The New Front in the Gerrymandering Wars: Democracy vs. Math | Hacker News Reader

The New Front in the Gerrymandering Wars: Democracy vs. Math

nytimes.com

67 pointspolarbear517 comments

Or, you can implement STV (Single Transferrable Vote) to fix a lot of these issues. Problem is that the state governments get to choose what constitutes a democratic election.

As a EU citizen, I think it's embarrassing that the UK has a completely bonkers system with constituencies when their neighbor, Ireland, has a more reasonable STV system working right next door. Sometimes I feel like Brussels should step in and standardize STV to get rid of such madness, but I guess it's stuff like that which, had the UK not started the Brexit process, certainly would've made them do it anyway.

> I guess it's stuff like that which, had the UK not started the Brexit process, certainly would've made them do it anyway.

Tbh, yes it really really would. There was a referendum on alternative voting a few years back, and (strangely) that result being overruled by the EU would probably go down like a cup of cold sick. I'd personally have had a pretty significant problem with that.

STV brings its own issues, obviously, and any change in structure is a decision that should be made by those people doing the electing.

I'm thrilled that you're embarrassed by the UKs voting system though. If that's the thing weighing on your mind life must be pretty damned good

> I'm thrilled that you're embarrassed by the UKs voting system though. If that's the thing weighing on your mind life must be pretty damned good

A nations voting system is one of the most important things in any functioning democracy.

I think where a lot of anti-Gerrymandering articles fall short is showing how districts should be proportioned. And that's because there is no way to fairly decide on district boundaries. E.g. Say district lines are drawn completely at random, so whichever party gets the most votes in a state is also very likely to win every district, resulting in a pure winner-take-all system. So any system will have to allow for some Gerrymandering just to make sure the opposing party gets some representation. Which really just means the system of single representative districts is broken, the only descent solution which is used by more than 60% of all democracies around the world is the use of Proportional Representation. But just getting rid of Gerrymandering won't produce a fairer system.

Multimember districts need to be considered. In fact I'd like to see the entire house elected at large in each state. Maybe something like you can choose to vote for 50% of the seats, so a 10 seat state would allow voting for up to 5 candidates.

There are many multi-winner electoral systems worth considering and a significant body of work studying them (STV and List PR are two examples).

But I'd be very careful with off-the-cuff systems like the one you've proposed. Voting algorithms can behave in surprisingly unintuitive ways when people start voting strategically.

One such example:

With ranked-choice voting, if

45% voted Trump-Johnson-Hillary,

45% voted Hillary-Johnson-Trump, and

10% voted Johnson-(either)-(either),

then Johnson would have won, despite lacking wde first-choice approval.

Not so. Assuming by "ranked choice voting" you mean IRV (the term ranked ballots doesn't say which algorithm is used to aggregate those ballots into a group decision), Johnson would be eliminated at the first step as he has the least votes. A Condorcet -compliant single winner voting system would likely elect Johnson in your example, as he seems to represent the best middle ground given the presented ballots. In actuality, voter preference is rarely so linear (one dimensional).

That's kind of the point, right? In this example it's a compromise that (based on these votes) nobody is really happy with but nobody is super unhappy with either.

To what extend do you all think state-wide direct democracy is a way to improve things? i.e. move a lot of the powers of the representative bodies that have gerrymander-able districts like this to systems where individuals can vote directly and the people's votes are counted, not representatives?

People can't be expected to track and understand the hundreds or thousands of issues faced each by their representatives who are in the "business of government". That's massively inefficient, and would result in people only voting for or against "pet issues". Extreme viewpoints on any particular topic would then "rule".

Good point. Maybe a hybrid then where by default everyone delegates their vote to a representative, but at any point you can re-allocate your vote to a different representative for any given issue, or vote on a single issue.

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