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Comment by crb002 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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