The Map That Popularized the Word ‘Gerrymander’ | Hacker News Reader

The Map That Popularized the Word ‘Gerrymander’

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82 pointsDanBC38 comments

The only way to fix this is to remove counties and count all votes equally by state then allow counties to vote local representation and then assign a percentage weight to that group per county.

Each vote is equal and ensures local representation.

The only difficult part would be moving away from one local rep equals one vote. In many cases it will be a percent so one rep could have 1.4 time that of a vote and some may have only .67 of a vote.

No, that's not the only way. Mixed-member proportional voting, for example, provides for proportional representation of parties, while also retaining single member districts (and their theoretical benefits, such as having a representative for a geographic constituency).

Here's a great little web game that shows the power of multi-member PR: http://polytrope.com/district/

I've had the same idea, but it's difficult to ensure proportional representation this way if there are more than two parties. Party A wins a county of 10,000 people with 40% of the vote, parties B and C get 35% and 25% respectively. So party A's representative wins, fine; but what should their weighting be? How do we account for the relative popularity of B and C?

So it's not as simple as it seems, and that's beside the awkwardness of totalling up fractional votes for each parliamentary debate. You'd need fully electronic voting for that, which may well be a good idea anyway, but it's a big step.

There are already existing methods that get very close to fully proportional representation while keeping local representation, and don't require fractional votes, so we should just use those. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...

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

Which doesn't ensure local representation.

Plenty of proportional systems guarantees local representation by the use of multi-member constituencies, for example, and maintain as high proportionality as possible by the use of levelling seats.

E.g. to take Norway as an example because I know it well: Norway is split into 19 electoral regions (for a population of ~5m), but could easily have been split into even smaller regions with the use of a few more levelling seats.

People cast a vote for a party list (which they may amend, to affect ordering of the candidates if they wish, but most people don't), and seats are allocated to the party with the most votes first, and then counted votes are removed, and the threshold for the next seat is adjusted using the Webster/Sainte-Laguë method.

This initially gives a pretty good proportional result. Any "wasted" votes after the allocation of the regional seats gets summed up at a national level to be used to assigned levelling seats - one seat in each constituency is currently assigned as a levelling seat assigned based on the national vote, so that parties due a levelling seat should ideally get it in the constituency where they came closest to winning a direct seat where there is still a free levelling seat when "their" seat is being allocated.

The end result is that while constituencies are larger, most people will generally find that there's a representative in their constituency that is at least sympathetic to their issues, whereas under non-proportional systems the geographic link is largely a sham for partisan issues - my local MP (in the UK) used to be a Conservative, that I could safely bet on would oppose anything I cared about and nothing I might want to bring up would get a positive response. I'd rather have actual representation than a geographic link to someone who opposed the policies of about half of his constituency (and the problem remains now - I have an MP now that I like, but about half have one that will oppose their issues).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster/Sainte-Lagu%C3%AB_meth...

>Which doesn't ensure local representation.

Ignoring the fact that your statement isn't true (as pointed out by others). The current system does not ensure local representation either. People generally vote for their favorite party, and do not base their decision on the policies of particular candidates. On the off chance that you actually hear anything out of your local representative, it will most likely be about notional level issues rather than anything happening in your district. When non-partisan issues come up, your rep is more likely to side with whichever company gave them money, and it'll be decided behind closed doors, it'll be added as a rider deep inside some bill you won't read. On the off chance that you actually read that part of that particular bill, you'll never know who was responsible for it.

Single transferable vote (with multi member ridings, STV) and mixed-member-proportional (MMP) solve both proportional and local representation, in two very different ways.

Sounds good in theory but what you propose gives representation to extremist fringe groups as well who other have to throw their weight around more mainstream candidates in a first past the post system. Imagine both ultra conservative and ultra left having a combined one-third representation.

Elbridge Gerry is an interesting figure in American history. He was Governor of Massachusetts, Vice President to James Madison, signatory of the Declaration of Independence, and Articles of the Confederation. He was at the Constitutional Convention, but ended up voting against it. He was then elected to congress and was an advocate for the Bill of Rights.

I live in his former hometown in MA. We have a drinking club named after him :)

It's flawed, but why should an area with diverse communities have to settle for one representative when a representative per community could be chosen instead? Isn't it marginalizing to have electoral districts which are divided politically? Districts should be aligned to the wishes of the residents there in, correct?

I think I get what you're saying, although the point of gerrymandering isn't to empower communities by giving them representatives who reflect their residents' political affiliations (although it works out that way for the ruling party). Rather, it's to disenfranchise voters for whichever party is out of power in a given state at that time.

I would much rather see a system where a given district is defined in terms of the common needs of its residents, not the political affiliation of the residents. Whichever party wins, they can try to fix the community's problems in their own way, and if they screw up, presumably the community might flip and try the other side for a while. If all anyone cares about is which political party someone is affiliated with, there's no accountability and no alternatives.

With the current system, all of this stuff is set in stone- a given representative might end up with with a 15% approval rating but still get reelected for 30 years. Gerrymandering is trying to rig the system to favor a party, not unlike how monopolies have the power to rig a market to favor themselves by subverting free market forces. In the case of monopolies, we have all sorts of antitrust/etc. laws to protect free markets. Some people say they go too far, some say they don't go far enough, but they're there at least. I wish we had many more similar legal concepts for redistricting, so the governance of the mechanics of US democracy is at least in theory geared towards empowering as much of the population as possible. Right now it's not even that way in theory, as politically-based gerrymandering is not only legal but the expected norm in most states.

But how do you define "common needs of the residents"? And what if you ask them, and their answer is basically political affiliation?

Use a computer to optimise for getting as close to the same number of people in each district with the shortest borders (probably roughly hexagonal districts). Carving up the populace on any other basis than 'number of voters' is sheer sophistry. No amount of weasel words about 'communities' will change that.

The problem with this is that it defeats the purpose of having per-district representation in the first place, which is supposed to be about shared geographic interests. If your randomly cut districts end up including parts with vastly different interests, one of them ends up denying representation to the other. You can say that it averages out across the country, but again, the whole point of such districts is to have representation that is unique to their needs. If we're okay with averaging things out, we might as well just ditch the districts, and count party votes on the national level.

The much simpler solution is proportional representation.

It takes away the benefit of gerrymandering, while designing a computer solution for this just changes the arguments people must use to justify changes to the algorithms employed.

What is a "community"? Hm maybe we should draw some lines. But who should do it? Why us of course.

To add on to the other comments, the two techniques used in gerrymandering are "packing" which sounds similar to what you're describing. Imagine if I have 10 districts and pack all the people who vote one party into one district. I've now ensured that my state will be overwhelmingly represented by the opposite party, The other technique is called "spreading" where I take all the people I would put into that single district, but instead put a few in district 1, a few in district 2, etc, but fewer than the demographics for the opposite party indicate. Not only have I made it so that this group underrepresented in their district, but I've ensured that there has to be overwhelming majority in A BUNCH of districts to get represented at the state and national level. Both are rather insidious and do not provide a fair representation to those voters, especially coupled with the layer of indirection that is the electoral college.

Actually, if it weren't for gerrymandering these districts would probably be more politically homogenous. The point of the gerrymandering is to split up a district that would have had a majority of some party. Now instead of having a majority in one district, they have a minority in several districts.

Not quite... the real point of gerrymandering is to concentrate your political opponents' support, so that they have a small number of large majorities, and to spread out your own, so that you have a large number of small majorities. This will presumably tend to make some areas more homogeneous and some less.

It's both! One's called "cracking" and the other is called "packing".

Because having some kind of matchup between... communities (are you trying to say 'ethnic groups' without coming out and saying it?) doesn't seem as good as having a matchup between the % of people who vote for each party's reps and the actual proportion of reps send, which is what would happen if these districts were chosen at random

Occasionally I wonder if it would be possible to let districts be completely dynamic, by allowing each voter to choose what district they wanted to vote in. Geographic proximity would no longer be a consideration (except of course that the district has to be entirely within the state); a geographically distributed interest group could form a district, if they were sufficiently numerous.

We would want the districts to be relatively stable; huge numbers of people changing districts right before an election would be too weird. And of course, we would want the system to overall increase voters' sense that their vote matters and that they are being represented well.

I haven't come up with a set of rules that could make this work, but I haven't thought about it all that hard. Seems like it could solve the gerrymandering problem, though.

Ooooor, just use some form of more (or mixed) proportional representation.

You're describing political parties.

I though it was Ireland that coined the term gerrymandering

You might be thinking of "Boycott", who was an English land agent in Ireland:

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

Ah yes your so right I got the two confused - my bad

If we had to choose one party in the U.S. that is more guilty of this sin, which would it be?

Most distortions in representation due to gerrymandering favor Republicans. So: The GOP is the more guilty party. http://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/30/gerrymanders-part-1...

Worth noting that recent events bias the story towards Republicans as perpetrators because they held power in 2010 - a census year, when districts are redrawn. If 2010 had been a better year for Dems maybe we would see it the other way.

(Disclaimer: My personal leanings are very anti-Republican, fwiw.)

Maybe. But I actually think it's representative of a very deliberate attempt by the GOP to take gerrymandering to the next level. The GOP has become a vicious beast over the past decade. They are not fucking around when it comes to winning and they absolutely consider "the voice of the people" as something not to be heard to but to be manipulated in various ways. I know, Democrats do it, too, blah, blah. But not like the GOP. Nowhere in the same ballpark.

To quote a prominent Republican: "Sad!"

> The GOP has become a vicious beast over the past decade.

Only ten years you say? Well Reagan kicked off this crazy "government is the problem" kick which was really veiled racism (I guess you could go back to Nixon's southern strategy for some of that), then Gingrich and his crew were pretty awful power-hungry hypocrites, then we had about a decade of Karl Rove's "permanent majority" BS which thankfully looked like it was going to crash and burn this decade until its smooth, effortless and unfortunate transition into the present day with Trump...

But as those kiddos say, HN is not a place to discuss politics. :-P

Though Gerrymandering, I will note, the map being discussed in this post predates either political party by quite some time.

Oh, I am completely with you, trust me. The past decade is only when the GOP has truly reached its apotheosis (I hope) of hate and stupidity. A popular black liberal President who refused to have a nice juicy scandal they could exploit threw them into a special kind of froth.

But, yes, it's all born of Nixon's Southern Strategy and the idea of injecting hateful cynicism into the marrow of the party. Like saying, "Even though we may not be racist ourselves, racism is something we can exploit to gain and keep power." And then over the decades substitute racism with all sorts of ugly shit. And then -- oops -- get taken over by people who are actually deranged racists because, well, now that's what your base desires. But wait: They still want to cut taxes on the rich. So it all worked out well in the end! .....

I am more than happy to discuss politics. Sounds like we're on the same page though, more or less. :-)

Both parties did it for a long time when and where they could, but in 2010, GOP upped the ante by making it a single coordinated campaign across the entire country, data-driven and computer-optimized. Google "REDMAP Project" for more on this.

Both -- depends who is in power at apportionment time.

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