Comment by ValG | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ValG | Hacker News Reader

There are a ton of important issues, but, I believe that gerrymandering is a core issue in the United States because :

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 fact that gerrymandering is even possible is a symptom (albeit an severely exacerbating one) - not the cause - of the problems in the US electoral structure.

It could be countered quite effectively by a system using larger jurisdictions each with multiple representitives.

Yeah, you can't really do anything like it in a proportional system. For gerrymandering to be possible It is crucial that there is a large number of parallell contests so that winning many contests is more important than winning overall support.

I would say the biggest problem by far is voter education--people simply are not educated on issues. They listen to idiotic MSM sound bites and narratives and are influenced by identity politics rather than anything of substance.

I must disagree. As person with an education and half a wit it doesn't matter how I vote in Omaha Nebraska. We will always vote republican and because of gerrymandering my local reps won't change.

No amount of education can be accepted by this crowd that doesn't amount to propaganda or brainwashing.

Totally agree. The winner takes it all system is the real problem. You can start a third party and get 30 percent of the vote and still end up with zero representation.

Large jusrisdictions with multiple representatives has its own set of problems too. In the current system, people, at least, know who their representative is, and there is more accountability.

The system the US help setup in Iraq was that half the house was local represention, then the wasted votes (didn't get your candidate locally, your candidate votes over majority) are given to the party they represent to buy seats in the other half of the house.

So the second half should be proportional to the error in the local representation.

Ditto the voting system.

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/Approval_voting

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.

One of my professors at UT Dallas has a book that argues that districts in fact should be partisan. It's been a few years but the logic is something like if you've got a 50-50 district, you're gonna end up with 50% of the people in the district unhappy. Where as if you intentionally designed districts to be like like 90-10 (or whatever possible), more people are happy.

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...

That's assuming a polarizing representative (one that 50% like and 50% are unhappy with. Could more balanced districts lead to more centrist representatives?

Maybe even having a system that makes more than two choices viable?

That's a super interesting concept. I will look into it; book ordered! From a quick think through - I think that this argument may fall flat on 2 related ideas. 1. Data shows that when seats are more secure like you say (90-10 instead of 50-50), representatives often go towards the extremes of the political spectrum (on both sides). this leads to issue 2... 2. Voters are generally not strictly partisan - that is to say (purely as an example), while I may have right leaning thoughts on how to run the economy, I may have left leaning thoughts on social issues. If I'm in a district with someone that is far right or far left, a portion of the time they're always going to vote against my wishes. Am I better off in general? Hard to tell without getting more in depth on my preferences.

Could this be mitigated by having a system with more than two parties?

Multi party systems tend to favor the most ideologically driven actors in the system. An example of this is Israel.

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.

I'm not sure I follow. American politics isn't two ideologies, but it does have ideologies. Is it better to bundle up these dozens of ideologies and interests into two parties than to have ideologically driven parties?

Except most people derive happiness from and prefer to have equitable power at the national level, not just who their personal congressperson is.

I think single transferable vote is a much better way of addressing that criticism. We have it where I live and it has tended to produce fairly boring yet representative elections.

Ireland has it, I'm not sure you would call the last few elections "boring" (Probably more to do with the financial crisis hitting us like a ton of bricks though)

The problem is gerrymandering results in only one district that's 90-10 while 9 other districts are 55-45.

Without gerrymandering, districts would have a normal distribution from 60-40 to 40-60.

It doesn't seem implausible that like-minded people would choose to live near each other.

Most people don't chose, they are just born in some place and stay nearby.

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.

Surely the point of a democratic election is for there to be the possibility of change? If every district is 90% in favour of one party or another then that will never happen. Assuming there are an equal number of districts then every election would be a tie, and any party that wanted to win would have to resort to gerrymandering in order to affect a change.

Part of gerrymandering is diffusing the vote of your opponent among "safe" districts. Look at Austin, Texas for example[1]. One would imagine the city would vote as a block.

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...

That position only proves true if you live in a society where compromise is seen as a negative.

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.

There are issues where compromise is impossible. Reproductive rights, marriage equality, and separation of church and public schools come immediately to mind. There are also issues where compromise leads to a death of a thousand cuts with one position becoming more and more extreme to force movement in their preferred direction.

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.

But gerrymandering is ALSO an important factor behind today's political polarization.

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.

There's a lot of good comments pointing out potential flaws in his argument, but responding to yours since it's the most recent...

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.

> Where as if you intentionally designed districts to be like like 90-10 (or whatever possible), more people are happy.

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.

Many argue for multi-member districts to avoid that problem.

This is running on the egregious assumption that people can only choose one option to make them happy, and that there are only two options to choose from. It may be applicable now for the most part (when people worry about spoiling the vote, they will support one of the two) but in a situation where other parties have a serious chance of gaining a seat and people have multiple choices they approve of, this theory begins to break down.

To solve this, I think some more universal mathematical truths would have to be employed. If you have 30 different definitions of compactness, the party in power will tend to choose the definition that will benefit them the most. If however, you choose some construct in mathematics where there is only a single option, you may avoid this particular problem.

This may not be the perfect example, but something like this

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3201424/A-new...

Partisan gerrymandering takes on many forms. There are also the convoluted voting blocs created to insure minority representation that can actually increase one parties representation over another based on how convoluted it is just so they don't run afoul of the courts; as in you don't make sure the selected group wins you are in court.

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.

I'm not tracking. Are we not a representative democracy? How are less (the word you seek is 'fewer') voters being represented? I need to know if you're one of the many millions of disaffected socialists who is still whining about the election last fall or if there is something of substance here.

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.

Gerrymandering is already illegal. It can be fixed relatively easily by redrawing the districts, which is done routinely. And it's not like the electoral college is written in stone either. Since you can't see why it matters, here are some examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Effects

Gerrymandering is not in general illegal. As you say, districts are routinely redrawn - but in a way which results in gerrymandering! To fix it requires that the districts be redrawn fairly, and that's a tougher fix (but a significant number of states already have non-partisan districting procedures).

It might be nearly impossible to litigate, but it is illegal. https://www.wired.com/2017/04/gerrymandering-illegal-mathema...

Gerrymandering is not the act of making seats "more secure". This is profound misinformation, gerrymandering is only ever about disenfranchising a voting block by packing them together.

You may have missed point three, where I literally say that. Also, they are not mutually exclusive, in fact they are quite causal. Also, there is more to gerrymandering that packing a voting block together; you can split voting blocks up do more sophisticated things to ensure your goals are met (the primary objectives generally being "get re-elected"). My email is in the comment and my profile, happy to chat more.

They aren't "mutually exclusive". If your voters have been packed into a district, making your seat more secure, then you are a victim of gerrymandering. It's not simply an alternative type of gerrymandering.

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...

It seems like you're not reading what I'm writing at all. I literally said "they are not mutually exclusive. Also, you are misinformed, both parties 100% do this [1](or attempt to) - It just happens that Republicans are way better at it. Way better.[2] Either way, I don't care who does it, it must be stopped b/c it's not good for a democracy like ours. [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/06/repub... [2]http://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/30/gerrymanders-part-1...

You misunderstand my criticism. The reason they aren't "mutually exclusive" is because one of the things that you are calling gerrymandering isn't gerrymandering.

If you read the article, it says there are actually two types of gerrymandering. One is "packing" all of a voting block together, and the other is "cracking" a voting block into multiple districts so that it can't win in any of them.

and somehow, neither of these strategies are "making your own seats more secure"

The first one is.

no, it is making your opponent's seat more secure.

Think about it for more than half a second.

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.

Probability of victory is highly non-linear in the proportion of voters. It's so non-linear that it makes sense to treat it as a phase transition. A district is secure when the outcome is certain. There are two distinct phases where the outcome is "secure" and the border between these two phases is, because of the non-linearity, very small. That is what secure means to most people.

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.

As I just pointed out to you, it can never happen to one party without simultaneously happening to the other party. Packing Democrats into an already-secure Democratic district adds Democratic voter proportion to their district and adds Republican voter proportion to yours.

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.

A seat can be secure at 55% just as it can be at 95%. Packing and cracking both tend to yield secure seats - if nobody could confidently predict who would win the seats, how would it be gerrymandering?

Gerrymandering is self-limited.

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.

I thought gerrymandering is the art of creatively drawing the lines such that all of the opposing constituents are squeezed into one or a few "throwaway districts", thus preserving comfortable majorities in the remaining districts.

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

Cryptonector's comment makes very little sense. It's an obvious advantage if you can move the boundaries between two seats in order to go from 80-20/50-50 to 75-25/55-45.

It's somewhat frustrating though when you can see that one area is 200k people and another is 50k people but the party negatively affected (someone will be) by re-drawing the boundaries to be "fairer" will scream bloody murder and claim Gerrymandering.

It's only a temporary advantage.

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.

Interesting take, but it assumes a high margin of error in the voting preferences of certain constituents, which may not be true, which likely makes it not self-limiting enough.

It assumes the opposition can sway some percentage of the population in a wave in one case (maximizing seats) or that they can put up a few really good candidates that can win on personal attributes and policy, not policy alone, in the other (maximizing seat safety).

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.)

Saying gerrymandering is self-limiting because the party has to choose how to allocate its power is like saying sexual assault is self-limiting because the perpetrator can only use one orifice at a time.

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".

I was actually paraphrasing a majority opinion by Justice O'Connor.

Folks, I was paraphrasing a majority opinion by Justice O'Connor (retired). Shaw v. Reno[0], IIRC.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaw_v._Reno

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