Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe it's time to stop using geography? Geography was an important consideration in the horse/trail era where if you were stumping around trying to get people to vote for you, how far you had to travel mattered.

Plus, before skyscrapers and other sorts high density developments geography had an okay correlation with population density, but that is no longer the case anymore. There are often far more people in a single block in a city than on an entire knob out in the knobs, or an entire mountain in mountainous areas, etc. You can't easily "circle" just a floor or three of a single building on a 2D map with any accuracy, but to balance population density fairly you may have to consider problems like that.

With TV, radio, the internet, skyscrapers, and urban density, maybe we need a whole new solution for representative democracy than where physically you collect your snail mail?

I don't have any good theories on what should replace geography, but I do think geography is a problem we could eliminate by ignoring that variable.

Most problems are constrained by the facts that it costs resources to move things, and that you can't trust people to play fair when they can get ahead by cheating.

The latter makes us establish physical security around election polling sites, and the former requires that we spent money to move people, machines, and consumables into and out of those sites.

As such, those costs require that political districts consider geography as a practical, money-saving measure, especially roads and buildings. You have to print N blank ballots and send them to the polling stations, and then send back any unused blanks, and the local issues on ballots for adjacent districts might be different.

In order to eliminate geography, you would need a system that has good data security without requiring physical security for the whole network. And an integral part of that would be a foolproof and uncheatable online identification system.

Good luck with that.

Additionally, geography does matter for the group for similar reasons. Proximity constrains economics and policy.

You can consider geography as far as logistics without using geography as the determining factor as far as who gets elected.

You could simply let anyone vote for anyone and elect the top N contenders where there is N seats.

Logically the choices would resemble the choices of the population.

You can also use the slow but difficult to default distributed network we have had the longest. The US mail.

> You could simply let anyone vote for anyone and elect the top N contenders where there is N seats

You could, but that would actually be worse the FPTP in single member districts.

> Logically the choices would resemble the choices of the population.

No, they wouldn't, except by chance. Say you have six candidates, A-F, for three seats. 75% of the electorate prefers an ideology generally espoused by A, B, and C; 25% prefers an ideology generally espoused by D and E, and 10% prefers an ideology espoused by F.

In the first group, A is by far the most effective campaigner and gets 70% of the total vote, with the remainder split evenly between B and C; in the second group, support is split equally between D and E. The last, of course, all goes to F.

So, in your top 3 vote, A and F win seats in the clear, and the third vote goes to a tiebreaker between D and E; this does not at all reflect the distribution of views in the population.

That's why methods like Single Transferrable Vote and it's relatives, using preference rather than bullet ballots, exist.

I'm all for innovative methods like single transferable vote and agree they would be more effective than FPTP but I think this is logically distinct from whether we should decouple votes from geographical locations.

They aren't practically distinct, and the benefit you claimed upthread is not realized with the voting system (which is also an innovative, non-FPTP, system, just a bad one) you proposed.

Right, Oregon and Washington figured out an easy way to decouple geography logistics of polling places and voting is to use absentee ballots for everyone and allow the physical security of the postal service to do its job.

It's not an interesting solution to the real-time results obsessed crowd, but it is a solution proven to mostly work.

The point of districting is to have the representation be more connected to a particular demographic than the whole state.

I get what you're saying about geography.

But the alternatives have a lot of pitfalls. An at-large candidate from Texas or California is not likely to be particularly close to any minority demographic that might desire a champion for their concerns. You end up with every candidate from Chicago, campaigning in Chicago and its collar counties, and no one ever visits or gets elected from Carbondale or Bloomington-Normal or the Illinois part of the Quad Cities.

It might be appropriate to segment the population by profession, such as to have all the bus drivers, car drivers, train operators, and pilots in the state nominally represented by the same person, while all the farmers, loggers, and ranchers have their own person. That faces the same problems as geographical gerrymandering, and more.

If you segmented the population alphabetically, the representative for surnames starting with the letters A through C does not have a particularly clear mandate. But at least it would likely be a fair distribution.

I think the simplest segmentation would be between urban and rural. Line up voters by the population density of their census tract. Slice the population into a reasonable number of buckets, 2 or 3, and the voters in those buckets elect a number of at-large representatives. You probably end up with liberal representatives for every urban core, moderate representatives for every suburb and commuter artery, and conservative representatives for every hamlet and unincorporated township that can still see the stars at night.

If rural voters are a small minority of the populace why should their distinct regressive views have more than a mathmatically appropriate ammount of weight? When tyranny of the majority is most people agreeing people ought to have more rights than rural hicks think they ought to deserve I fail to see the problem.

Democracy means representing the majority view tempered by personal judgement.

But they are not a small minority. It just costs more in campaign funding to sway their votes. You would have to have a smaller event in every county seat to equal one big political rally in the metropolis. That's a lot of time and distance, and the payoff goes into the basement if other candidates are doing the same thing.

Or you could just make this simple and use STV or a similar preference-based, candidate-centered, proportional system, which effectively segments the electorate by candidate preferences expressed in the election, rather than prior to the election. This essentially minimizes distortions resulting from pre-vote segmentation.

In Oregon we vote by mail. So there's one way.

Geography still matters because your interests are entwined with where you live, at least so long as you continue to venture out the front door.

Most people's social lives are entirely virtual these days. The boundaries are getting fuzzier.

Yes, there will always be direct local interests like fire, police, emergency service, sewage, utility, etc districts, but those services all have natural boundaries themselves, and the political boundaries can and often do match there at city/county/township/x-district levels.

But the state and federal levels, at least in the US, seem increasingly divorced from geography (outside of the Cold Civil War between rural and urban economies/beliefs/interests). The weird shapes of current gerrymandered districts is only possible because the geography is so divorced from the governing. If the shape of most US congressional districts was the shape of fire or sewage districts there would be riots in the streets.

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