Hacker News Reader

Comment by sova | Hacker News Reader

The Supreme Court (id est The Highest Court of the Land) is currently evaluating if they can rely on an algorithm to detect Constitutionality of district shapes. You're kidding, right? As a computational scientist this is concerning to put it mildly.

Trying to ensure proportionality in representation... is that the intended goal? Is this even a meaningful pursuit in a bicameral system? The Supreme Court makes rulings that span time infinitely forward, meaning that all those different parties that have existed since the inception of the Union have dissolved and new ones have been formed since, but the rulings of the Supreme Court have not this luxury of death and recycling. Nay, a ruling by the court is very potent and quite a footprint on the legal plain.

So there is no easy way to ensure that a district is Constitutionally Compliant, but we can definitely point out "unconstitutional districting" -- right? Do you agree?

View on HN

From my understanding, the Baker v Carr in 1962 decision enabled federal courts to intervene in and to decide redistricting.

Back in the day redistricting was even crazier. You could just draw an arbitrary number of districts with arbitrary population sizes. That seems bad on the surface. With this system, election outcomes could potentially be entirely determined by how districts were gerrymandered.

The efficiency standard seems like trick to get closer to proportional representation. All of this comes down to the 14th amendment being "one person one vote" rather than something like "all votes must have equal weight". A small language that has made things really complicated.

IMO just switching to proportional representation is a much cleaner solution. But the efficiency standard seems like a decent solution to keeping races competitive and from being severely gerrymandered.

Thanks for your words and insight. Yes, proportional voting would be great! Your state gets 5 house seats? Let's have priority-voting where a voter picks choices 1-5 for representation. Jane is first choice, then Miyoko, Sofia, Leben, and Pierre. Jane may not get all the "first place" votes but she could get enough to end up in one of the five house seats our state gets.

Reading up on the 14th amendment, it does ensure that every male over 21 is able to vote (assuming they did not lose the right through crime, also a big issue today as a third of our populous is disenfranchised). It does not, however, say anything about how voting for reps is done at the state level, and I wonder if this becomes a States' matter as soon as we part from the 14th amendment. Pardon my gap-riddled knowledge of such important affairs

ranked choice voting is interesting. It also has its fair share of problems (as most voting methods do)

I believe the 14th amendment specifically applies to state elections under the "equal protection clause".

Most States don't take away your right to vote if you are convicted of a felony. Felons get to vote and can even, more often than not, vote while incarcerated. To vote while incarcerated, they use absentee ballots from the district where they resided prior to detention.

Only two states allow felons to vote while incarcerated: http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-v...

D'oh. I had looked up, previously, to find out that felons can usually vote and extrapolated Maine to be the same as the rest, with regards to voting while incarcerated. My bad, the rest is correct however.

I know Maine allows it, and even encourages it. I actually started a campaign for State Senate at one point. As I got closer to election, I learned more about the system and decided I couldn't participate in that. So, I never turned in all the signatures and didn't run.

But, thanks for the correction. For some reason, I'd assumed the rest of the States allowed it. I understand that, in Maine, some candidates have even campaigned, in person, in the prisons. Notably, we don't actually have a lot of prisoners or very dangerous prisons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com