Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts | Hacker News Reader

Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

uglygerry.com

750 pointsrgardaphe190 comments

In case it's not entirely clear, the font ridicules the practice of gerrymandering: toying with electoral district borders so that the results favor the incumbent while corralling the voters of the adversaries.

So extensive is this practice that the resulting shapes can approximate any letter of the alphabet. Quite readable too.

There's currently a push to take it to the supreme court so it can be stopped once and for all.

Archive link because the Baltimore Sun doesn't like Europe:

http://archive.is/a3mMR

That's an article from several months ago. The Supreme Court already ruled, and said that federal courts couldn't do anything about it, so state governments that are controlled by one party can continue to entrench their power.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/06/gerrymandering-symposium-...

> There's currently a push to take it to the supreme court so it can be stopped once and for all.

I may be mistaken, but I thought I read the court ruled it constitutional

Their ruling was that the Supreme Court is not the decider here, this has to be done at a state level.

If they do this doesn't this mean 5 cities will dictate who is in charge of the country?

I'm not quite sure I follow you, could you elaborate?

One of the arguments in favor of the electoral college is that it boosts the voice of people who are in areas with lower population density. This is to ensure that minority interests are respected and taken into account by presidential hopefuls.

Without this protection the voices of people who live outside the 5 major metropolitan areas simply wouldn't matter and candidates would have no reason to listen to their issues and have no repercussions for hurting them to favor city-dwellers.

This would be bad. Very bad. A straight population vote ends up being a scheduling algorithm for issues where rural interests have unbounded wait time.

One could say that the solution of weighting rural votes higher is a clunky system but any replacement voting system needs to take this into account as those small towns are where almost all of our primary industry is.

If this is the issue, the electoral college doesn't solve this. Because what happens is the campaigning for the general election is usually dictated by swing state status and when the caucus or primary takes place in the election calendar. If you look at the distribution of states visited during the campaigning for the general election, it backs this up.

Also, the Senate is supposed to combat the House in this instance. That's what it's there for, and frankly, because of the importance of the Senate, a voter in Wyoming has more voting power than a voter in California. This isn't good either as you mention in your last statement.

yep, and i would posit that hanging everything off of swing states gyrates the presidential debates into wild swings in extreme directions which possibly further divide the population against each other over time

All but two state's electoral votes are decided by the result of the popular vote in that state, congressional districts have no effect on that.

Local and proportional representation is the main reason for having the house of representatives, while the reason for Gerrymandering is to disproportionately favor one party or another.

I thought that the electoral college and gerrymandering were to separate issues, how are they related?

They are, although you could consider the electoral college as an unintended gerrymander for president...

To be fair, Western Australia has this problem. 10% of the population but 15-20% (depending on boom status) of the export revenue. Politically irrelevant, but the source of all the mining royalties. It causes problems.

Can't we make the exact opposite argument?

In the unbalanced system which currently exists in the USA, rural voters are given huge, disproportionate advantage in electoral power, leading to national decisions being made that favor them (have some more farm subsidies!) and ignoring the voices of the millions of citizens who happen to live in large cities and populous states.

Why are rural people better than city people? Shouldn't it be.. equal?

If you look at educational attainment, health, poverty rates, and other factors it doesn’t seem to biased towards rural communities. They fall behind in all those measures.

It is interesting to read one significant thread here discussing gerrymandering starting as an effort to increase minority representation. Otherwise, minority blocs can be overridden by a majority and diluted into have no representation.

Then another thread discussing rural voters being given excessive representation. Why shouldn't the cities dominate, they ask?

Rural voters comprise a minority.

How consistent should these threads be in terms of the arguments and what is seen as good? How consistent are they in practice?

This is why we have the senate, two votes per state even though alaska has less people than the city of Seattle.

The point of the electoral college was that news travels slowly so voting for a rep to vote for you to represent your district was the right thing to do. Now, everyone can vote for themselves and probably should and we can have it counted in a day or two.

I am not sure I agree with you on this. Although the Senate indeed has two per State, the House seats is by population. Correct me if I am wrong, but the US House the exclusive power to "initiate revenue bills, impeach federal officials, and elect the President in the case of an electoral college tie".

Because bills are _always_ full of pork (Gov funded projects that are specific to the representative's district), there is nothing that would stop a highly populated region representatives to divert all funds to their district, while taxing an other region higher. In essence, diverting not only shared funds, but levy punitive taxes on other regions.

The original intent of the two chambers of congress was that the Senate would represent the state (government) itself, and the House would represent the people living in the state. It wasn't until later that senators were elected by the people rather than appointed by the governor.

If the electoral college was apportioned correctly and the size of the house not artificially capped, there wouldn't be any reason to compare "voting power" of low-population vs high-population states.

Except this is blatantly not supported by evidence.

Presidential candidates want to win Florida. Badly. The state has a popular vote for the presidential candidate. If "popular vote encourages candidates to ignore everything except for population centers" then we'd see candidates campaigning in Florida exclusively target major cities. But we don't. The candidates themselves show up in small towns in Florida as part of their campaign efforts.

If we don't see this behavior at the state level, then why would we expect to see if at the national level?

This is untrue, in a national popular vote scenario, politicians would spend an equal amount of time and effort on winning each vote, regardless of location. And each person’s vote would be worth the same, regardless of location, as every other election in the U.S. works.

Why are people so keen on evening out geographical representation, why not age, or gender, or sexual orientation, able bodiedness or some other arbitrary measure like left handedness?

I think if any measure should be focused on getting equal representation its class. But guess which class is both by far the largest, but still has the least representation. Perhaps it is the purpose of arbitrary drawing of districts to keep it that way.

>One of the arguments in favor of the electoral college is that it boosts the voice of people who are in areas with lower population density

Why should people get more say because they live more spread out? Why do 100k people living across the countryside get more say than 100k people living in a city?

If 5 million people live in a city and 2 million people live in the countryside, the people in the city should have 5 reps to the rural 2.

Density is a completely arbitrary metric to use. Why not use race? Why not income levels? Why does density demand electoral privilege but no other metric?

The only actual answer is "status quo". They are overrepresented now, so there is a retroactive justification that somehow balanced representation is "unfair", when in fact it is only "unfair" because it is less than they already have.

I think that the idea is that as much as possible everyone's preferences should be heard and allowed for. The preferences and priorities of people living in cities tends to be dramatically different than those of people living in rural areas. The concern is that a scenario where cities have enough higher population that their preferences are advanced to the exclusion of the priorities of people in rural areas, while more democratic, would undermine ideals of freedom, equality, self determination, etc.

The real answer is because we’re a union of states, many of which would not have joined under that representation scheme.

You need to amend the constitution to change that. It’s hard to do, but again that was intentional.

America was originally a union of colonies separated by economic focuses and communication difficulties - those concerns are no longer relevant in the modern world and sticking to a tradition because "that's what it's always been" isn't a good general policy.

It's not just tradition, it's law written into the kernel of the country. Changing it is possible, it's just not easy, and requires the support of those who would "lose" under the arrangement proposed. Some compromise will have to be made to do so.

There is no justifiable reason why one person's vote should be worth more than another.

I think you're referring to national elections which ends up being in the court of the electoral college which is a terribly broken system but separate from the habit of gerrymandering, only a few states will divide their electoral votes - and the rest simply give all their votes to whoever won a plurality of the vote.

(And, to clarify, I believe you're referring to a false talking point that's often thrown about to spread F.U.D.)

It makes sense that the majority of the population should be able to “dictate” (really: have majority influence on) policy, doesn’t it?

If I'm not mistaken, there is nothing in the constitution about doing this. It is unfortunately completely legal.

I think the Baltimore Sun probably likes Europe just fine - what they don't like are self-contradictory rule sets that can cost them $20,000,000+ on top of the cost of achieving "compliance."

'Sarah Toporoff, a Massachusetts native who works in Paris for the Global Editors Network, which promotes newsroom innovation, raised similar questions. She said U.S. newsrooms “are a benchmark for digital innovation” — and it’s important that their content be available in Europe.'

'It is naive and wholly irresponsible to think that U.S. news holds no relevance beyond U.S. borders...'

Perhaps, then, Europe should've had some international discussion about their hyper-aggressive legislation, to try and prevent this situation. I am dumbfounded that anyone thinks the U.S. corporations are to blame for not spending millions to comply with a foreign law from countries where they have no legal representation.

Preventing that sort of 'taxation without representation' is something of a popular idea over here.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/more-than-1000-u-s-news-si...

> on top of the cost of achieving "compliance."

Compliance with GDPR is easy though - don't aggressively track and monitor European visitors. If you've stuffed your website that full with invasive trackers et al that you can't show it to Europeans for fear of broaching personal privacy legislation, you should probably have a good long think about where you've gone wrong.

GDPR is not merely a list of bad things to avoid, it adds a lot of ongoing burdens to every company active in the region. Hire more people. Actively investigate your own compliance. Wait months for government permission to deliver features.

There are people who aren't doing anything wrong, who did the math and decided they can't clear a profit on proving they aren't doing anything wrong.

The ongoing burden is minuscule.

What’s wrong with actively investigating your own compliance?

What government permissions are you even talking about?

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-36-gdpr/

Says nothing about government permissions.

You must consult in case, quote “processing would result in a high risk in the absence of measures taken by the controller to mitigate the risk”.

You're free to bet $22M that they won't punish you for not waiting 8-14 weeks for their permission.

You keep saying permission even though nothing anywhere says about a permission. Now you've come up with a number that you pulled out of the blue.

You keep imagining things and expect me to have an argument about them.

What I do care about is for companies getting the highest possible fines for their mismanagement of user data. Like British Airways, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/british-airways-data-breach-...

Except that it uses non-gerrymandered districts from California, where elected officials are not allowed to draw the lines. So any statement is lost, but I guess it’s a fun art project.

Only three letters in this project include California; only the letters T and X are represented exclusively by California. The statement is powerful and hilarious, not "lost."

It's not even a very good T. Some letters are more impressive than others. Q is totally worthless for the political point.

But N, D, U, and a few others are real gems.

I’m imagining this debate playing out in my head.

I’m not sure if gerrymandering is all that bad. Wait, what’s this, a font made out of gerrymandered districts? It must be really bad, we should do something about it. Except the T doesn’t look that great, and it’s from California anyway. Maybe this isn’t such a big deal after all. And the Q! The Q is barely even gerrymandered. Fuck it, I’m gonna go play some video games.

What's wrong with D? That looks like a pretty reasonable district. B is the worst one I think.

K and H are pretty egregious at first glance.

The T district doesn't even look problematic to me. Nor does the other California letter, X, which is made up of a combination of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California%27s_8th_congression...

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California%27s_14th_congressio...

...both of which seem like textbook examples of what a good, non-gerrymandered district should look like.

I think it was a dig at Texas, especially since the gp didn't mention the third CA letter.

There isn't a third. There are two, T (made up of one district) and X (made of two).

If the point of this project was to call attention to ridiculously-shaped gerrymandered districts, these are some of the last districts that should ever be considered for inclusion.

>these are some of the last districts that should ever be considered for inclusion.

Maybe there were, and the author had to use them for their relatively sane shapes compared to calling Maryland's 3rd District the X.

Be that as it may, it substantially undermines the premise of the work, which is presumably, "Gerrymandering is so rampant that you can make an entire alphabetic font out of gerrymandered districts".

I think that "Gerrymandering is so rampant that you can make 24 of the 26 letters out of gerrymandered districts" still demonstrates their point.

D, E, O, Q, T, X, Y, and half of Z all seem fine to me.

Districts look idiosyncratic no matter how they are drawn, so I’m not sure this works as a statement. Perhaps if the font were updated over time to match the changes due to gerrymandering, the font would become less and less readable, and that would seemingly be some sort of statement.

Also district shaping is more complex than you might think.

For instance some distracts were purposely built around a minority groups neighborhoods so that they would have a representative. If you made the districts purely based on grids then the group would be too small to have any representative.

Which maybe is the wrong solution. But you get funky district shapes for all sorts of reasons that are not the corruption people typically think of.

A lot of times they do this to isolate voters in one district. You make 1-2 compact districts like GA-5, that contains a large number of Democratic voters (and black people), like 90% margin. Then you surround it with gerrymandered districts and make them nearly but not quite competitive, like 55% Republican white suburban. Thus the same population of Republicans can have 4 or 5 districts while the Democrats get 1 or 2.

Isn't it interesting that folks will justify gerrymandering when it's built to support a minority group, unless that minority group is the one particular subset of the population who aren't generally allowed specific representation?

That is because what you are referring to as "one particular subset of the population who aren't generally allowed specific representation" does not need any help in making sure they have representation. One, they are not (currently) a minority and two, they have the vast majority of the power in this country already.

So no, it isn't interesting.

I'm confused about why being a minority means you need more help? Are they not as capable as the rest of us? Why do you think they are so disadvantaged as to require special education and assistance? I mean we're not talking case by case basis here, your sentiments were clearly blanketed statements.

yours would best be described as the 'naive' take on the situation, and rests on a false premise.

These minorities need 'help' in that a majority is going to be self-interested and lacking compassion or any sort of integrity at larger scope.

In the U.S. this might take the form of tax loopholes for speedboats and golf memberships eating into funding for basic social services (infrastructure, law enforcement, education resources and such) on the other side of town.

If you can unpack the above and place yourself in the shoes of the people on the bad end of that deal, you might start to get the idea.

There will always be a majority and there will always be a minority. But the thought process behind, "they are a minority, therefore they need assistance" is elitism at best and racism at worst. Furthermore, the laws that we pass that give special treatment to one group over another make that divide all the more permanent.

It's not about giving anyone assistance or an advantage, it's about giving people representation. With single-member districts, if a group makes up, say, 20% of the population in each district, they don't get 20% of the representatives, but 0%. If we had proportional representation, they would get 20% of the representatives, but we don't, and majority-minority districts are basically a bandaid to simulate it in a subset of cases.

To be eligible for a majority-minority district, a minority group must be "politically cohesive" and "sufficiently numerous and compact to form a majority in a single-member district", while the majority group must "votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it [..] usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate". (Thornburg v. Gingles) In other words, there must be a political bloc that (a) is not receiving any representation in the area and (b) would have representation with a majority-minority district. Letting them have that in no way gives them an advantage over the majority, whose preferred candidates will still control all the other districts.

Why not apply this to political blocs that exist based on factors other than race – like plain old conservative versus liberal? Well, I think we should; again, I'd prefer proportional representation. But the current rule is enforcing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which specifically calls out discrimination based on race – something that was a huge problem in 1965, and is still a problem today. Compared to other types of political blocs, racial ones are disproportionately excluded from the political system. And morally speaking, although being discriminated against due to your political beliefs is bad, being discriminated against due to your race is somewhat worse, because you can choose one but not the other.

How about “they’re a minority with a long history of being enslaved, impoverished, disparaged, denied basic rights, denied access, denied the ballot box, denied representation, denied life itself”? Would that make any difference in your judgment on the matter?

Although comex’s answer is, probably, more important.

>There will always be a majority

Not if there are more than 2 groups. There could easily be 3 minorities with 0 majorities.

* The laws we are talking about are to mitigate abuse and oppression by a majority. * You seem especially vitriolic in defending the status quo. * The status quo is full of examples wherein a minority group is unfairly impacted. * You are even willing to make the claim that these protections are themselves racist and should not be attempted under any circumstances.

I think most decent minded folks can see where this is leading.

> You seem especially vitriolic in defending the status quo.

I'm vitriolic towards any law that gives one group preferential treatment under the law. The entire premise of American democracy is majority rule within limits. The founding fathers already gave us ways to protect the minority's rights via the judicial system and the constitution. You cannot legislate status quo because it is derived from the sentiment of the population. If you want to change the sentiment you need to halt the division. You cannot pass a bill forcing black to love white, you can only pass bills that make the distinction irrelevant.

> I think most decent-minded folks can see where this is leading.

Hopefully to a world where people are judged by the content of their character and not by some physical attribute or thing they identify as.

as for "content of character", you have been presented with the mechanism of the oppression and still argue vehemently against remediation or protections.

Juust so you are aware, this all extends far beyond questions of race, not sure why you are so focused on that, but it's probably pretty telling.

Also, I'm not at all sure what you see as a distinction between these protections and "founding fathers already gave us ways to protect the minority's rights via the judicial system...".

We are discussing implementation of that Founding Father Judicial system stuff in this thread, please expand on why you think it serves as an argument against modfying or creating laws to protect abused classes?

> Juust so you are aware, this all extends far beyond questions of race, not sure why you are so focused on that, but it's probably pretty telling.

Just so you are aware, everything is racist in the news today. If you go to any major news site I promise you will find some article about Trump or his supporters being racist. Trump says things about Baltimore, media calls him racist, why is that? Is that telling? Is calling out this guy for having the worst district really that bad? https://i.redd.it/wlf72xth8gd31.jpg

In your version of the US, the Civil Rights Act should be forever expanded to include more and more oppressed groups, whereas in my version of the US the Civil Rights Act should be a universal truth. I don't think it's fair that clubs in Vegas can charge men and women different prices, but is there a movement for that? Does that ever make the news? Of course not. I'm being discriminated against based on my gender but since I don't have protected status that's ok. Instead, I think any discrimination based on physical features should not be allowed unless it somehow impacted their ability to perform a job. (IE ok to say no to person in wheelchair for UPS job)

> "founding fathers already gave us ways to protect the minority's rights via the judicial system...".

If you feel oppressed, you can sue and have your case adjudicated in court. In your system, only those who have protected status have grounds for a lawsuit, therefore people are no longer equal in the eyes of the law. In my system, valid claims of discrimination can be herd regardless of protected status. I would also impose a fine for losing to discourage frivolous lawsuits. If that's too burdensome then that's why we have the ACLU.

I want to get rid of classes. I want people to associate because of common interests not out of mutual dislike. I want to eliminate all differences between citizens under the eyes of the law. I just think it's deeply flawed to think that if you pass enough protection laws suddenly the people that inflict the so-called "oppression" will have a change of heart. You can only hope to do that by highlighting peoples similaries instead of their differences. Conversely, if your goal is to get people to hate each other, you should constantly point out there differences, something the modern media does a fantastic job at.

>I'm confused about why being a minority means you need more help?

In simple terms, many minority groups in America have been forcefully and intentionally disadvantaged for generations through programs like redlining, segregation, the so-called war on drugs, gerrymandering, and hundreds of other racist schemes designed to deprive minority citizens of the same rights and privileges you and your ancestors were afforded solely based on the colour of their skin.

And I would hope that you can understand why centuries of systemic oppression would have a lasting effect that needs more than just words to address.

This is exactly how the current wave of gerrymandering began. The mandate to create "majority-minority" districts led to the concentration of districts that favored minorities (Democrats) but at the same time created two or three districts with sizable (but not insanely so) Republican districts.

From the Atlantic:

"But just in time for the redistricting in 1990, some enterprising Republicans began noticing a rather curious fact: The drawing of majority-minority districts not only elected more minorities, it also had the effect of bleeding minority voters out of all the surrounding districts. Given that minority voters were the most reliably Democratic voters, that made all of the neighboring districts more Republican. The black, Latino, and Asian representatives mostly were replacing white Democrats, and the increase in minority representation was coming at the expense of electing fewer Democrats. "

> Except that it uses non-gerrymandered districts from California, where elected officials are not allowed to draw the lines.

Just because the districts are drawn by unelected people doesn't mean the districts aren't gerrymandered.

The contrast just serves to further emphasize just how fucked up some of these districts are.

Thanks for clarifying! Was not aware of the practice and didn't even notice the states represented the alphabet! (Non US resident here).

Note that these are Congressional districts (a sub-state district used for electoral purposes). The states' shapes themselves exist for other historical reasons that are probably not mainly related to gerrymandering.

How accurate are the rest of the districts? Or were there some tweaks to make it work out as the alphabet a little better?

Pretty amazing, though.

FiveThirtyEight did a great podcast series on gerrymandering in 2017 [1]. It turns out to be a much more complicated topic than I expected. Some gerrymandering is even legally required to ensure proper representation of minority groups even if they live in somewhat distributed communities.

1: https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/gerrymandering-podcast/

Which is so hilariously misguided it might be taken as a form of racism. By lumping minorities into a single candidate they create a token representative who has a very safe seat but no power in the state senate and allow all other candidates to effectively ignore that minority entirely. They don't have to worry about angering 5% of their electorate and losing the next election by a 2% margin.

Now let's take the other extreme. You split the minority population among 10 different seats where their population in each district is so small that their interests are ignored entirely in each one.

These are both extreme's which make total sense but the degree at which the entire drawing of borders is taken is extreme by itself.

Are there any feasible solutions? Does simply squaring out a district make sense? Would that have unintended side effects?

Yep. It's hard to effectively wield political power as a minority in a democracy based on voting power alone...

If your population is relatively balanced then you need to worry about everybody because every vote might count. Sure a minority might only be 5% of the population, but if you anger them and they vote for your opponent that could absolutely change the outcome of an otherwise close race.

That's what coalition-building (an important feature of other governmental structures used outside the US) comes in. You generally have a bunch of small minority groups all over the place, but if they work together ("hey, we'll support your group's big issue if you support ours"), they can form a large enough voting bloc that their issues get traction.

This was exactly the point discussed in one of the episodes. Artificially create a black delegation? Or have no black delegation at all.

...just do away with districts entirely? why are they needed?

I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Individual districts are going to have problems the the rest of the state or country don't know/care about. Having a representative for these districts makes sense.

For example, in my district (Brownsville in Brooklyn), we have an almost tragically poorly-ranked school system, due largely to bad funding and high crime rates in the area. I don't expect someone from Midtown Manhattan to care a whole lot about these specific problems (I know I certainly didn't when I lived in Washington Heights).

In an ideal world I guess I'd agree, everyone would care about everything at the exact appropriate weight, but that's not the world we live in. Certain problems will go ignored if we don't have fairly-granular representation for an area.

That's not a great example because really the school budget should be set at the state level and distributed evenly to every district based on student headcount.

You do make a valid point that many issues are local and that could be lost in a system where the party is focused at the state level instead of the local level. Proportional representation systems are prone to having this issue for example.

Some areas are going to require more funding than others. For example, certain areas are wealthier and as a result are less reliant on the after-school programs, while poorer areas have a higher likelihood to be single-parent, or both parents having to work, meaning that the after-school programs are vital.

That's just one example, but it's not as simple as "give a certain amount of money per kid to the schools", and saying this is reductionist.

The original point of having districts was because states are "too large" and you want people representing an even smaller geographical area so that truly local issues are represented.

And in many places that's still the case, and is actually useful and important to get local issues surfaced properly.

For states with heavily gerrymandered districts, though, I agree: might as well just do away with districts and have the entire state vote for their entire roster of representatives.

Yep, via ranked choice voting and open primaries!

So instead of making a choice between 2-5 candidates (major 2 plus a few independents/smaller parties), every voter has to rank up to 50 candidates (assuming ranked choice voting)? How do you expect voters to know the policy positions of that many candidates? They may as well be picking at random.

If not ranked choice voting, how would this even work?

If you're going to have a large multi-member district with proportional representation, it's not essential to use ranked-choice voting - you can get a reasonable result just by having people vote once for the ticket of candidates they prefer, then allocating the seats proportionally.

That said, ranked-choice voting in large multi-member districts is certainly possible: It is usual to require voters to rank only as many candidates as there are vacancies, though they can number more if they wish to (consequently they don't need to understand the detailed policy positions of the minor candidates that have no realistic chance of election). Voters in such systems tend to firstly order the parties based on the policy positions of those parties, then order the candidates within those parties if they have a strong opinion of the relative merits of those candidates.

Here's an example of a media summary of the candidates running in such an election: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-17/federal-election-2019...

Thanks TIL.

I think America really likes them because the alternative seems like "virtual representation" (i.e. representatives represent everyone, not a local district), which was part of why they rebelled against England. The theory is you want someone to represent your local area specifically rather than all representatives trying (badly) to balance the needs of everyone.

I don't know what the difference would really be in practice, although I think the other comments in this thread about lack of proportional representation would probably apply. I think it sort of comes down to how much worse you think Tyranny of the Majority is than what we have currently (or if you want an actual proportional representation system instead).

Because otherwise every voter would need to cast a vote on every single candidate for every single seat in the legislature. It's impossible to make informed choices with so many options.

If political issues actually split along the 95%/5% lines that correspond to that minority, then the 5% are effectively voiceless however you cut it. Another possibility is that most issues aren't about that minority group and you see something like republican:democrat:minority::42:43:5 split. Now the rep for that 5% has a ton of leverage to exchange, eg, votes for republican issues in exchange for republican support for minority issues.

State representation usually clusters around class issues not ethnicity. And even if it didn’t, why arbitrarily focus on ethnicity? Handicapped people need representation, yet we don’t draw districts that ensures they get one. And if we did, and started splitting votes by who we think need the most representation, we might as well do away with democracy and start arbitrarily arranging representatives.

This is one reason why proportional representation is a better system. Parties can form to represent different types of interests, and their power is proportional to the number of votes they get. Instead, in the American winner-takes-all electoral system, the Supreme Court decides which groups need representation and mandates that they get gerrymandered districts.

It says tweet your reps. To be clear, you should probably contact your state rep about this (and send an email, not a tweet). They have the power to do something about it.

This is very important, esp. in light the recent US Supreme Court decision on this subject[1]. Gerrymandering creates safe districts that make primaries hold increasingly more weight then general elections, which is leading, in a significant way, toward our increasingly hyper-partisan politics in the US.

In some states this also heavily tilts the balance of power to one party over the other.

The bottom line is this. Fairer redistricting will lead to more competitive races, which will lead to less partisan, saner politics with more compromise. (Oh dear god I hope!)

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/politics/supreme-court...

Rep's response: Why would I want any of that?

More competitive? Or more representative of the overall population? Because those two things are at odds.

Say you have a state that is split 55/44, and has nine districts. Do you want nine districts each at 55/44, meaning 9-0? That's more competitive, but less representative of the state. Or do you want five districts for one, and four for the other? That's more representative of the state, but less competitive. Redistricting is hard.

(I suspect my scenario is a false choice if you wrestle with the math enough, but I'm not sure. I prefer the Wisconsin test that we all thought Justice Kennedy would decide in favor of, but then he took the coward's way out, probably corrupt too.)

This is SUPER important. People think redistricting is a panacea, but it actually sounds like a super tough nut to crack. Even states that have non-partisan districting enshrined in law are going through their own controversies and it doesn't (at first blush) appear to be solving anything.

99pi/538 did an excellent series on the topic I would recommend.

Came here to say something like this.

Chief Justice Roberts' opinion[0] touches on the legislative evolution of the problem. The advent of districts was instituted by congress to encourage proportional representation - and it worked! Gerrymandering is actually an improvement over the older system that led to situations like GP is describing.

Gerrymandering is not the problem, it's a symptom. The problem is first-past-the-post elections. Ranked-choice voting or some other proportional system isn't a panacea either, but it's much better than judges re-drawing political districts instead of elected representatives.

[0]https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-422_9ol1.pdf

I agree entirely. Ranked voting or preference with instant runoff (Australia) or MMP (New Zealand) are all much better at representing the population.

They're not perfect of course. People in power will always try to adjust the system to benefit them and their supporters (read: The Dictators Handbook). Even in Australia where voting is mandatory, there is a top and bottom of the ballot and only the top is required (if a party doesn't have a certain percentage, that party is moved to the bottom).

This seems like a “perfect is the enemy of the good” sort of thing.

Yes, drawing good districts is really hard. Non-partisan redistricting doesn’t solve everything.

But surely it’s a hell of a lot better than allowing whatever political party is in power in a particular year to draw districts to their own advantage, allowing them to rule long after they lose the support of the majority?

You’ll sometimes end up with minority rule in any district based system, but at least it’ll be accidental rather than intentional and self-perpetuating.

My understanding of Gerrymandering is to specifically have the outcome of 9-0 though. The natural distributions would make a natural outcome of 9-0 highly unlikely without rigging the district lines.

Gerrymandering uses cracking and packing. Packing is giving your opponent 2 very safe districts (eg urban centre), and cracking is making it impossible for them to win the other 7 (eg making them 30% suburb, 70% rural).

Actually, I think gerrymandering aims to have the result be more like 7-2 consistently, where 7 is the party with less actual representation. Gerrymandering aims to put all of the opponent's voters in the smallest number of districts possible, while spreading out your own base.

The result is that the opponent wins fewer districts with over 90% of the vote where you win more districts with 55% or 60% of the vote.

Non-representative outcomes is a symptom of Gerrymandering, ont the goal of it. The reason for gerrymandering a district varies, but overall it tends to preserve the status quo. Those in power can use it to disenfranchise a group of people, or they can use it to create safe districts for party leaders. Gerrymandering should be thought of as a tool. The illustrations popular online showing how gerrymandering can be used to produce paradoxical representation have done a lot to raise awarenss, but it's also made people confused about what it is. Gerrymandering is a tool, not a goal.

I think gerrymandering is typically willing to sacrifice a few districts to make the majority of districts less competitive

If you worry about this, the reform you want is multi-member districts. Instead of voting for one representative people are picking several and the districts are bigger. This is how EU parliamentary elections work for example, a region gets say 5 slots and it needs to send 5 representatives to fill those slots, elected democratically but the EU doesn't tightly constrain the method used.

There are a few ways you can do this, Jefferson developed one of them so that's got a nice pedigree. It is also a good way for any third party to start to get some attention. Getting 20% of votes together to have your candidate as the fifth member for a district with 2 Dems and 2 Republicans is going to be easier than finding a plurality of voters for a single rep when the two big parties are both saying that's a wasted vote.

With that said, before you start writing your state legislature about “Multi-member districts TODAY!” you should also know that they have a very difficult history of being shot down by the Supreme Court. This was pointed out to me by a number of good folks on Politics.StackExchange[1].

But yes, the route to avoiding a second US Civil War is only incidentally through the “eliminating gerrymandering” nodes of the graph—the 50/50 saturation of the vote into two spineless political parties happens in both the House (gerrymandered to hell) and the Senate (not gerrymandered at all) and is a consequence of something more fundamental. States do need to switch to the proportional system, but there is a decent chance that the Supreme Court might destroy this out-of-hand, in which case a Constitutional amendment may well be necessary.

[1] “Would Switching to a Proportionate House Require a Constitutional Amendment?” https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/42551/would-swi...

That response fails to distinguish between multi-member at large districts which are Real Bad^TM, and some form of ranked mechanism which are Real Good^TM. Multi-member ranked districts are both more representative and more competitive than our current system.

Or doing away with districts entirely, which amounts to the same thing. Right now we elect people as if geography were the only concern that could link voters. That makes it prone to ignoring voters whose concerns differ from that of their immediate neighbors. And very susceptible to manipulation by those who get to define "neighbors".

Geography will always play into it, especially in our odd hybrid system where we insist on devolving many laws to the states (such that even obvious crimes like murder, and apparently-unrelated notions like real estate or health care, end up with 50 separate laws with small but crucial differences). But there are lots of ways to change the system so that you're not solely linked by geography and hoping that, if you're in a local minority, somebody else will elect somebody to represent your view.

The problem with this analogy is that the 55/44 split is not equally distributed across a state. In virtually every case there are pockets of one or the other. As long as you keep the goals of uniform, compact and consistent sizes they should do a much better job of getting closer to the 4/5 you are looking for or maybe a couple of safer and a couple of swing districts. What happens now is that the party in control (which in 2010 was largely R) packs and cracks to get an unnatural advantage (looking at you Wisconsin)

My bigger question is when the political split is more like 80/20 case should the 20 be guaranteed representation?

> My bigger question is when the political split is more like 80/20 case should the 20 be guaranteed representation?

Yes they should. They should get around 20% of the representatives.

So then without making other more fundamental changes we would have to gerrymander. In fact a number of strange looking districts are gerrymandered with creating a majority minority district as the stated goal.

I believe we need structural changes to really solve this problem but absent that, I think having a computer algorithm that has the following priorities in the following order:

1) Compact (ie smallest circumference)

2) Least number of axis points and smallest difference in the sides.(ie a square is the goal)

3) Least number of wasted votes (ie use the proposal from the supreme court case)

4) Least change from a previous district (maybe not for this first run)

Why do we need a large number of small districts? It seems like a relic from an obsolete philosophy that people from a geographically separate areas need a different representation. But that is not how reality works. People want representation based on their class status, not geography. We have local governments to deal with local issues and it is silly to also divide federal representation based on geography.

Alternatively I propose the state being a single district, with representatives directly partitioned based on the proportion of vote they get in the state. So if a state gets 10 representatives in congress, and a party gets 10% of the votes in that state. That party will get 1 representative in congress.

---

Edit: And before this starts being called unrealistic, I believe all we would need is a constitutional amendment (even just in state constitutions) that states that every vote should count the same.

The focus on compactness (or other geometric properties) as a goal is misguided.

The districts don't exist to look pretty or have nice geometric properties. They exist to translate the will of the voters into a representative government.

538 compared maps gerrymandered for various goals [1]. Prioritizing compactness has the effect of a) skewing political power toward rural areas away from cities, and b) reducing the expected number of non-white House members (for similar reasons).

The problem with compactness is it doesn't take into account the political geography of where people live. Increasingly, Democratic majorities are concentrated in cities, while Republican majorities are outside of them. Drawing compact districts has the effect of packing Democrats in fewer (urban) districts, resulting in more wasted votes. This gave the Republican party about a 30 seat advantage in the 538 map, compared to a more proportional one.

The Senate and Electoral College already unfairly skew political power toward rural voters. Compact maps would do the same in the House.

The efficiency gap (your #3) is a much better measure of partisan fairness to focus on than compactness.

[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-maps/#alg...

Interesting how everything is only Democrats vs Republicans in the USA.

It probably does not help the political climate that for most people it is just a binary choice.

That's a consequence of first-past-the-post voting (Duverger's law), not gerrymandering.

I should have used quotes, I was answering specifically about the 55/45 part of gp text :)

I want at-large representatives for the entire state, based on general election polling rank. This is unlikely, of course, because it threatens the two-party hegemon.

Or you could drop the whole issue by turning to a representative democracy with proportional voting, where it's about policy not individuals raising money.

If we can't even get our Supreme Court to agree that gerrymandering is bad enough to believe that it should be involved, I'm pretty sure fundamentally changing how the entire government works is a bit unlikely, to put it mildly.

Yes and the barrier to do that is so much higher than OP's suggestion. It's so high that it's nearly impossible.

Idealism is great and all, but you gotta have a practical plan to achieve something.

The barrier remains regardless of whether you contact your rep, or not. We may as well ask for both.

Multi member districts is not a bad idea for the House of Representatives. Can be done on a local level. But there needs to be a constitutional amendment.

Why not simply switch to a system where a state itself is a giant multi member district, like a parliamentary system?

> Why not simply switch to a system where a state itself is a giant multi member district, like a parliamentary system?

Because this isn't software... you can't just "switch" to a different form of government like that.

...and attitudes like this are largely why.

I'm not an expert in US law, so maybe I miss something, but there are countries which successfully changed their electoral systems, so apparently it's possible.

Indeed states could do this for themselves, though for federal congress it would only make sense for states with large delegations like califormia’s (How would proportional representation Wyoming’s single rep?).

However Congress has barred at-large representation and that law would require changing as well.

Proportional would be nice, but that's a more radical change. I am an incrementalist and believe restoring sanity to the existing system is the good first step, and easier to get done.

'Incremental' implies you are getting closer to a better solution, but you are not. FPP is simply not created for proportional representation of voters' preferences. It has it's own advantages to be fair, but it's not about that. Any district shapes will favor some party, and square-ish is not better in this regard then a salamander-like.

Sometimes a system is so bad that the only reform is a revolution. Incrementalism is simply an unrealistic option in many cases, including voting reform (and climate change)

I doubt that a revolution in the USA would go so well considering the military hardware that some state police departments have.

Even, a political grass roots revolution would be unsuccessful as many people are resistant to change and would not back it.

Incrementalism is the best approach as it slowly changes people and doesn't get their defenses up from the get go.

I’m definitely not talking about a revolution in a sense of violent overthrow of the government. I’m merely talking about revolutionary changes to the voting system. More specifically how the votes are counted towards each representative. I don’t have a source for this, but I think most Americans would actually be quite happy with the idea of switching out the election system for something objectively better.

The more interesting part is that we now have pretty good computational models to measure gerrymandering. IIRC correctly, there was two different models developed by different teams and they both actually found very similar results.

One of the two basically ran a Monte Carlo simulation, exploring a subset of all possible configurations, and comparing the average results to that of the current configuration. The other one I believe used a more mathematical approach.

Here's one of the papers: http://cho.pol.illinois.edu/wendy/papers/talismanic.pdf

EDIT: Here's a Daily episode explaining it: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/podcasts/the-daily/gerrym...

I think that a solution this problem as well as many others like undo influence, too much money needed and so on, could be solved by increasing the number of representatives. I believe that the only stipulations in the constitution is that each state must have at least one and that a representative cannot represent less than 30K citizens. The number was frozen 35 in 1911 by the house, but they could change that if they wanted to without changing the constitution.

The reason I think this would help on a number of levels is as follows 1) Gerrymandering becomes more difficult if there are a lot more districts. 2) influence peddling and lobbying is diluted if there are more representatives. 3) the voter can have more influence and contact with their representative if their congress person represents a smaller sized constituency.

I think arguments around the size of the building (the capital) are silly, who cares where they meet, it can be in a stadium, or even better why bother having them all in Washington DC. it can all be done with telepresence in todays world and then you as a citizen could go down to say the court house and sit in the audience as your representatives interact via telepresence.

I get it that perhaps all this seems crazy or whatever, but none of it would require any changes to the constitution. It could be done by the House itself with no consent from the Senate or President.

Prior to the Civil War our Representatives voted and worked from the same desk, the one they had in the Capitol Building in the House Chambers.

Now they have offices and support staff. Why don't we just convert those ~5000 support staff( and their offices ) into a much more representative democracy?

Perfect, I agree completely.

It seems that across countries the size of the parlament is proportional to the square root of the population size:

https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/364/is-there-an...

Interesting. I am not sure what the underlying basis of the cube root is, but the population of the U.S. has gone from 80 million to 340 million since 1911 and the size of the assembly has not changed in that period. I think it is an overlooked aspect that could be at the root of a many problems.

Also , no states have been added in over 60years , it is time D.C. And Puerto Rico get state hood.

I don't mind elevating the autonomy of D.C., but there was a reason D.C. was created in the first place - so that no state would have too much power by containing the capital. It shouldn't become a full state.

I'd rather dissolve D.C. and re-institute the original state boundaries of Maryland and Virginia than elevate a district to a state.

Not saying Ontario's EDs are bias-free but the difference is just day and night when you've got an independent body delineating them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Centre_(provincial_ele...

In Wisconsin, the now permanent ruling party won 60% of seats with only 48.6% of the vote.

The politicized SCOTUS' 5 to 4 decision to up hold that gerrymandering was hardly a surprise:

https://www.wpr.org/us-supreme-court-ruling-effectively-ends...

NJ Resident here: I'd like to point out that the "V" shape is basically just the southern border of the state along the coast.

It could be considered a Gerrymander (I haven't invested the time to look at district representation) but I will say it could also just be a weird geographical feature.

Fun project none the less.

For what it's worth, a bunch of the things in this font are weird-shaped because of coastlines...

Could we reduce the power of gerrymandering by increasing the number of districts? At the first census, there were 3.9M people and 65 districts. Now we have 327M people and 435 districts, so the number of people per district has increased by 12.5X. I would think this makes gerrymandering more lucrative, since gerrymandering works because of quantization error.

Let's do a 100x - 43,500 districts. This would probably fix Citizens United too, it'd be really expensive to buy 43,500 congress members.

why not 327M district? (direct democracy)

Mob rule is not what you want. It's terrifying.

What you want is a slow projection of the will of the people onto the seats of power. That's why separation of powers is so brilliant.

Judges are completely insulated from the people, unelected with lifetime appointments.

The President - when chosen by a real electoral college rather than the funky thing the EC has actually evolved into - is more answerable to the will of the people, but still insulated enough to do the job without the daily whims of the mob plunging the ship of state into chaos. It takes time and slow calculated movements to steer the ship of state. We want an executive who can make those calculations without constant fear of political turmoil.

The Senate, as it was originally designed, is closer to the people but also insulated. Senators get six years to advocate for the interests of their state. Before the 17th amendment, they were chosen by the state legislatures to directly represent the interests of the state as a whole.

And the House is directly answerable to the people, with each member representing a portion of them - 700k or 70k or 7k. It's the most powerful part of the government and also the most distributed. It's the beating heart of democracy and the starting point for all discussion on what constitutes the rights of the citizens, as directed by the citizens. But it is just a starting point. How the will of the people filters its way into the senate and the executive and the judicial branch is the refining process of a representative republic, the best form of government yet implemented by humans.

If you want to play around with district mapping, 538 has a neat tool: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-maps/

Their podcast series is a must if you are remotely interested in the topic.

Technically 'A', 'B', 'R', 'Y', 'Z' letters consist of two districts. Still, even with fewer single-district letters, the project proves a point.

The call to action on the site is to “tweet at your rep.” This isn’t going to do anything.

Donate to groups that are fighting for unrigging the system, vote for candidates in off year elections that will help create fairer maps (VA residents: your vote this November will determine who creates your district maps).

We are discussing it right now, so I would say its already doing something.. Nothing wrong with creating awareness, though other avenues will certainly be needed before meaningful change will happen.

How often is this font redrawn? Where's the changelog?

That's a paid upgrade. Please consult with your local Super PAC.

A funny looking district != a gerrymandered district.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gerrymandering-strange-maps_n...

I mean, just imagine if every district were a simple polygon. How could that possibly work with population density variations, minority voter distribution, physical barriers like mountains and rivers, etc?

This needs to be coloured in shades of Blue and Red.

Both parties are equally terrible when it comes to gerrymandering, I, thankfully, vote in a state that is one of seven that has absolutely solved gerrymandering for all time... Vermont - it's hard to creatively draw districts when everyone is in the same one.

It should be obvious that you can’t trust any political party with the power to decide who their own voters will be. It’s not a partisan issue. If Republicans are doing it more in recent years it’s only because they’ve had more opportunity.

I’m not usually a “both sides” sort of person, but in this case it’s like putting a steak in front of a dog and expecting them not to eat it.

Nah, both parties are complicit; no need to trigger tribalism here, just stop gerrymandering.

Indeed, the previous time the US Supreme Court was dealing with gerrymandering rules/tests it was a republicans accusing the democrat's of unfair gerrymandering in Maryland: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-333_b97c.pdf

Then the latest one was democrats challenging republicans in Wisconsin.

It has a long complicated history of courts and politicians trying to balance the lines. As long as there's a way to game the system in your favour, someone will try - regardless of party.

According to the cook political report[1]:

California 3 - D+5

Texas 35 - D+15

Ohio 12 - R+7

Ohio 7 - R+12

Connecticut 1 - D+12

Missouri 8 - R+24

Missouri 6 - R+16

Oregon 5 - EVEN

Ohio 4 - R+14

North Carolina 6 - R+9

Texas 15 - D+7

Illinois 18 - R+15

Alabama 1 - R+15

New York 7 - D+38

New York 8 - D+36

Illinois 11 - D+9

Arizona 6 - R+9

Florida 25 - R+4

Texas 12 - R+18

Ohio 10 - R+4

Michigan 13 - D+32

Tennessee 4 - R+20

California 43 - D+29

Illinois 4 - D+33

New Jersey 5 - R+3

New York 8 - D+36 (yes they used it twice)

California 8 - R+9

California 14 - D+27

Illinois 12 - R+5

Indiana 8 - R+15

Ohio 8 - R+17

What you are looking for is states where you see a lot of one party with +5-9 districts and then a handful of districts that are +20 or more for the other party.

https://cookpolitical.com/pvi-map-and-district-list

No, it doesn't. Because what the district votes for isn't necessarily the party that drew the lines. The goal of gerrymandering is to create safe districts for yourself, and your opponents (But more safe districts for yourself).

Just because a district that looks like a dragon riding a spaceship votes blue doesn't mean that it was created by a Democrat. It could have been a Republican, who attached all the areas that were likely to vote D to that district. (And ended up turning the neighbouring 3 districts, which look a little less insane into solid R blocks.) Or vice versa.

I don't think that would give you the information you think it would.

Gerrymandering includes packing opposition votes into one district.

So whether a district is red or blue tells you nothing about whether it has been gerrymandered by a republican or a democrat

I am not surprised to see Ohio is well represented here! We have a particularly egregious gerrymandered map with 75% Republican representatives in a state that leans slightly Republican.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio%27s_congressional_distric...

Sure, but note Illinois is also well-represented in the font, this time with significant Democratic party over-reprentation (13 out of 18, for a state that is not nearly that skewed in presidential elections, say).

Turns out, gerrymandering gets done by whoever happens to be in power. :(

Yes, it does go both ways, I didn't mean to single out the RS!

Some time ago I wrote a coding challenge based on the concept of gerrymandering[0].

[0]: https://www.codewars.com/kata/5a70285ab17101627a000024

That's fun, I just started & enjoyed the katas from cw and planned to do yours after skyscraper 6x6

Reminds me of the butterfly alphabet: https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/archive/Vm4Dpv...

Sad there are no examples of the font in a sentence though. Is it readable? If it was the point would be stronger.

You can download the OTF font file from the bottom of the page and try rendering text in it yourself.

I made a sample for you at https://imgur.com/TjqUYQt

Awesome, thank you!

Here's a good explanation with a graphic.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/01/this-...

Massachusetts created Gerrymandering yet we are not represented by a single glyph. Rewrite them!

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-did-term-gerrym...

Massachusetts also has an unusual shape that makes sense on closer inspection, like I'm guessing some of the glyphs do.

Here's a sample

https://is.gd/KAduzx (.jpg)

Pointing out the obvious injustice and loss of adjacency imposed on voters in these districts is the obvious reason for this project but leave it to Hacker News readers to fixate on the technical aspects of redistricting while ignoring the political and social reasons which led to this issue.

The obvious thing to do with this is to print out letters using this font to send to your representatives.

Tweet all the reps... https://theunitedstates.io/congress-legislators/legislators-...

No Rights Reserved -- this is great, all fonts should be public domain, but I would love to see actual CC0 attached, otherwise I can't trust it really being public domain legally, which discourages me from using it.

I just love it when deft minimal art...spurs such comprehensive critical conversation. We need more of this on HN ;-)

While humorous, a high percentage of these districts look this way due to rivers and lakes.

I just looked at Florida's districts and the districts all include the rivers and lakes. Key examples are the Everglades and the St. Johns rivers.

https://www.flsenate.gov/Senators/Districts

Can I get a monospaced version for my IDE?

This is fun!

This looks cute. Does the author expect to actually bring about any result by creating it? I see a Twitter link for various reps, but there's no link to any funded campaign to overturn recent legislation which has enshrined gerrymandering as the standard practice for districting. Perhaps if there was a donation link there it might be of more benefit.

On the other hand, a political statement in a font is a very interesting idea. I hope it helps drive a campaign to normalize legal districting in the future.

I see it as a playful way to bring attention to an issue, and refreshing to see any attempts at keeping money out of politics. If you are looking for a more funded, formalized campaign, those exist as well, for instance: https://www.fairvote.org/

Does every political statement need to include all of these things? If I espouse a political opinion on an online forum like this:

"Gerrymandering is bad and has negative effects on our democracy"

Am I expected to include donation links and organize a Call Your Rep campaign every time I say something like that? Thats effectively what OP is doing, making a statement, not trying to singlehandledly solve the issue in question.

There's a call to action on the webpage which goes to Twitter; which won't change anything. If instead there was a donation link, it would be contributing. Also, saying that on a forum is one thing; taking a stand with art should be backed by actually trying to do something about it and pointing people to groups or individuals who are doing more about it than creating art (no small feat in itself, but not an immediate cause of legal change).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com