Mathematicians looking to make elections in the US more representative
nature.com
nature.com
Partisan gerrymandering allows for politicians to secure their seats - this leads to less voters being represented (allowing the politicians to become more polarized) e.g. when races are tight, politicians tend to move towards the center. [2]
Partisan gerrymandering is strongly disliked by both parties and across the political spectrum, the only people fighting for it are those currently in power (on both sides) [3]
Partisan gerrymandering disenfranchises a large portion of voters, whose votes end up “not counting” b/c of how district lines are drawn[4]
Because of this, I'm currently fundraising (from friends and family) for the legal team in the North Carolina case [1]. I've committed significant amount personally to the fundraise and can say that this is arguably one of the highest leverage ways to spent dollars that you can get to get America back on track as a representative democracy.
I've done a lot of research on this - if you want to help (with $$) or just want to learn more, feel free to reach out (valgui [at] gmail.com)
[1]http://www.campaignlegalcenter.org/sites/default/files/LWVNC... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/us/politics/in-indiana-tig... [3]http://www.theharrispoll.com/politics/Americans_Across_Party... [4]http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-wang-remlinger-ge...
The misunderstanding of who stands to benefit from redistricting has allowed republicans to propagate a narrative that "democrats do it too". In 2012, despite Republican house candidates receiving less of the popular vote they walked away with an extra 30 seats[1]. That's not a bipartisan effect.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Represe...
Moving a Democrat into a Democratic district makes that district's Democratic seat more secure.
At the same time, moving that Democrat out of your district makes your Republican seat more secure.
You can't do one without the other.
The specific language that the OC, and almost all journalism uses to describe the strategy is "making districts more secure". The only way to interpret that, in the context of the phase definition of security, is adding voter proportion to a district which is already secure. This is never in the interest of the party that it is happening to, so yes, it is dishonest to describe it this way.
If you don't believe that this can be in the interest of either party (since it's happening "to" both of them), you don't have much left to complain about.
Not sure if I believe him, but it's interesting.
Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections are Bad for America
https://www.amazon.com/Redistricting-Representation-Competit...
Furthermore, American politics isn't two ideologies. Each party is composed of multiple groups that compete for dominance. Republicans have business interests, evangelicals, etc., while democrats have progressives, neoliberal, etc.
Without gerrymandering, districts would have a normal distribution from 60-40 to 40-60.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...
And even when choosing, they do it for job, etc reasons, not necessarily or primarily with political criteria.
I do concede that odd shaped districts can be more representative. I've been told the "famously gerrymandered" Earmuff district in Illinois[2] actually represents a single Latino community that was split.
[1] https://www.austinchronicle.com/binary/3468/h309.jpg [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois%27s_4th_congressional...
I don't know when this shift occurred, but it is certainly the case now that any compromise is generally seen as a loss and failure to represent your constituents. Hence our very partisan climate and the increasing success of radical politicians. If all you have to do is vote the party line and never try to work things out, your job suddenly becomes quite easy to keep.
Now if things were to change and people would agree to discuss issues and meet midway, then more would get done and progress on long stalled issues would be made. In a country where small yet constant steps are being made, I would argue that the general populace would be far more happy than the one presented in that book by your professor.
The basic problem is that government at all levels has too much power. Less coercion and more voluntarism is the only long term solution to battles over power.
In a district that's strongly biased one way or another (which is the goal of gerrymandering), the general election is a foregone conclusion: the nominee of the majority party will win, even if (as it's been famously demonstrated) he's dead, or if he endorses his opponent, etc.
The result is that the actual electoral process occurs during the party primaries. And middle-of-the-road folks are a lot less likely to participate in that. The make-up of the primary voters is far more extremist and partisan.
And so what we wind up with are candidates that are extremists partisans, and fewer candidates that are appealing to the median, centrist voter.
You're preaching to the choir. I disagreed with him at the time I read it and still do. The single party south is a "great" example of what happens when primaries become what matter.
On the other hand, the current political polarization and problems are due to the old system, so conceivably changing the structure could change things for the better. It's just fun to consider.
I'd also note that he worked in Congress (not elected) for awhile and taught for a couple decades, so his 160 page book anticipates a lot of the obvious criticisms thrown out here.
Right, and that's the right way to do it. The wrong, current way, is to design the districts so their own party has a slight majority everywhere, thus winning more seats overall, not a significant majority in the areas where they are strongest.
The problem is that there's a conflict of interest, so redistricting shouldn't be in the hands of the politicians with a vested interest in winning.
It could be countered quite effectively by a system using larger jurisdictions each with multiple representitives.
No amount of education can be accepted by this crowd that doesn't amount to propaganda or brainwashing.
So the second half should be proportional to the error in the local representation.
I support replacing our winner takes all (first past the post) elections with approval voting. Maybe as a step towards PR. But we'll always have executive races that'd benefit.
Benefits
* super easy to explain, administrate
* per Duverger's Law, would end our two party system
* eliminates separate primary elections
* reduces voter fatigue
* reduces admin costs
* greatly reduce mudslinging, because everyone wants to be your second choice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
Note: I prefer approval to the slightly mathematically superior score voting, we'd get most of the benefits but much more simple.
The party in power (in a State government) can either maximize the number of seats it has, or make seats safe. It cannot do both at once!
Maximizing seats -> minimizing the margin of victory in each district -> increasing likelihood of losing its majority in a future election!
Making seats safe -> maximizing margin of victory in each district and minimizing the number of seats by concentrating the majority's voters -> minimizing margin of victory in the popular houses (of the State legislature and Congress) -> increasing likelihood of losing its majority in a future election!
That is, no matter how you redraw district borders, as long as population per-district is roughly even (in each State), then you cannot get a long-lasting advantage.
This will probably be surprising to some here, but it's clearly true.
This means that Gerrymandering is a much smaller evil than one might think.
I would further argue that Gerrymandering is not an evil at all. It is part and parcel of the Republican system of government in the U.S.:
- the Senate, especially when Senators were selected by State governments, and still now due to its 6-year terms and staggered elections, modulates the popular House
- first past the post leads to a small number of parties and reduces party power (you vote for a person, not just a party as in the case of proportional representation systems)
- gerrymandering also modulates popular will
- juries modulate law and prosecutors
- the president is selected by the Electoral College, which also modulates popular will
- the States have police power, which modulates Federal power
- the Courts modulate Congress and the Executive branch
These things were well thought out by the Founders! They were arrived at by compromise. They weren't accidents born of ignorance of mathematics or science. This system has served us well. Changing it requires broad consensus, which requires strong arguments. So far I've yet to see any decent arguments against this structure.
How is this self-limiting? Also, I don't quite see how it maps to the rather abstract phenomenon you are talking about?
Edit -- wikipedia seems to match up with what I was remembering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering
If you maximize seat safety, you minimize the number of seats you have because you bunch up all your voters. This means that the opposition need only flip a few districts to win back a majority (and then redistrict to their liking!).
If you maximize the number of seats you have then you spread your voters thin. This makes it easier to win in a wave: with many districts close to 50/50, you only have to flip a few percent of the voters state-wide or nation-wide and you win. And that's exactly what's been happening. We've had a number of wave elections recently.
We've certainly had wave elections, have we not? 1920, 1932, 1994, 2006, 2010... They're getting more frequent, perhaps because redistricting may not be maximizing seat safety as much? (I'm not sure, I've not and will not spend my cycles on analyzing redistricting history.)
Gerrymandering gives an absolute advantage. At the core of it, you are destroying part of the votes of your enemies, either by bundling them in one district, or completely destroying their power by cracking them.
Flawed argument, but good on you for noticing the tradeoff. Yes, there are two types of gerrymandering, with almost exactly opposite mechanics.
Unfortunately, the rest of your comment isn't even sophomoric...the US political structure is about sloppily conceived and aimless as your constant use of the phrase "X modulates Y".
Downvote all you want, but all you're doing is showing your bias and ignorance. This isn't the sort of subject where you can reliably determine the truth value of any statement a commenter might make. You should be more open minded. I get the impression that if the tables were flipped you'd flip too, that the disgust you express at redistricting (or the Electoral College, or...) is merely convenient and insincere.
EDIT: And the tables have flipped over the years, haven't they. Democrats ran the table and redistricted accordingly for over 60 years between 1932 and 1994. I'm OK with that. I'm OK with Republicans doing the same now, and I will be OK with it when Democrats next get to do it again. Redistricting doesn't seem to have the effect you all seem to fear. In spite of redistricting, 2006 and 2008 happened, did they not? The 60 years that Republicans spent in the wilderness weren't due to redistricting, they were due to the long-lasting cultural effects of the Great Depression. It's reasonable to suspect that without the Great Depression we would have seen a much higher frequency of majority party switches in the 20th century. I think a switch frequency of 1 every 20 years is a reasonable guess. I can live with that.
then the anecdotal bit, got a cousin who is in politics in a mid Western state following in her dad's foot steps. here is the dirty part, at county and city levels and even to state levels the parties negotiate who runs. sometimes they get a wild card but both pretty much work to stop that. she wanted a county seat moving up from her city district, one she got because the guy in both sides hated and no one else wanted it.
to get the county seat requires finding a way for the person in it to retire or get into state level politics. she cannot simply go up against this person because she won't have her parties help.
politics gets dirty at the earliest possible moment. gerrymandering only seems to be an issue to most when the wrong party manages to overcome it and take power. yet sometimes we need this type of distracting for the same reason how the House is set up. To prevent cities from overpowering the counties and other areas in the state.
The "I'm currently fundraising" is kind of a giveaway that you're one of them.
While gerrymandering is strongly disliked, I doubt there is much that is going to be done about it. The Constitution allows the creation of districts like this. Much like the electoral college, it is what it is and I don't see how it matters whether districts follow neat lines or whether they are all crazy and chopped up like they are today. This sounds like another feeble attempt at grasping at straws by people whose priorities are completely out of whack.
This may not be the perfect example, but something like this
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3201424/A-new...
Approval voting is great too, but I don't know that it addresses the issue of district boundaries on its own.
And to address the question of complexity from the first person to reply to me, I don't think that's a realistic concern. Basically it would work like this: you vote normally (whether singe vote, approval, ranked, or whatever), then each party gets at most the number of winners proportional to their aggregate share of the vote, with representatives chosen in order of performance.
Distribute the seats based on largest quotient (details need not to be understood by lay man, but it is fairly simple), and there it is all states equally represented. If people are unsatisfied with current politician, they don't have to become part of the established system to enter.
It's called d'Hondt method or Jefferson method. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method
Thomas Jefferson introduced the method for proportional allocation of seats in the United States House of Representatives in 1791. Victor D'Hondt published it in 1882.
d'Hondt and Jefferson methods are equivalent. Only difference is the way result is calculated. d'Hondt method is used all over the world, but I Americans might feel more patriotic using Jefferson method.
It adds more power to other important democratic mechanisms: free speech and vote-with-your-feet.
The power of free speech is improved because a state legislator has fewer constituents, so each group of 100 with similar interests matters a lot more.
And, at the end of the day, if a city or state is really screwing things up, people (not everyone, but enough) can relocate to somewhere that is doing a better job.
Eliminating gerrymandering (how? how will it get passed?) and new voting schemes (which? how will it get passed?) are interesting, but federalism already exists (10th amendment), it's just underemphasized.
Which all means "vote-with-your-feet" is actually far harder to do, as all your everyday legal knowledge is useless in other states.
And, at the end of the day, we can talk to our city councilmen about the unfairness of complicated regulations. And cities can brag about their simple and fair legal systems to get people to want to move there.
But ultimately, what political needs would a community of last-name-starts-with-C need?
None, which is why that grouping would only make sense in a society of extremely generic robots.
In contrast, those with a common birthday or name have no distinguishable political desires in aggregate, so the likely result would be 538 generic congress members.
Furthermore, if we assume people exhibit a bias toward candidates from their home state (they do, on average), grouping by birthday or last name is actually a net negative choice since it would likely result in overrepresenation of Californians in congress (assuming first-past-the-post).
The three PR methods in common use are STV-with-multimember-districts; mixed-member proportional (MMP); and open (or, yuck, closed) list systems. All of these (except closed lists) are decent, but have downsides. STV leads to very complex ballots; MMP leads to "two classes" of representatives; open list focuses your voting power on the partisan choice, but doesn't give you much power to help set the direction of your favorite party. And all three can lead to extreme party fragmentation and thus excess "kingmaker" power for splinter parties, unless there are rules against that.
It is, however, possible to design a method without any of these downsides. Perfection is impossible, but the Pareto frontier is, and none of the above methods are on it. Here's one that is:
http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Geographic_Open_List/Delegat...
Here's an article about why it's good:
https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/make-all-votes-count-part-...
Even without the details my sense is that this method suffers from some very serious problems. Picking the two candidates with the highest initial votes seems like a bad idea; this can remove all of the most widely supported candidates if there are enough similar candidates (i.e. if 70% of the voters are split between 10 candidates and 30% between two candidates, but the 70% consider the two that the 30% would elect to be least favored).
In general, strategic voting is likely to have a huge effect. I don't understand what the write-in option does, but if it allows you to vote for candidates in a different district than that would allow votes to be used to disloge more influential members of an opposing party against the wishes of the district that candidate actually represents.
In any case, always interesting to learn about possible voting methods :).
IMO, limiting the effectiveness of strategic voting is one of the most important things a voting method should do, while also not electing anyone who would heavily lose in two candidate races vs. any of the other candidates. I don't think it needs to be strictly Condorcet, but the further away from that a method gets (at least when geographic representation is involed) the less reasonable it seems in a lot of ways IMO.
I've been thinking about the possibility of a parallel system where the grographical representation part is non-partisan. I think this might work if geographical representatives are allowed and expected to allocate their vote on a given issue proportionally to how the people they represent would vote on that issue.
Change the ballot.
Ranked voting is better than First Past the Post (what we use) but the one with the BEST statistical properties and simplest exanation is the Approval Vote.
Simply be able to mark more than one candidate.
This way Bernie or Bloomberg could have run and taken the whole thing. As opposed to staying out because of fear "a vote for X is a vote against Y".
Maine did it. They switched! Now 49 more states to go.
This can be done at a local level in some places. Any district that does this will become less politically polarized and people won't be so fearful and hate each other less :)
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/who-gerrymande...
What surprises me, though, is how little attention is given to caucuses in the US presidential primaries. The turnout is very low and they're subject to strong arming and party insider corruption in both major parties.
Also what do you mean by insane levels of populism? Isn't that just a derogatory way to say "what the people want"?
But yeah, today there's little chance. But so what? Plenty of progress, far more than today was made in the past before the primary system. Several great presidents (including Lincoln, FDR, TDR) came from the old process. Meanwhile the new process gave us Trump...Not to mention, tons of members of Congress afraid to do anything sensible because they are too afraid of primary challenges by hyper partisan people on their side.
UK doesn't have a primary system (mostly -- they did for Labour who are now saddled with Corbyn) and they don't have a stupidly gridlocked govt. Neither does Canada. Both of those countries have politics dominated by mostly 2-3 parties. In fact almost no country on Earth has it to the level that the US does.
Re:"what people want" -- for one thing what people want is often contradictory. For another, there's a reason why the US doesn't have mob rule by majority. What people want is not always coherent or wise. IMO our goal as a society should be a functioning govt and a liberal polity for which democracy is a means. But by no means is democracy a good in an of itself for me at least.
Non sequitur. The DNC's heavily party-insider-driven primary process gave us Clinton as Trump's opponent, rather than Sanders, a similarly populist (and popular!) candidate who most likely would have won.
Governments should be composed solely of civil servants drawn from academia and other fields in which they need to prove their knowledge and competence. Their job would be to advise on and implement the policy goals chosen by ballot measures.
Figuring out some way to allow direct ballot/referendum securely and efficiently would be more welcome than re-jigging the USA to bring it into line with one of the other countries that has an elite class shuffling between ruling in the interests of businesses and remunerating themselves as leaders of those businesses.
That said, people in the US are so busy that they don't have any time at all to even make informed decisions on who to elect to run the city/state/country for them. This is a problem...people need to work less, but good luck solving that one with a crippled economy and enormous wealth disparities.
In principle, I agree with you...we have the technology to allow referendum voting, and it would certainly make for a more representative government. However, I think time, understanding, and human nature are large barriers. Also, don't think that just because people can vote directly means they won't be easily swayed by ruling-class propaganda. A good example is when cities try to install their own fiber infrastructure and Comcast rolls in and convinces everyone it's somehow communism. That doesn't go away just because people have a more direct rule.
I think a representative republic still makes sense for our day and age. Gerrymandering is a huge issue and should be dealt with...along with lobbying and other forms of (very obvious) corporate intervention in our republic.
Clearly, the above would bias some of the decision making power away from low-income populous, however this can be addressed by some form of weighting and thresholds.
For instance, I may value national defense and our military in the abstract. However, if I look at the actual budget, think we overspend and that the marginal value of an additional dollar is small because of diminishing returns.
In contrast, I am sure that there are government programs that provide me great benefit but that I do not know or think about. This proposal would require every government cause to engage in large scale marketing, which is wastefully expensive, and would likely result in inefficient allocations.
>Clearly, the above would bias some of the decision making power away from low-income populous, however this can be addressed by some form of weighting and thresholds.
We could avoid this problem entirely by giving every voter an equal slice of the government budget to allocate.
So I think that people would have no problem finding someone who they trust who has taken the time to identify the best places to spend government money without a huge large scale marketing scheme being necessary.
> Just like I hire a person to fix my car, or hire a
> person to fly the planes I sometimes travel on, we
> hire people to handle running the country for us. It's
> an abstraction of labor. I really don't want to be
> bothered with every little tiny decision about budget
> or foreign policy.
I am proposing that fundamental policy matters: taxation, foreign wars, climate change accords, trade deals be dealt with directly.
The smaller details can be handled by experts in order to free up our time to watch football games, catch up on soap operas and paint our nails.
This could easily still be done with referendum voting, by allowing people to appoint SMEs as proxies for relevant issues.
>That said, people in the US are so busy that they don't have any time at all to even make informed decisions
Neither does congress, because most of their time is spent begging for money and selling legislation. So much so that they regularly pass bills that was neither authored by a congressman nor read by many of those who voted for it.
I think representative democracy only needs to do the second one to be successful.
Impose a new wealth tax on anyone in the top 1%
of income earners. Redistribute the money directly
to the people.
The real problem is faith in democracy itself. It's not about a smart electorate or a technocratic bureaucracy. It's about voting being inherently adversarial, with a voting majority (population minority) always on the offensive against the rest of the people. Many vote in defense of their property against their neighbors who would take it through the ballot box.
Look at the 2016 US election. How many actually voted for either candidate, rather than against the other one?
The only hope for the long-term survival of America is to decentralize power into smaller and smaller self-governing units, with free movement of people and property between those units. We are a union of states, after all (not that they teach republicanism in schools).
> In each section (at first a state, etc), find a dividing line that splits the population in two.
This seems somewhat reasonable, and there's no way for humans to bias it.
Here's some pictures of what this looks like [1], and the write up of this idea [2]
Second, any degree of freedom creates variance, and you can optimize it. There are many straight lines that divide a population in two.
This is why plenty of people prefer to do things like maximize the chance that a voter feels well represented, or minimize the safety of incumbents, instead of going for something that leads to simple lines.
Another important problem of straight lines is that it ignores the physical limitations of actual voting: Each voting location is expensive (go ask in North Carolina, where magical budget cuts make it harder to vote in areas that tend to vote democratic). inconvenient, mathematical lines will give you higher average costs to get to your own polling place, and will require more polling places, or places that have to corral different people to different booths with different options. Good luck doing that without doing everything fully digitally, which is, IMO, not necessarily a good idea.
Once and again the divisiveness of the US politics keeps astonishing me. This would never fly in my home country, even reading this here is repulsive in its unfairness. Sure the parties push their own ideologies, but luckily a fair election still seems to be a sacred concept.
If you care at all about being provided with food, it is unwise to ignore those who live outside of a city or you cut your own throat.
Democrats don't seem to get this because they care too much about their social issues, and Republicans aren't much better about this for the last decade.
Only Trump seems to have figured this out and smartly got rural America on his side.
so if I choose
1. Dem 2. Green 3. Repub
and you chose
1. Repub 2. Green 3. Dem
They'd all be equal? (four points each)
Voter one: Green - yes; dem - yes; rep - no. Voter two: Green - yes; dem - no; rep - yes. This would result in the green party winning in the above example.
The vote would be very close if not identical to approval ratings we frequently see for various candidates. This would have probably gotten us Bernie, since he was the only candidate running at all with favorable approval ratings. Both candidates who made it beyond the primaries were disliked by the majority, which is unfortunate to say the least.
As an added benefit we could completely leave off primaries if we want. There is very little spoiler effect in this system.
Why do you believe this?
It is open to the public and free of charge
It is a solution to make the governing bodies more inclusive and representative, which is the title of the article. No winner takes all, no fake news, no votes buying, no suspicious campaign donations, probably no 2 party system, less oligarchies, corruption and nepotism. What is not to like? Wikipedia [1] does list a couple of points, all debatable and/or easily countered imo.
I also happen to like how seamlessly it integrates with the current representative model and remains scalable as opposed to more direct approaches.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition#Disadvantages
from the average voter pov, who benefit little to none from the current establishment in this presumption
Of course, there are discussions to be held about the implementation details, including the governments reach and the checks and regulations. A lot can be argued about what political experience brings to the table (imo bad things for the very large part, but that is a ugly can of worms). Personally, I would trust my neighbor more to do The Right Thing, than any career politician.
Nevertheless, a sampling based method is much more representative and more in line with the rule of the people idea.