Not to mention a motivated and very angry base.
Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights, its straight up common sense like we have to do for every other thing in society. Many people find it surprising around the world that we don't check IDs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St...
https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
To the voter id laws, I can provide studies showing that in person vote fraud is non existent in America - the majority of cases last election stemmed from trump voters who tried to defend their actions as 'testing the system.' I can also provide studies that show those voter is laws disproportionately impact minority voters, as well as court judgements where republicans were found to target said voter with these laws explicitly - as in that was their explicit goal, and acted with 'surgical orecision6', in the courts words. This is not to mention the circumstantial evidence, like republican operatives explaining their long term goal is disenfranchisement, or the actions of governors instructing dmv employees to deceive the public and closure of dmv's in minority areas.
I'd be open to hear alternative interpretations as to what is happening, but so far my experience has been that those in favor of said laws either approve of disenfranchisement, or have an emotional response as to the 'fairness' of the law, and assume i should adopt their viewpoint.
I think it might be better to say "irrelevant to the outcome of an election" than "non existent".
One kind of in-person vote fraud which can be measured is voting twice: mail in a ballot in one district and vote in person in another district, or (more rare) vote in person in two districts. There were as an order of magnitude guess 400-1000 people who voted twice in both Florida and New York in 2000.
And other isolated incidents have been detected, e.g. in 2002 perhaps as many as a few hundred people in Kansas voted in person in two different districts (sometimes two places in Kansas, sometimes one in Kansas and one in Missouri).
See http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/200... for the sources here; local newspapers pulled the voter records and cross-checked duplicate names by hand, reaching out to individual people to ask their stories.
The issue of whether or not voter fraud is a serious national problem was a big deal in the early 2000s, when the executive branch of the federal government put a LOT of work into trying to find and prosecute voter fraud which they believed was a big deal. They were generally unable to find lots of fraud and their failure to find significant fraud was a big part of the reason that a bunch of US attorneys were, controversially, fired - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_co... , https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publicatio... .
With respect to the "vote as someone else" in-person fraud problem, that's a lot harder to measure. It seems like if it were an endemic problem we would have found it the last time we went hunting 10-15 years ago.
Still I am definitely sympathetic to the idea that everyone should be issued a free, easy-to-get national ID card. Perhaps we should get that system up and running and as soon as there are fewer than (say) 100 cases per year of people being denied an ID despite presenting sufficient documentation, we can think about requiring it at the polls. (When ID-issuance goes wrong it goes really wrong -- see e.g. https://www.thenation.com/article/wisconsin-is-systematicall... ).
I am curious, can provide a citation for your comment? I have heard this claim (or something similar) before but have never seen hard evidence.
The idea of voter ID is effective because of what you just said it sounds so reasonable, until you look at the motivation that it disproportionately results in poor people not being able to vote.
The REAL ID act was supposed to be a step toward this, but has been continually delayed as far as I know.
[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/oagnews/release.php?id=...
I also note that mandatory ID laws wouldn't have stopped the case you linked - they had IDs but the fraudulent bit was the citizenship!
If the later, then I can understand why people are against requiring such an arbitrary form of identification.
Varies from State to State as far as know. At least in some states it's enough to prove that you live in the state, not that you are living there legally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REAL_ID_Act
I definitely had to show the 4 types of documents the last couple of times I've moved (photo/birth/status/address). Stupidly, the first id that was obtained by showing that stuff didn't serve as proof of the first 3 when I moved again.
A bored immigration guy in Detroit once amused himself by pointing out that neither my driver's license nor my draft card showed that I was in fact a citizen of the US, or I guess a legal resident. When I said that this was the only ID I was carrying, and shrugged, he waved me through.
Can you link to a single instance of voter fraud effecting the outcome of an election?
How would voter id laws prevent an american citizen from voting in a different district?
For example the texas election ID doesnt even include your address.[1]
im kidding, but seriously thats a really interesting article/event - what search terms did you use, or did you have prior knowledge of that incident?
I found the incident a few months ago when I simply tried to collect a bunch of data on voter fraud in order to estimate how prevalent it is. Because the issue is so highly politicized, you have to dredge through an excessive amount of bullshit just to find references to specific elections. That election is mentioned in this article (which I, incidentally, recommend reading in full) about Hans von Spakovsky in the New Yorker, albeit in a VERY different guise than two relatives of the candidate: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/29/the-voter-fraud...
A much more interesting election is that of Loretta Sanchez to the House of Representatives in 1996. That resulted in a Congressional investigation that lasted for over a year, whose findings are worth reading if you're interested in analysis of voter fraud. For a quick link to an article from the time, see for example http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/02/13/cq/sanchez.html
This goes for more than just voter ID. Politicians will say things that "sound reasonable" or "are common sense" on the surface, but the motives and fact once you get into the details tell a much different story.
They also find it surprising that the US has no universal ID system issued at age 18 to absolutely everyone.
[0]: https://www.aclu.org/other/5-problems-national-id-cards
I'd trade a federal ID for dismantling all the domestic spying.
Doing it in the other order is a non-starter because it deprives people of their fundamental rights.
The reason why it's suppression is that republicans have very often done the exact opposite.
[1] http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2016/apr/22/tom-s...
I agree that it's common sense, but data often trumps common sense. Before you combat voter fraud you first have to establish that it's a real problem. To date no one has shown that it's a real problem.
Apologies if this is a stupid question but I'd love to learn about how the integrity of the voting system is maintained in huge countries like the US.
As far as I can tell, to pull that off at a big enough scale to affect national or even state elections you'd need to know:
* The voter rolls for a county. I think that, in California anyway, the best you can do is random access by looking up an individual's record using their name, phone number, mailing address, etc. I don't know how one would acquire the entire list of registered voter.
* Near perfect information about which voters will neglect to vote on election day.
The reason you'd need to know the second thing is that many attempts at voter impersonation have been foiled because the impersonated person eventually shows up to vote at their precinct — only to be told they've already voted!
You also need some logistics: enough people to make it worthwhile, vans to shuttle them from precinct to precinct, etc. The whole things seems way too complicated for an organization to pull off without somebody discovering it.
It seems likely to me that voter impersonation could only be a successful tactic in a small town or county's local elections, where you wouldn't need large numbers of people to turn the results in your favor.
>Qualifications to Vote by Absentee Ballot
>Absent from your county or, if a resident of New York City absent from said city, on Election Day.
>Unable to appear at the polls due to temporary or permanent illness or disability; or because you are the primary care giver of one or more individuals who are ill or physically disabled.
>A patient or inmate in a Veterans' Administration Hospital.
>Detained in jail awaiting Grand Jury action or confined in prison after conviction for an offense other than a felony.
Big campaigns also already build statistical models of likely voter behavior (they use it to try to contact people who they think they can influence).
Still not hordes of people out committing felonies on election day.
First, there's voter impersonation--where you go to a precinct, and claim to be someone else and vote under their name. This tends to be relatively easy to catch; the general estimate of fradulent votes cast in this manner is less than 1 in a million, although there's certainly been more attempts that were easily caught (quite a few people last November tried to do voter impersonation to prove how easy it was and got busted instead). It can't be decisive, because before you get to a margin of victory in this range, you're going to discover that we can't actually ascertain the voting intentions that well (misread ballots happen about ~1 in 10000)--this is basically what happened in 2000; the margin of victory in Florida pretty much depends on what you consider constitutes an actual vote in the ballot.
A related type of fraud is using the vote of someone who should be ineligible to vote. You'll sometimes hear claims of millions of people on the voter rolls who shouldn't be on them, and the people who are concerned about this worry that they will be used for voter impersonation. Most of these cases basically boil down to the state didn't hear that you died or moved. States generally only bother to cross-reference their databases to purge people from these lists every few years, but it's still pretty easy to tell if someone cast a fraudulent vote in the meantime if you compare dates.
The least common case of voter fraud (at least in the US) is outright ballot-stuffing: where precincts lie about the counted results. Most precincts count their results in the presence of observers from independent election monitoring groups and representatives of candidates and political parties, which reduces the scope to commit this kind of fraud.
More common is mail vote fraud, where someone intercepts the votes of people who are voting by mail-in ballot. Estimates of this kind of fraud is perhaps 1 in 100,000--it's still not going to be decisive, since (as said above) the inherent inaccuracy in vote counting will crop up before then.
It's worth point out that there is no national vote in the US. Voting is entirely decided by the states, and many details about how you conduct the vote and vote counting process may be left up to individual counties or sometimes even precincts.
The Democrats have engaged in many of these same methods in the past btw, but today's GOP have taken it to the next level. So far that I question if many Republican leaders believe in democracy at all anymore.
But thousands of times as many people as that are prevented from voting because they don't have such ID and are not feasibly able to get it.
That doesn't even cover the situations such as Alabama and Wisconsin, where they passed laws requiring voter ID, then proceeded to close or severely curtail the hours at DMV offices across the states - particularly in poorer counties.
In Alabama, they closed the DMV offices (for budgetary reasons) in 29 of the state's 67 counties a year after the ID requirement went into effect, and I'm sure it was just a coincidence that the closures included every county with a population >75% black and most of the counties that went for Obama and Democrats. Of course, after the news and analysis of this started, the state that can't afford to keep DMV offices open said “We will go to people’s houses to have their picture made if they don’t have a photo ID in the state of Alabama,” or they can go to any probate judge (who? and aren't they busy?) or county register office. Mmhm.
In Wisconsin, they closed and cut hours at offices in more Democratic areas while expanding them in areas that tended to vote Republican. The most egregious one (and the one that got national attention on John Oliver's show) is Sauk City, where the office hours were cut back to the fifth Wednesday of any month with 5 Wednesdays - which in 2016 meant 3 times prior to the election, plus November 30. Admittedly, you could go 20 miles to the next closest (open Mondays and Wednesdays), 30 miles to the one open on the first, second and third Wednesdays of each month or just a little further to the state capitol with pretty normal hours. Hope you're not walking or on a bike, or that you're good with doing a 40-mile round trip on a weekday and that you don't forget to bring something they'll accept as proof of residency.
Basically, voter ID as it's presented is a solution to a problem that basically doesn't exist, but it's a solution that happens to have some pretty severe side effects. Maybe the folks pushing so hard for it are incompetent and innumerate, or maybe, just maybe, it's those side effects that are really the goal.
Edit: Oh and for the argument that there's massive in-person voting fraud I have a simple question: If you're claiming that are you also therefore arguing that all of the people responsible for monitoring the voting process are utterly incompetent because even when they go looking for it they can't find it? Or are the perpetrators of the fraud simply superhuman and able to get their fraudulent votes counted while leaving no other traces?
While this is superficially true, pragmatically speaking it depends entirely on the outcome of doing such. If it happens to avoid no voter fraud, but does succeed in making it so certain demographics are inconvenienced in voting, then the effect of it is indeed undemocratic voter suppression.
At any rate, the fact that one party is pushing the matter, while the other resisting should suggest that there are expected gains or losses, respectively, for those parties. That's all the more reason to insist on fully demonstrating that there is a bonafide need to implement these measures before blindly doing so under the ultimately irrelevant rationalization that "everybody else does it this way".
Showing your ID isn't, but voter ID laws are.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ac...
Yes. And it would make sense if the USA had some form of free universal ID. It doesn't, and the people most strongly in favour of voting ID laws also seem to be the most strongly opposed to universal ID.
But I do agree that in general, it needs to be easier to get an ID in this country
Texas' strict voter ID requirement was struck down in the courts last summer precisely because of these reasons. It was found that the law, despite free IDs significantly disadvantages black and latino voter's in the state who are much more likely to have issues like above. Didn't stop polling place workers in some areas though some of whom still turned people away based on the non-existent requirement.
Research has shown that the type of voter fraud that would be prevented by voter IDs is extremely rare; research is mixed as to whether voter ID laws reduce overall turnout or minority turnout; and research has shown that Republican legislators in swing states and districts with sizable black or Hispanic populations push the hardest for voter ID laws.
While I personally suspect that both republican and democrat concern about voter ID laws comes from a (mostly overblown) fear of being disenfranchised- I wouldn't really call it common sense any more than it's common sense to believe that the people who aren't going to vote for your policies shouldn't be able to vote at all.
The same people who held that as a point of pride in the 50's and 60's are now the people who are fighting for mandatory voter ID laws. I honestly believe that if anybody is committing voter fraud, it isn't the people that the republicans are targeting with these voter ID laws.
Sounds creepy and far-fetched, right? Surely they would only use a law like that to punish voter fraud. Oh, but they're already talking about prosecuting registered voters who voted in the last election.[0]
How are they going to do that? Well, it wouldn't be possible if voter fraud were real, because all they have to go on is the affidavit forms filled out with the names of eligible, registered voters. The real perpetrators would be a mystery. But if you assume that voter fraud doesn't happen, that all of the ballots were cast by eligible voters voting honestly as themselves, then all you have to do is track them down by their voter registration records and prosecute them for perjury.
For every eligible voter they arrest, ten thousand will be scared away from the polls. For every person they prosecute, a hundred thousand registered voters will avoid the polls for fear of breaking the law. (I have no idea if those numbers are overstated or understated. The point is that it's well worth their effort even if they don't convict anyone. I'm sure they accomplished plenty just by floating the idea.)
Remember this when you're wondering how "close" we are to authoritarianism in the United States. It's here. It has always been here. It just isn't evenly distributed. There's a constant battle to incrementally expand it in one place or roll it back in another. Dribs and drabs. Boring politics.
It would be cliché to say if you're reading this then it will affect you last -- cliché and wrong. By design, this kind of disenfranchisement will never affect the vast majority of the American registered voters reading this on HN. We have the financial means and the technocratic know-how to abide by whatever rules they invent to reduce the voting power of the underclass. If you're black or brown, so much the better. You will probably vote successfully, and they will point to you as proof that the system works and democracy has not been subverted.
Did I mention that the votes in question were never even counted? So I should have said they're considering prosecuting eligible, registered voters who tried to vote as themselves but had their ballots thrown away.
[0] "The chief election officers in two of the state's largest counties are now considering whether to refer cases to local prosecutors for potential perjury charges or violations of election law." http://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas/2017/02/18/hundreds-tex...
The Republican take on what happened: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/02/19/hundreds-texans-m...
Another take; you decide: https://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2014/11/18/texa...
More background: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/us/court-filing-accuses-t...
This is striking me as becoming close to Wolfram Derangement Syndrome, and I think it's bad for the quality of discourse on this subject.
Just to sketch out the brief reasons why, let's first accept that the gerrymandering conversation is about the United States. As such, we have to accept the reality of the United States Constitution. Finally, most arguments about gerrymandering are focused more on federal districts, as in the districts that make up the House of Representatives.
Given all that, talking about proportional representation is a complete waste of time, and it gets in the way of having constructive conversation about this subject. It is constitutionally impossible to disband the House of Representatives and switch to proportional representation. It will not happen. Arguments about how it should happen are completely irrelevant to the gerrymandering subject, and counterproductive. For people that know this, arguments about proportional representation are not all that different than hijacking threads and trolling - the only difference being the high likelihood that people are not educated enough civically to understand that proportional representation is impossible on the Federal level.
Every time I see a thread here I really do look forward to reading thoughts that are actually about gerrymandering and solving gerrymandering - I would like to see more focus on those subjects rather than the completely unrelated subject of proportional representation.
One caveat - many people don't realize this, but some state constitutions DO theoretically allow proportional representation for STATE governments. That's worth exploring.
The reason people love to talk about proportional representation is because it is a comparatively easy and elegant method to solve the problem. Legislating math is hard. Folks won't understand it.
People feel their vote doesn't matter. I say this as someone whose district just became a swing one out of nowhere.
Whether doing so is realistic or not is another question, but as a non-american, I can totally relate to this attitude - the whole problem just seems bizarre to me. But don't get me wrong, I am neither judging, nor do I think that "just switch to proportional representation" is realistic for the US without a revolution, or at least some miraculous bipartisan effort.
National reforms are often led by the states.
I'm curious, what is the Constitutional argument against proportional representation within states? A complete proportional representation system that spans the states is obviously unconstitutional, but I'm not sure that a proportional representation system within states is. Can you expand on this?
Making this change would require action by a state's legislature, and likely changes to federal law as well, but no federal constitutional amendment is needed.
I think it's highly germane to discuss alternative election systems in a discussion on fighting gerrymandering.
E.g. Norway uses proportionality within regions, and counts votes per party list and then keeps track of how many "wasted" votes each party has.
Then a small fixed number of seats are allocated in descending order of remaining wasted votes (each allocation removes an equivalent number of votes from that party-lists pool) from the region where that party had the most wasted votes.
There's also a 5% threshold in the national vote to be able to receive seats from that pool.
It both gets relatively close to proportional, still makes it possible for very popular independent candidates to get elected directly, and the seats used to even out are also linked to regions. The areas are just a bit larger.
Even 2-3 seats per district plus a few seats used to even out representation would give dramatic improvements in proportionality.
This was done variously by allowing and disallowing multi member districts, after reapportionment via a decenial census.
Multi-member districts were un-regulated in the early 1800s, then disallowed in the 1842 statute, but had a number of states with multi-member districts were in the subsequent election allowed to have their multi-member-district representatives seated. Then allowed again by silence in the statutes in 1850, then disallowed by statute again in 1862, and generally not allowed in subsequent reapportionment statutes through 1911, allowed by absence of regulation in 1929 (via Supreme Court ruling in 1932, Wood v. Broom, that the provisions of each apportionment act affected only the apportionment for which they were written).
Then disallowed most recently in 1967 by statute (as part of a civil rights concerns, after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that southern states might resort to winner-take-all at-large elections to eliminate voting strength of recently-enfranchised blacks in the South).
See: The History of Single Member Districts for Congress: Seeking Fair Representation Before Full Representation - by Tory Mast
You are confusing "proportional representation" (an outcome which many systems approach) with Party List Proportional (an election method which is designed to achieve proportional representation.)
There is no Constitutional barrier to many PR systems (e.g., STV in multimember districts) in the US, though there are some structural limits to the degree of proportionality that could be achieved (you'd still have to apportion by population and have each state as a separate pool.)
There are some federal statutory limits mandating single-member districts, but those are much easier to reform than Constitutional barriers.
> Every time I see a thread here I really do look forward to reading thoughts that are actually about gerrymandering and solving gerrymandering
Distortions of the kind labelled gerrymandering are fundamental to the exclusive use of independent single member districts (and exacerbated if you use plurality or majority-runoff elections in those districts.)
This is an inescapable fact. You can't complain that you want to hear solutions to gerrymandering and simultaneously exclude all the things that actually address gerrymandering from the acceptable solution space. Well, you can, but you are making irreconcilably conflicting demands when you do so.
Not so much. In Australia we have single member districts but not really gerrymandering because our districts are set by an independent non-political body using an algorithm and some common sense. Look at an electoral map of Australia and you'll see that our electorates are reasonably sensible shapes, they haven't been set up to favour one party over another.
Heh, yeah...we used to have those in the US, too. Is there anything in AUS law that prevents infiltration by members more political than the body's charter anticipated?
Given how the US political landscape is, it's not difficult to build a generic system that produces results that will favor the same party in all states. Compactness will, in general, be closer to favoring Republicans, while something that aimed for even population density in each district would favor democrats.
If I had to choose between any algorithm and what we have now, I'd pick the algorithm, but it's still going to be a worse output than someone actively redistricting aiming for maximally competitive elections or a proportional system.
People have historically underestimated "tail risks" to institutions and social situations that they take for granted. I had an international relations professor once who was in the Situation Room on August 19, 1991; he worked for the Pentagon, and they had just finished their 5-year plan about likely force build-ups and military risks in Eastern Europe. Nobody had envisioned that there would be no Soviet Union, no Eastern Bloc, and no Cold War. It just didn't fit into their possible calculus; the Soviet Union had existed for 69 years, the Cold War for 46, and that was the entire adult lifespan of most of the people in the room.
I believe there's a non-negligible chance that within my lifetime, the United States of America will cease to exist. And furthermore, there's a non-negligible chance that the concept of the nation-state as a societal organizing principle may also cease to exist. People forget that the modern nation-state as we think of it - a strong central government with a monopoly on military power, public infrastructure, and a unified ideological worldview - is only about 150 years old. It actually post-dates the U.S. Constitution; many of the individual amendments (eg. the 2nd and the 10th) are remnants of a time where primary power resided within the States, and we literally were the "United States of America", not the "United States of America".
If this does come to pass, it's critically important that there be robust academic discussion of alternatives, and particularly alternatives to those aspects of the current system that are most problematic. Otherwise, we risk falling back on systems (eg. corporate feudalism) that provide safety & security but don't even bother to give lip-service to freedom or democracy, which I think would be a huge shame. We would not have an America without the ideas of the Enlightenment, which were largely developed in response to rising contradictions within Europe between the official institutions and the actual economic & social power on the continent.
I'd date the modern nation-state to:
The American Civil War. (1865). There's a reason why this is called "The War Between the States" in the South - before the Civil War, it wasn't clear whether the U.S. was a loose confederation that any state could secede from at will, or a unified political body that would fight to maintain its integrity.
The unification of Germany (1871). This is geographically the same area as the Westphalian states, but people think of "Germany" as the nation, not Munster/Brandenburg/Westphalia/Saxony/etc.
The unification of Italy (1871). Again, we don't think of the Papal States as a nation, we think of Italy as one.
The Meiji restoration in Japan (1868), where decentralized power under the shogunate was centralized under the emperor.
Russification under Alexander II of Russia (1859-1882), which included both the emancipation of the serfs and a systematic campaign to promote the Russian language & culture within territories governed by the Russian empire.
The issue is that territories often shifted hands, and what territories happened to be ruled by the same people often boiled down to which monarch happened to inherit or conquer which areas.
There simply was no clear unified concept of a nation of people.
The rise of the national states came in part as a result of Romantic Nationalism (or Nationalromanticism) [1], and the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in particular as a reaction against the above:
For the first time there was the rise of the sentiment that certain areas belonged to certain states because their people belonged together due to common language or culture, rather than because the territories were owned by a specific monarch, or because of a given convenient political association.
This coincided by wholesale creation of cultural mythos. E.g. Norway had not existed as an independent kingdom since 1380, and had only existed as a unified kingdom for a few hundred years at that time. But with the rise of Romantic Nationalism, authors and artists and politicians contributed to creating a mythos of a Viking era Norway and Norwegian people that had a common destiny.
Norway was nothing special in that respect - it is one example of dozens in Europe alone where nations were spun out of mythology or ideas about a shared history or destiny that largely boiled down to finding convenient political or language boundary and creating a mythos that fit them.
Strictly speaking, the Roman Empire was a surprisingly centralized state for its size--the provincial governors spent a lot of time asking the Emperor for guidance. (That was a large part of the reason why it fell--it was just too big to be centrally governed, and the administration couldn't really effect the necessary decentralization). Decentralization was the norm from post-classical times up until the development of gunpowder, which allowed central governments to start to exercise a monopoly of force over their subordinates.
This is, incidentally, the argument behind eliminating the Electoral College.
But the fascinating thing about the EC is that it's basically a custom "consensus algorithm" that is intended to prevent large disparities between the political power of states with very large vs very small populations.
This has the effect of increasing the political power of voters in remote regions, and decreasing the political power of voters in states with large populations. In effect, what we consider "consensus" in the EC system is different than what we'd consider consensus in a purely majority-vote system.
Congressional districting is an attempt to do the same thing at the state level... Consensus requires more than just appealing to the largest numerical majority. Interests that correlate with geography get slightly more political power than they would in a purely majority-vote system.
As we know from cryptocurrencies, changing the consensus algorithm is a hot topic, and there is always a group of winners and a group of losers.
Gerrymandering creates voting blocs that make it more likely that the bloc will elect a candidate that strongly supports the bloc's interests, but it also reduces the impact of the bloc's views on elections held in nearby blocs.
How this plays out in any specific scenario is largely the result of historical accident, but I'd offer the argument that allowing states to change the consensus algorithm for their own voters is not necessarily bad for anyone outside of that state.
I support the Electoral College because I think that without it, the issues that Americans considered at the national level would be very strongly dominated by the concerns of the most populous urban centers, which would lead to even more fractiousness between urban areas and "flyover" areas.
So states that tinker with their own consensus algorithms are potentially helping (but likely hindering) the ability to achieve stable consensus. This is a bad thing, but not something that should be prevented by Federal law. We should let them make their own mistakes and let more enlightened states (if any exist) lead by example.
and with it the majority of voters get overridden because of those flyover states. I don't like this argument because you are arguing for exactly the opposite as the better way.
Anyway, I still think the easiest way is to remove the cap on the house or raise it a lot. You still get the electoral college benefit you want but the disparity in power isn't so high.
I don't really like that though. Personally I think a popular vote would just result in more moderate policies because you need to at least split the cities, and then the rural areas are still valuable to put you over the top.
Urban voters have the benefit of living in a densely populated area. There's something to be said for safety in numbers.
> Personally I think a popular vote would just result in more moderate policies because you need to at least split the cities, and then the rural areas are still valuable to put you over the top.
Campaigns would visit fewer areas than they do now. Voter fraud could become more easier to commit. Swing states would disappear.
Popular voting sounds great until you realize those who live away from larger voting blocs would get the short end of the stick.
Why?
> Swing states would disappear.
Thank fucking god for that.
Do you want swing states to no longer have votes that matter? Or do you wish that the kinds of issues that result in swing states would no longer exist?
I don't want them to be the only ones that end up mattering.
Even in a popular vote system there would still be small issues that ended up mattering (seemingly too much) they would just not be as likely to be from geographical areas with low populations.
There are issues with broad support, and other issues with narrow support. In order to win, politicians must cater to both. The narrow, tie-breaker issues in a popular vote system would also (quite likely be just as stupid as they are today).
This is a common sentiment. I'm curious about what you think about the following question:
Let's say we order cities from most populous to least populous. How many cities would we need to add together to get to roughly 50% of the population? Bonus points for putting down a guess before doing the math and checking.
http://www.businessinsider.com/half-of-the-united-states-liv...
Once you merge those into virtual counties, the number of counties is a lot lower.
While this is an interesting question, it's not the one that we should ask:
Instead, what is the lowest number of flights a candidate needs to take to visit a majority of the voters' nearby area? If the candidate can drive for under three hours to arrive at another area, the trip does not qualify for a flight.
See these links for the map visuals supporting this line of reasoning:
http://www.arbesman.net/blog/2011/02/02/the-city-states-of-a...
and
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-...
A popular vote system decreases the number of flights substantially compared to the EC system, and would make much of the US utterly irrelevant in a national election. The EC system was created to prevent this from happening.
Also, flights are a proxy for overall campaign spending. A popular vote system would reward spending on the most populous visits and (compared to the EC system) penalize visits to the least populous areas.
No, we're not rewriting the whole code base on a production system just because you think Scala is neat. The existing code is fundamentally fine, let's focus on this problem today.
(I still agree that "rewrite in Scala!" is a bad answer, but some kind of extensive refactoring or rewrite may be called for.)
It is merely a piece of paper, containing stuff that was the pinnacle of political thought centuries ago. It is not the will of god almighty. It is merely the operating system of this country's laws, and we upgrade OSs all the time - when they're too old, start glitching, and crash your apps all day long.
Stop worshiping a piece of paper with some old words on it.
It can be done on a local level and in each such district you will see people hate each other less, third parties get a real chance etc.
Google APPROVAL VOTE.
the constitution dictates how representatives are apportioned and sets out the rules for how election laws are handled. The districting rules are not in the constitution. So why would it require an amendment? You wouldn't dissolve the house, you would just change the apportionment as needed (people/rep) and pass the appropriate laws.
There are multiple kinds of proportional representation. You're focusing on one kind called a party list system, but it's perfectly possible to have PR within a constituency with a transferable vote.
In reality, voters are more scrambled than that - so if you try to retain that "most fair" sense, then you are by definition going to have extremely non-compact, non-contiguous districts.
You can get back to more compactness by making some voters "unrepresented" (meaning, a representative other than the one they voted for). As long as that balances out between parties, then you're okay (which is what the "efficiency gap" is all about).
But by itself non-compactness is not a guarantee that the district is unfair. It's really just an indication, that so far, it probably means that the district drawers were up to shenanigans. It's just not necessarily so. You may want to get more creative with district shapes to help more voters feel represented.
By the way, I should point out again that there are plenty of other weird tradeoffs like this. For instance, Schwarzenegger was recently complaining about "non-competitive" districts, while others regularly complain that the Federal house districts are not very representative of the voting population as a whole. These two aims are actually in tension with one another! The "most fair" scenario above is about as non-competitive as you can get.
They are "looks nice" (in a picture of district outlines) criteria that actually (given the geographical distribution of party members) are equivalent to deliberately gerrymandering in favor of Republicans.
And that's really the key point: as long as you have single member districts and data about the existing distribution of voting preferences (which people in a position to adopt or sell policies do), you can design facially neutral criteria whose application will result in any distortions of representation you could seek to gain from gerrymandering, and say "let's automate with these criteria, take people out of the loop, and avoid gerrymandering", when all you are really doing is automating gerrymandering.
I seriously doubt this assertion is true. If you were to take, say, one state and design a set of district division rules based on, say, population density, geographic similarity and boundaries, infrastructure boundaries, existing political borders like counties and cites and manipulate the weights given to each factor so that one party comes out over- represented, the very next time the districts are redrawn after significant changes that carefully constructed balance will fall apart.
No, there's not. The patterns of geographical distribution of partisan identification in the US is relatively stable over decades (and that of broad ideology is even more stable, as much of the shift in distribution of party identification is realignment of parties rather than redistribution of ideology), it's also pretty similar across the nation in many key ways.
I started hearing about and researching the idea of algorithmic districting to address gerrymandering the same year I started college, 27 years ago; optimizing for compactness and contiguity was a popular proposed standard then, and that it overrepresentingamong conservative views and the Republican party because urban cores nationally tend to contain liberal supermajorities whereas rural and suburban areas broadly have a narrower conservative majorities was true and not even a new observation then. And it remains just as true now.
[...] over 900 people have indicated their interest by signing up for a mailing list
http://tufts.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7...
"Math prof claims she's invented new form of compactness, which Mexico has used for decades
& programmed into our DistrictBuilder software"
http://www.illc.uva.nl/COST-IC1205/documents/Caen-2014-Slide...
The article neglected to mention that neither side wants to actually fix the problem, but both sides want to gain an advantage under the guise of fixing the problem. It's like players arguing calls in contemporary sports–it's not based on what's correct, it's based on trying to win at all costs.
For instance, the fourth district looks ridiculous:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois%27s_4th_congressional...
The funky shape ensures that minorities get representation though. The weird path it takes is because of the 7th district, which I live in, which is 54% black. If it was cut any farther East, black people would be a minority.
I think the shape is a bit ridiculous, but it would be possible to make a more fair looking shape that had a white majority in each district, so I think this is the lesser of two evils. There is probably a better way to district this area though, but proportional representation would make the entire situation a bit less ridiculous overall.
The way you've represented what I've said is absurd. If representatives are to be representative of the population you'll have to create some funny looking districts somewhere. If Illinois was really gerrymandering as much as say, Wisconsin, our district map would look like a tentacled monster extending from Chicago and reaching down through the rest of the state.
So.. in the house of rep districts you allow for popular vote to recall reps and also to hold popular referendum in said districts on whether to split them. If people are upset enough with their representation and can get enough to vote to spit the district then the district is split. This would intensify the situation some however you enable merging so when the popular will exists to merge then there is the chance as well.
A lower level would exist under the house of representatives in which instead of people in the district voting for that lower rep, people from a random generated district that votes differently would have the ability to vote someone in. Essentially San Fransisco would be able to vote for a lower rep in some random super conservative district and vice versa. The entire point of the lower rep is to essentially troll the house of rep. We'd give them powers such as being able to call for a town hall meeting twice a year, a direct debate twice a year, petitions without the usual required permits, an an ability to freedom of information act everything the house rep does.
The upper end of the tetracameral system would be two senators appointed by the state legislature prior to the 17th amendment restoring some state power. The mid level would be directly elected senators, however states would gain a few more based on population.
Nonetheless, the districts portion is what I wanted to cover but felt I'd share most of the idea so there would be more background around the concept. The ideal would be both on the state level and federal level, the lower houses would be open to recall and open to popular vote for district splitting or merging. With a lower house rep voted on by outside parties to try to curtail silo thinking. While the upper chamber returns state interests back to the federal government; some populist sentiment I personally feel needs to be curtailed and think our biggest constitutional mistake was that of the 17th amendment.
It'll never happen of course. But it's fun to think about.
A lot of the Dunning-Kruger problem in the Programming field is due to this. I think that Programming has a number of problems with training and making information accessible to its practitioners. Furthermore, I think many of these problems have tribal and sub-cultural elements to them. (Along language community lines, not ethnic ones.)
The size of my district is larger than most states! It was also gerrymandered in 2003 by the R's seeking to regain territory from D's who had a suprising grip in Texas up until the late 90's.
By Christopher Ingraham June 3, 2014
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/03/this-...
Not to mention Peter Thiel.
Now, we don't know how they did it, but I can only imagine that with deep learning, etc, this is only going to get worse.
Shameless plug for the video. I doubt it'll get traction on HN, but it was 100% a wakeup call for me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719646
Now I recognize it for what it is. Its a techno-hyper-capitalist power grab.
I suspect that it's fun to read and write about new tech applied to Presidential elections but that the new doesn't actually matter more than the same old. If you wanted a really simple model to predict Presidential elections, this would be it: incumbents get re-elected, and then after 8 years American voters are sick enough of one party to try the other party again. One-term presidents are rare.
Maybe you remember the idea of a "permanent Republican majority" from GWB's first term. That wasn't very permanent at all. Maybe you remember the post-2012 fear among conservatives that demographic changes had given Democrats a permanent lock on the presidency. That was short lived too.
:p
seriously though, whether or not you are concerned about the role of data technology in elections, check out that documentary clip I linked to. it helped me peel back the curtain on the wizard of trump.
The non-zero sum benefit of not having to compete in as many districts can't outweigh the harm of being relegated to the minority party. Surely a party would rather compete and win than not compete and lose.
In fact, given modern technology, you could easily draw the boundaries after the election. If you did, I bet they'd look a lot more "natural" than the results of current GOP gerrymandering.
They can cover the entire state's interest through compromises as oppose to infighting for district vs. district within a state.
The universal rule of single member districts is relatively recent, and it was a blunt (though effective) tool to deal with the threat of a form of super-gerrymandering by which states would assign some or all of their representatives to state-wide at-large seats so that the statewide majority would elect them, as a means of preventing the existence of majority-black districts in majority-rule states.
Multimember districts with a proportional (even candidate-centered, like STV) electoral system rather than plurality or majority-runoff deals with both that problem and the problem with single-member FPTP districts.
no new State shall be formed or erected within the
Jurisdiction of any other State...
without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States
concerned as well as of the Congress.
States are mere administrative districts that exist at the pleasure of the Constitution. This state sovereignty under the Articles of Confederation was done away with by the Constitution.
The mere fact that any partition of union requires the approval of the legislatures of the involved states is demonstative of this.
In the same way, however, nearly any law creates winners and losers compared to a slightly different, hypothetical version of the law.
I think the intention behind creating geographical districting was to allow geographically dispersed interests to gain political power that would otherwise end up concentrated in population centers.
This is the same basic idea as the Electoral College -- create a definition of consensus that requires not just population-dominated consensus, but geographically diverse consensus.
The tension about what constitutes legitimate consensus mirrors the sort of debate in the cryptocurrency community about proof of work vs proof of stake vs other methods of weighting the consensus algorithm.
Redistricting is thus somewhat analogous to developing an ASIC that exploits a quirk of the consensus algorithm. Of course interest groups are going to want to exploit whatever loopholes they can find that are within the rules.
But in the case of redistricting we can easily see the folly of it. The impact of minority votes all being lumped into one district is that all the politicians in the other districts can safely ignore minority concerns, whereas if each of the other districts had 10% minority voters, those concerns would not be something all politicians could ignore.
But on the other hand, with a single minority-dominated district, we're much more likely to get minority politicians winning at least one seat, whereas with minority votes spread thinly over all the other districts, this would be less likely.
We can impose whatever restrictions on shapes we want, but ultimately we are just shifting the balance of power between geographically-general interests and geographically specific ones.
Since redistricting is so embarrassing, though, I'd support limiting district shapes to regular polygons whose height and width are within 10% of one another.
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work...
You can turn it into an optimization problem instead if you try to minimize the wasted votes for the entire state. This ensures that you don't get states with districts that all have huge -- but equal! -- efficiency gaps.
I would like to have better representation and lower volatility.
It is a political solution to political problem. It pushes decisions locally (to the "laboratories of democracy"). It is responsive to "We The People" but with a built in delaying mechanism to smooth out changes. It generally leads to competitive (but not toss-up) districts (the goal is to get as many seats as possible so huge margins are wasteful).
What's not to like?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/23/wisco...
>>It pushes decisions locally (to the "laboratories of democracy"). It is responsive to "We The People"...
I would love for you to elaborate a little more about this. I happen to think that it does the opposite by making representatives less accountable to their constituents (they can just pick new ones).
In general, it seems like a mechanism designed to advance the power of a given political party by repressing the will of the people. That just doesn't seem like it can possibly lead to better outcomes.