Utility Ghost: Gamified redistricting with partisan symmetry
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
My proposal, which I call "merrymandering", involves comparing the number of seats won by each party in a state after an election, with the aggregate percentage of votes won by each party in that election. If there is an imbalance, then the over-represented party has one of their seats assigned to the next-most-over-represented party, and so on until any seat change would result in a more disproportionate result.
The choice of which seat gets reassigned could be chosen based on how close the other party came to winning that seat, to make it deterministic, or a random process could be used, to avoid safe seats.
In practice, what I think would happen is that with this system in place, there would be no advantage to partisan redistricting, so the merrymandering ruleset would never actually be applied, and no seats would flip. Nevertheless, I have some confidence that the system would survive a legal challenge, since it only changes election results to make them strictly more compliant with the "one person one vote" principle.
In standard FPTP, all the weights are one. To make the results proportional, just assign weights such that the seat counts match the overall vote shares (rounding in favor of the parties with the most votes).
Edit to add: I would guess there’s probably a single solution for any given election, or rather a contiguous set of solutions, but I haven’t verified that.
It probably wouldn’t survive a legal challenge, as some would complain that votes are being counted unequally. Though in this situation I’d argue that the ends (PR) justify the means (unequal weights).
Their system is called "Direct Party and Representative Voting" (DPR Voting) and it has some weird edge cases (like dealing with independent candidates, or parties that win a big vote share but no actual seats), but it definitely seems like an improvement over FPTP, and uses a very easy/quick ballot counting process (unlike IRV or Approval voting, for example).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_re...
As the name "mixed-member" suggests, the winners from this other source (such as a party list) can be seen as "less valid" and lacking a constituency.
Also I think most MMP systems require a change in the ballot papers and counting process, whereas the system I am proposing would look like a normal First Past The Post election in all cases where district boundaries are drawn "fairly".
I would hope that the majority of voters would see that they are getting better (proportional) representation under this system (even if that representation wouldn't always be as local as it would be for the lucky few districts that aren't gerrymandered into irrelevance in the current system).
In any case, by changing the game theory (removing any incentive to gerrymander districts), my expectation is that in practice no results would get flipped, so no one would experience any bad effect attributed to this system.
It reinforces the idea that parties are more important than anything.
I'm a Democrat mostly, but I might vote for particular Republicans if I feel like they are outstanding individuals with good moral character.
If I cross the isle to vote for John McCain would you take away my McCain vote and give me someone from my party that I didn't want?
The way they count is unorthodox: It needs a computer to compute the result because it's very iterative, but the result is easily verified without a computer. In Condorcet's days this would have been unthinkable.
Each party receives the right number of seats based on number of votes, and the iterations progressively move seats around to favour candidates who are popular in their party and in their region/district. Eventually it says "can't be made more fair now" and at that point it's easy to verify that.
At first blush it seems that gerrymandering could then only have an effect within a party... is that right?
In a FPTP election, 10-20% of the votes are wasted on a 3rd party. In a PR election, 10-20% of the votes get 10-20% of the seats.
(1) They will change the law if the choice is being displaced as major parties (i.e., if people care enough), and
(2) for state government, in many cases the elected members of political parties would not need to act, the citizenry could change the laws directly,
> In a FPTP election, 10-20% of the votes are wasted on a 3rd party. In a PR election, 10-20% of the votes get 10-20% of the seats.
Assuming you mean party list PR, that's true, but then also individual candidates aren't accountable to the general electorate and no one has anyone they can point to as “their” representative. That's a significant trade-off; there are systems which achieve rough proportionality (far better than FPTP) that don't have these problems (i.e., STV with small, e.g. 5-member, districts), but if you look simply at a naive “wastee vote” metric as you've constructed here they may not be better than FPTP.
> In a FPTP election, 10-20% of the votes are wasted on a 3rd party
In the US, the number is much lower; of course, the problem is as big or bigger if you add in abstentions and tactical votes.
Alternatively, individual candidates would be accountable to the voters who placed them there. Similarly, the voters who placed them there would think of them primarily as their representative. Those voters who are represented by more than one person in their ideological camp would find they have more than one representative they can reach out to on issues. Those who are more independent but find themselves more closely aligned to a set of reps in one of the camps will also find they have multiple representatives to reach out to, ask to cooperate on something, etc. I live in a state that has GOP dominance at all levels. I’d love to feel like there was anyone representing me the last 20 years at the state and federal levels.
EDIT: I’m not advocating for such a system per se, I’m just suggesting its efficacy is somewhat a matter of perception/perspective. Both voters and candidates can find accountability and notions/feelings of representation in a district-free proportional system. It is surprising to me there’s no way for voters to challenge gerrymandering directly when, in many states, voters aren’t represented by someone who shares their views for decades (on either side of the ideological aisle).
The trade-off with more seats with STV is better theoretical proportionality vs. larger candidate pool that voters must evaluate; because the number of viable parties as well as the number of candidates each can sensibly run scales roughly with the number of seats per district, the attention burden varies roughky with the square of the number of seats.
> The wasted vote is smaller, any constituency that can show up and get out the vote for 1/N of the total gets one of the N seats.
With the usual formula, pedantically, the smallest integer number of votes greater than a 1/(1+N) share of the electorate, rather than a 1/N share.
> 5 seats or fewer biases towards the major parties.
I think you overestimate the degree to which support for the major parties in the US is fundamental rather than a artifact of tactical voting based on the realities of FPTP; the US is, by affiliation rather than typical vote, 39% independent, 31% Democrat, 28% Republican by the most recent Gallup poll numbers, and at least the Democrats consist of two apply conflicting, roughly balanced factions in loose tactical alliance. (The Republicans have factional divisions, too.)
Yes, it would, politically. The reason it exists will produce vet strong resistance to a straight repeal, and any replacement with an alternate approach to preventing the original problem while allowing multimember districts will, in addition to resistance from those in Congress whose opposition is driven by opposing undermining the existing dominant parties, resistance around the details of any alternative scheme (which will have predictable winners and losers.)