What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case? | Hacker News Reader

What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

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145 pointsfritzw89 comments

This is an interesting article, but the headline is deceptive. The article doesn't answer that question it poses. The reason the Supreme Court granted cert is because the court below, which in this case was a special 3 judge district court panel whose opinions skip the Court of Appeals, ruled in favor of the challengers.

If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this lower court opinion would have in effect (but not technically) stood as a nationwide precedent modifying existing Supreme Court decisions.

Thanks, this is what I was looking for. More coverage at SCOTUS blog: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gill-v-whitford/

That's the procedural reason -- the case ended up in the SC because the lower court sent it up the chain, but that's still not an explanation for why they chose to accept it. As far as I know, they still had the option to refuse it.

> If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this lower court opinion would have in effect (but not technically) stood as a nationwide precedent modifying existing Supreme Court decisions.

I think this is the part that matters. It's possible that the Supreme Court would rather that the judgement came from them rather than the lower court. Leaving it as-is would modify existing Supreme Court caselaw, but the decision itself wouldn't have come from the Supreme Court, which could lead to a bit of ambiguity. If the Supreme Court itself weighs in, even just to agree with the lower court, it eliminates that ambiguity. No one is left wondering "What if it had gone to the Supreme Court" about the decision.

I am not a lawyer, but that is my interpretation.

"Leaving it as-is would modify existing Supreme Court caselaw, but the decision itself wouldn't have come from the Supreme Court, which could lead to a bit of ambiguity. If the Supreme Court itself weighs in, even just to agree with the lower court, it eliminates that ambiguity. No one is left wondering "What if it had gone to the Supreme Court" about the decision."

Doesn't this reasoning apply to every case that comes before the Supreme Court, even those it refuses to hear?

Most cases that the Supreme Court refuses to hear are those in which lower courts reaffirmed the status quo.

Why is that? If this lower court could go against the status quo like this, what stops other courts doing the same in other cases?

This[1] may help. The relevant excepts:

> The doctrine operates both horizontally and vertically. Horizontal stare decisis refers to a court adhering to its own precedent. A court engages in vertical stare decisis when it applies precedent from a higher court. Consequently, stare decisis discourages litigating established precedents, and thus, reduces spending.

and

> Although courts seldom overrule precedent, Justice Rehnquist explained that stare decisis is not an “inexorable command.” On occasion, the Court will decide not to apply the doctrine if a prior decision is deemed unworkable. In addition, significant societal changes may also prompt the Court to overrule precedent; however, any decision to overrule precedent is exercised cautiously.

It's worth a read (not terribly long) because of the examples and the rationale behind Louisiana having a different system.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/stare_decisis

Doesn't this reasoning apply to every case that comes before the Supreme Court, even those it refuses to hear?

There's are several answers to your question.

1) To a certain extent it does apply to every case the Court doesn't hear. Although such denials of cert aren't supposed to mean anything you will nonetheless see in briefs something like:

"The Ninth Circuit held blah blah blah. Doe v. Smith 108 F.3d 1147 (9th Cir. 2012), cert. denied, 112 S. Ct. 60 (2013)."

The intention is to imply that a majority of the Supreme Court at least didn't strongly disagree with the Ninth Circuit.

2) Most cases come up to the Supreme Court from the Court of Appeals, not a special three District Court judge panel. The uses and limits of CoA judgement in their own circuits and in other circuits are well understood because it happens so much. That's not the case for these kind of judgments.

3) The nature of the decision itself is unusual. Most cases are fact bound, even most cases that are dealing with precedent work around the edges of existing cases.

The precedent the court below was dealing with -- Vieth v. Jubelirer -- is really unusual. In it four judges would have held that partisan gerrymandering cases are always non-judiciable (i.e. courts shouldn't hear them) four would have held that the such cases are judiciable. Justice Kennedy wrote a solo concurrence that represented the decisive vote. In it he wrote that such cases were as of then non-judiciable because there were no judicially manageable standards that could be applied. But he left the door open for such standards to appear in the future.

The court panel below held that the standard proposed by the plaintiffs was the standard that Justice Kennedy had been looking for all along. Leaving that in place without comment would have looked more endorsement than usual.

They only had the option to summarily affirm or take up the case on appeal. Technically I should not have used the term cert in my original post as it comes up through a different method (28 U.S.C 1253). In the old days there used to be many more mandatory appeals to the Supreme Court, but it has gotten narrower and narrower. The last change in 1988 got rid of most of the remaining paths, but there are still mandatory appeals written into a handful of statutory causes of actions.

See: http://electionlawblog.org/?p=91947 for more info.

Re-posting my comment on Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with Geometry | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252 4 months ago:

[...] a need for expert witnesses who understand the mathematical concepts applicable to gerrymandering. To meet that need, she’s spearheaded the creation of a five-day summer program at Tufts [the first in a series of regional trainings] that aims to train mathematicians to do just that

[...] over 900 people have indicated their interest by signing up for a mailing list

http://tufts.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7...

Quoting from the end of that article, calling out the "efficiency gap" as the spark for work towards a mathematical definition of "compactness" satisfying districting requirements in a way that is convincingly explainable as fair:

Recently there was a big media sensation in Wisconsin around something called the "efficiency gap." It was a new metric of partisan gerrymandering that, for the first time, a court said they liked. The way it was devised was that the people who created it, they went back and they read all of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s written decisions about measuring gerrymandering. By reading his words and by reading what he said he found convincing and less convincing, they designed a statistic to appeal to him.

To rephrase this a little more concisely:

SCOTUS turns based on which side of the bed Kennedy wakes up on (on most issues). There are 4 solid liberal votes and 4 solid conservative votes and Kennedy in the middle.

Kennedy indicated in a ruling a few years ago that in theory he's uncomfortable with gerrymandering and might be open to striking them down, but apart from "I know it when I see it" he doesn't know a neutral/nonpartisan way to actually detect it. And "I know it when I see it" doesn't work well as a judicial test, there needs to be a bright-line somewhere that lower courts can apply.

Well, a bunch of mathematicians heard that and said "challenge accepted" and have been working on mathematical models to quantify the level of gerrymandering. And now the court cases are working their way back up to SCOTUS, only with the academic models that Kennedy has indicated he wants.

Now we get to find out whether Kennedy's interest in neutering gerrymandering actually goes as far as being willing to strike down a gerrymander. Because it's easy to talk the talk, but at the end of the day Kennedy is still conservative-ish and gerrymandering heavily benefits conservatives overall.

My guess is Kennedy will punt and say there are two many models to choose from with no clear way to determine which one is best even though they are clearly better than what we have now.

To a large extent the court should punt. Congress - as the ones who make the laws - should decide which model is used, not the courts. The job of the courts is only to say if any particular model congress decides on is fair enough.

So you think the very people who unfairly have benefit from this partisan gerrymandering should be able to choose whether to continue it?

Let me guess, you happen to politically side with the benefiting partisans?

the courts benefit too. Liberal justices looking to retire tend to wait for a liberal president, and vice versa conservative justices wait for a conservative president.

> SCOTUS turns based on which side of the bed Kennedy wakes up on (on most issues).

I think this is a little bit misleading. Most Supreme Court decisions are unanimous.

When unanimous, SCOTUS isn't turning.

I was pretty much with you until the last paragraph.

The efficiency gap for all plans[0] shows pretty clearly gerrymandering can occur for either party. In fact, the very pro-Democratic plans are more gerrymandered than the very pro-Republican plans, including the plan in question. There are four pro-D plans with the upper error limit above .2 while the plan in question appears to be at approximately -1.5

There's no need to turn this into "if Kennedy doesn't vote against this he's in favor of gerrymandering because it helps his conservative leanings."

[0] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pJwDdPDejaHo83ukoW27r6Yaaxg=...

In fact, the very pro-Democratic plans are more gerrymandered than the very pro-Republican plans, including the plan in question.

The chart shows districing plans with larger efficiency gaps but the article does not offer any of the really damning plan simulation or sensitivity test results for those plans.

How do the current Democratic districting plans fare in terms of the efficiency gap? Can't tell by that graphic, and if the gerrymandered Democratic plans at the top are historical then do you see how Kennedy's conservative leanings would be relevant?

Conservative means resisting change. Gerrymandering, which benefits incumbents over challengers, is then inherently conservative.

I wish SCOTUS would put out a Euclidian distance Voronoi metric, where the redistricting map presented with minimum error wins.

You quickly get into non-linear territory by using travel time instead of Euclidian distance. Roads and bridges become weapons for cutting or connecting districts. Bad bad stuff.

Programmers like to come up with mathematical plans like this, but you would likely run into the Voting Rights Act!

Many districts which aren't compact have been created as majority-minority districts, to prevent disenfranchisement of racial minorities. Plans which divide or erase one of these districts get stopped by the Supreme Court all the time. It's a 1960s approach to equality, but you can tell its effectiveness by how the House is much more representative of the US population's diversity than the Senate is.

The nature of the institutions, not the district shaping, is what makes the House more diverse than the Senate:

* Many more seats in smaller districts mean more independent population "samples" * 2-senator per state rule means that ND has the same Senate weight as CA, regardless of population

> Many districts which aren't compact have been created as majority-minority districts, to prevent disenfranchisement of racial minorities.

[citation needed]

I have seen many examples of horribly shaped districts, but all of them were done for partisan advantage. I would love it if you

1. Give an example of a majority minority district that is horribly shaped explicitly to accommodate the VRA. 2. Give citation for statement that there are "Many" such districts.

https://www.justice.gov/crt/cases-raising-claims-under-secti...

Some of the ugliest looking district ducklings are beautiful swans in the eyes of the courts. For example, the Illinois 4th Congressional District drawn in the 2000's decade is often called the "earmuff" district for obvious reasons. The western portion of this district actually travels along the northbound lane of Interstate 294! But, this district has a very important purpose. It was initially created in the 1990s to elect the first Latino representative to Congress from the Midwest.

The 4th congressional district has its funny shape because there is an African-American community sandwiched between two Latino communities. The African-American community is represented by the 7th Congressional district, which is designed to elect an African-American candidate of choice. The 4th district was wrapped around the 7th district so that both African-American and Latino communities could have congressional representation.

But isn't that gerrymandering for democrats instead of republicans? I am open to the idea that districts could be drawn based on more than geography, but to me this just sounds like "helpful" gerrymandering simply because it assists the democrats instead of the republicans.

There's no reason for congressional districts to be based on race, IMO.

You could argue that one race votes for one party over another, but the VRA goal was to ensure minority representation, regardless of the party affiliation. Full Stop.

That's a fair concern, but to me it seems like an "easy" yet flawed solution to systemic oppression, kind of like affirmative action. For starters, by drawing districts specifically along racial lines for minorities, you are de facto also drawing the other districts along racial lines for white people. I also think that more diversity in congressional districts is a good thing, as it avoids "lock-in" districts where the incumbent has essentially a 100% chance of winning every election due to homogeneity of their voters. Of course, the other side of the coin is that minority populations can get "diluted" to the point where they can be safely ignored by politicians.

I believe the real solution to our problems is to move away from geographic representation in its entirety. It's too easy to cheat, and by design it only ends up allowing representation of around half the constituents in its area. I'm not sure what could replace it; perhaps a parliamentary system based on opt-in voting blocks could work. But in its present form it does seem deeply flawed.

What could replace it is a sufficiently advanced delegative democracy such as LiquidFeedback. The idea is that parties self-organize when sufficiently many votes are delegated to a single person or entity, but they can dissolve and reform at any time.

Some sort of transferrable vote scheme would probably allow a mix of local/personal interests to end up represented.

No, that's gerrymandering for minorities instead of the majority. THe fact that many minorities support and run as Ds is beside the point.

It's more gerrymandering to get a black Democrat and a Latino Democrat instead of two white Democrats. That type of district doesn't really benefit Democrats as a whole.

I agree it's not a very good solution to minority representation, though. I think multi-member districts with transferable votes would do a better job of allowing minorities to get representation naturally instead of having to be intentionally grouped together.

Thanks for the background! That does explain the motivation a lot more.

It does, however, seem wicked racist and even rude that the primary goal of districting should be to get a candidate of a certain race.

Not necessarily a candidate of a certain race, but the candidate preferred by voters of that race (which often coincides, but not always). And only if members of that race vote sufficiently as a bloc to get them elected; nobody’s forcing them to agree with each other, just ensuring that their voice is heard if they do.

As it turns out, many, many, many districts are majority white people. What these districts do is make sure there are some that aren't.

The Chicago example is famous, but the case earlier this year with several districts in North Carolina revolved around race and disenfranchisement (as partisan gerrymandering is common and exceedingly difficult to make unconstitutional). These were created in a partisan way, but with hopes that it would be within the law. In any case replacing North Carolina's districts algorithmically without respect to race would be illegal.

Some background https://ballotpedia.org/Majority-minority_districts

The article addresses this specifically.

The article briefly mentions the Voting Rights Act in regards to whether the resesrchers' many simulated maps could be valid maps. The commenter that I'm replying to proposed another system. Both are missing context.

> Programmers like to come up with mathematical plans like this, but you would likely run into the Voting Rights Act!

More generally, many mathematically inclined people eventually come to the conclusion that we should have some sort of multi-member scheme but that too is bared by federal law -- 2 USC 2c (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c)

Or, you know, you could just change the ballot to allow more voting for than one candidate, as Maine just did.

Rendering gerrymandering much less of a deal.

By the way APPROVAL VOTE is the best one, not ranked voting.

Roads and bridges often exist on other natural lines that cannot be changed. A river is a good place to put a boundary, since cities and counties are already bordered there.

A proportional representation voting system would also largely solve the gerrymandering problem (no district would be dominated by a single party anymore so exploiting the gerrymandering system wouldn't help much), along with having many other benefits for democracy:

http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation

> They complied with the Constitution’s one person, one vote requirement

That line is interesting. How is the electoral college system not in conflict with the Constitution then, if a person's vote in one state is much stronger than another person's vote in another state? Or is it enough that it satisfies the requirement technically (still "one vote"), even if not in spirit/based on a (I would think) more common interpretation of the Constitution?

Look at the history of compromise that lead to the Electoral College -

Madison acknowledged that while a popular vote would be ideal, it would be difficult to get consensus on the proposal given the prevalence of slavery in the South:

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat...

It's a bit of a tangent, but the discussion of voting systems reminds me of another modification to voting that I sometimes think might be reasonable: weighting votes based on voter age, with the weight starting off low for the youngest voters and increasing to a peak, and then dropping off again.

What brought this on was thinking about the brexit vote over in the UK, which from what I read had very different outcomes among different age groups. It seems quite unfair that people who are likely to die before brexit is complete should have the same say as people who will be living decades under the outcome.

why does it start off low for the youngest?

I think that there are some factors that favor younger people when it comes to decision making, and some factors that favor older people.

Younger people tend to be more creative and flexible in their thinking. As they get older those tend to diminish, but they gain knowledge and experience. I suspect that until somewhere in middle age the gains from knowledge and experience beat out their thinking becoming less flexible and creative when it comes to making well thought out political decisions.

it's not about decision making, it's about incentives. No one is arguing for a performance based voting algorithm. A young person will eventually have to be an old person, so they must balance the interests of both. An old person will never have to be a young person again though, so they only vote in the interest of themselves.

Because younger people have less life experience than older people?

How many times do you see articles about 18-23 year old people doing something stupid, and people come to their defense saying something along the lines of 'They're only children!'?

And on the other hand, old people's poor decisions are often blamed on their age as well. The elderly are prime targets for most scams because they are perceived as more likely to fall for them.

You misunderstand. if you are operating only under the assumption that your voting power should be proportional to the time you have left to live, then there's a pretty clear age-power relationship.

If you add an assumption about life experience though, You're going to have to be a lot more specific to explain how these two functions interact. why is the optimum in the middle? Why isn't it bumpy?

As soon as you start adding other factors into your weighting function, I don't know how you can be confident in the shape of your graph without being precise with your functions.

To be fair though, I think that there's a pretty good argument for inverse age weighting. If you're 20, you will eventually have to be 35, so it wouldn't make any sense for you to screw over 35 year olds. If you're 35 though, you'll never be 20 again. There is no incentive for you to not screw over 20 year olds. (unless you have kids, but at that point, everyone has equal investment in society and the premise falls apart).

I don't think it's unreasonable for voters over a certain age to have restrictions put on their voting. My grandfather died at 94 and for the last ten years of his life he was extremely misinformed, and I don't mean just because he voted in a way that I wouldn't, or got his news elsewhere. He lost the ability to properly understand news from the television/newspaper; he would frequently ask my family if we had heard of some story and then provide a wildly inaccurate summary of it, only loosely related. This was mostly due to the progression of Alzheimer's. He was still able to vote during this time and I think even participated in the 2016 Republican primaries (at that point he was having trouble remembering even the most basic of things).

That said, removing people's right to vote is not only difficult, but can cause more problems than it solves. Implementing voting tests can codify racism/sexism/etc. Medical tests will just be gamed. And good luck ever passing these restrictions anyway, since old people are the most consistent voters out there.

i dont think its a good idea to discriminate a voter on any metric: age, income, race, education, or status of health among them.

I am really surprised that anyone would even suggest it

Voting is already discriminatory based on age. We don't let 5 year olds vote, drive, or drink; why shouldn't we impose the same restrictions on say, a senile 95 year old with the mental age of 5 year old? I know why, implementing those restrictions would be far more difficult, but still, it's incorrect to say you should never discriminate based on age.

Ironically, I actually know a radical anti-ageism activist who thinks 5 year olds (and 0 year olds for that matter) should have all the same legal rights as adults.

> Why shouldn't we impose the same restrictions on say, a senile 95 year old with the mental age of 5 year old?

In that case, you aren't discriminating based on age. Unless you think for some reason that a 95 year old with the mental capacity of a 5 year old doesn't deserve a vote, but a 40 year old with the mental capacity of a 5 year old does deserve a vote.

Good point, in the case of voting it's a matter of mental age/capacity, not physical age. But I think there are analogous situations where it makes sense to age discriminate on both end for primarily physical reasons - contact sports, voluntary exposure to high g-forces, etc.

> Ironically, I actually know a radical anti-ageism activist who thinks 5 year olds (and 0 year olds for that matter) should have all the same legal rights as adults.

I'd be really curious to know that activist's views on labor, aviation, combat, pornography, driving, and marriage--as they relate to a 5-year-old. I suppose some of those categories can be answered with skill testing or whatnot, but others clearly cannot.

Something to think about, while young people and middle-age people have never lived under a non-EU ruled UK, old people have seen what the UK was like with the EU and not the EU around. They offer a unique perspective on this matter.

To answer your question more directly: the electoral college system isn’t in conflict with the Constitution because it’s in the Constitution (article II section 1).

> How is the electoral college system not in conflict with the Constitution then, if a person's vote in one state is much stronger than another person's vote in another state?

The electoral college system gives equal weight to the vote of everyone who isn't an elector, and that weight is 0.

It gives stronger votes to large states than to small states, except that states are allowed to split their votes, which obviates that complaint.

The electoral college is in conflict with the one person/one vote requirement, but it is also part of the Constitution so it is still legal.

I'm not convinced that the "efficiency gap" is a good metric. My main issue, aside from the difficulty in describing what a "good" map should look like, much less measuring it, is that it is sharply discontinuous around the "winning" criteria -- for a single district, in a 49-51 victory vs. a 51-49 loss, there's a 2% difference in the number of votes, but the wasted votes goes from -50 to +50.

It's not difficult to see that the optimal partitioning is 75/25 (in either direction), which seems very arbitrary.

From a democracy perspective, it seems like the ideal partitioning would be much closer to 50-50 -- hopefully even in the margin of error for the area, so that candidates would have to make a real effort to represent their entire district in order to be assured re-election. Even this feels very questionable, because as I understand it, the idea of congressional districts is that representation should follow groups of shared problems and interests, irrespective of proposed solutions to those problems.

The measure by itself is not sufficient. Which is why all the additional analysis was needed.

1. Using the current district map the last set of elections show that Wisconsin had a large gap.

2. Compared to other state's the gap is an outlier.

3. By creating a large number of alternate maps within the state satisfying all the other requirements that gap was still an outlier.

4. Calculating the gap under different voting outcomes showed the result to be robust even under a 5 point swing to the democrates. (This is where the discontinuity would show up if there results were not robust.)

You are stating the efficiency gap incorrectly in the single district case. There can never be one, because the seat goes to the party with more votes (the party with less votes should have 0 seats, no efficiency gap).

The simplest example you can work is with 2 districts.

The efficiency gap, as described, is the number of "wasted" votes for one party, minus the number of wasted votes for the other party, summed over all districts and divided by the total voting population.

So fundamentally it's just a normalized version of the wasted votes metric. Wasted votes is the thing that concerns me as a metric, and it has the discontinuity noted.

Notably, if you have a circular uniformly populated state that is exactly 50-50 -- let's say the north of the state is 100% Republican and the south is 100% Democrat, and we restrict our districting to straight lines through the center. Then there are two solutions that minimize the efficiency gap, the line going from southwest to northeast, and the one going from southeast to northwest, because both of those result in 75/25 districts (that have 0 net wasted votes). This seems really odd to me.

Right, but the efficiency gap isn't obsessed with net 0 districts, it is looking for excess wasted votes. No matter how you draw the line through your circle, the net wasted votes across the districts will be 0, so the state wide efficiency gap will always be 0.

I think it's actually literally impossible to use a straight line there for partisan gerrymanding, so it isn't a real useful scenario.

That's a fair point. Still seems off to me in terms of sensitivity, and once again putting aside the discussion of what the goal of districting should be.

Simplifying the algebra in the calculation, though, the efficiency gap is actually independent of the inefficiencies of any particular district, but dependent only on the population of the districts -- the numerator simplifies to

D - R + sum_i { I(D_i < R_i) (D_i + R_i) / 2 }

Where D and R are the total Democratic/Republican votes in the state (across all districts) and the I(x) is an indicator function, +1 if true, -1 if false.

If you hold the size of districts to be about even, then this just says that the ratio of the total population of districts that vote R to the total population of districts that vote D should be approximately equal to the ratio of the total state population of R voters to the total state population of D voters.

That seems reasonable, just seems like a roundabout way to get there, and is sensitive to unequal population distributions.

An uncontroversial (perhaps the only uncontroversial) goal of redistricting is to make the population of the districts in a state as similar as possible.

Conceptually, I like the idea of having a test for excessive unfairness; states can do whatever they want to deal with their special cases as long as the result is reasonable.

"Gerrymandering" is a word difficult enough to grasp, and "partisan gerrymandering" (for me at least) doesn't ring any bells either, so for those of us who don't come from an USA background, but are interested in how someone could mathematically define that, I found this link:

https://www.senate.mn/departments/scr/REDIST/Red2000/ch5part...

> Partisan (or political) gerrymandering is the drawing of electoral district lines in a manner that discriminates against a political party.

Gerrymandering is by definition partisan (or political). The term comes from when Governor Gerry redrew districts to benefit his party, resulting a district some described as looking like a salamander, causing it to be named the "gerrymander".

I'm so glad this is happening. Gerrymandering is for 2nd rate banana republics, not the greatest Republic of all time. This IS a national security threat.

I would add which party is mostly responsible, but apparently mentioning the party, although factually correct, would lead me to get in trouble here. Which is Grand, coz im really Old, and I dont like to Party... anymore!

Personally I wish my state would enact a law that says representative districts must be drawn to cross as few county lines as possible.

Yes, some manipulation would still be possible, but it would be greatly diminished.

As possible given what constraints? There's no requirement that they have equal population; it seems like your rule would always require districts to cross zero county lines.

If it could be drawn while crossing zero lines, then yes. But even then it is likely several different options would exist, and each party would try to pick one that favors them.

I'm OK with that as a solution.

> If it could be drawn while crossing zero lines, then yes

What would prevent this?

Then why not make the county the de facto district, and subdivide the county as needed when populations rise?

Take the power to create districts away from the legislature. Give it to a non-partisan commission. 1/3 Democrats, 1/3 Republicans, and 1/3 other/no party. We did that in California, and almost none of the legislators were happy with it, which means it probably did a good job. The state still wound up with mostly Democratic representation, but that's more a product of California being heavily Democrat. I'd imagine that if you did the same thing in Texas, even if the districts were much less gerrymandered, you'd still have mostly Republicans.

Woo! Enshrining the current two party system in legislation. What could possibly go wrong?

So don't include them by name. Just say the two major parties. Doesn't matter, doesn't change a thing.

first two parties to finish in the last election would be just as good

Sure. I figure if we ever get to the point where there aren't two major parties, it can either be fixed then, or we're under one party autocratic rule and it won't matter anymore.

You're objecting to one example of an implementation when you should be focused on the idea. You can clearly define it in such a way as to not rule out multi-party representation as needed. Many other countries have cracked this nut (see Elections Canada). Of course, the history of the US political system seems to be one of NIH...

Iowa's redistricting commission is truly non-partisan: no politicians are allowed to participate.

Seems to work fairly well for them just looking at the maps and variety of results:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa's_congressional_districts

Everyone's going to be somewhat political. So no politicians is a good rule, but it still would be good to know the political affiliations of the people doing the districting.

Surpreme? Somebody fix the title please.

Thanks! Updated.

Now that this comment is no longer necessary, how do I delete it?

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