Hacker News Reader

Comment by veeralpatel979 | Hacker News Reader

I hate gerrymandering too. More competitive elections, in my view, makes politicians less partisan and incentivizes them more to deliver for their districts.

But who should determine who draws electoral lines? Right now, it's in the hands of elected officials, so you can at least vote them out if they gerrymander.

If electoral lines are drawn by a nonpartisan commission, who appoints the commission? How do you ensure the members of the commission stay nonpartisan? Can the public hold members of this commission accountable?

Definitely our current system is broken; what are some alternatives to elected officials drawing electoral lines that are promising?

View on HN

Oh - districts should be drawn to guarantee mathematical fairness and a few relatively good measures exist[1] including one that was used in court in connection to a particularly egregious Wisconsin district (the efficiency-gap measure).

This is really less of an unsolvable problem than people make it out to be - it's just that most of the discussion you hear about it is from the political parties both of which benefit from its existence and, especially, the incumbents who have a much more secure seat with careful district drawing to make sure you don't get too many progressives that might vote out a centrist (or ditto on the other side)

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mathematician...

Got it, so you're proposing electoral lines by drawn by algorithms?

I don't see any problems with this myself, as long as the algorithms are fair -- what are some downsides of this, though?

A pretty common downside is a lack of adherence to historical boundaries and groupings - some neighborhoods that legitimately formed a district and a unified block due to strange geographic features could be broken up.

But actually - there are two classes of algorithms out there: one can determine how to fairly divide up a state and another measures how unfairly a state is divided up - instead of going full into computers-determine-everything it might be nice to just have a requirement that the result of the election in the state is relatively statistically probable given the proportions of votes for each party. So people could still draw districts we would just have a manner to prove their districts are acceptably fair.

The two downsides I see are:

1. There would be a lot of sudden changes, without any real explanation about those particular changes.

2. Unlike now there would be little on-the-ground reasoning to these changes. Districts would be split on random-seeming streets, with no respect at all about residents felt. Now at least you have someone to blame, and we like to have someone to blame rather than "the computer".

People actually will have to tune into politics since the differences will be diminished and you can't simply push the red or blue button and be done with it. 'aint nobody got time for that!

Why are we shifting to fancy math for this? Just mandate districts have to be simple geometric shapes; good luck isolating 16 individual neighborhoods in a city when all you have are four corners. I mean I know some mathematician will show that you can still tile them in such a way to benefit some candidate by 1.6% or whatever, but it would be the simplest way to get rid of the most egregious of district abuses.

Remember, you also have to sell the idea to the public, and which is easier to sell: "Trust this complex algorithm built by mathematicians and their fancy computer models who most certainly aren't secretly biased toward the candidate you dislike", or "RECTANGLES! :D"

> But who should determine who draws electoral lines? Right now, it's in the hands of elected officials, so you can at least vote them out if they gerrymander.

No you (practically) cannot, that's kinda the point

Who says we have to draw electoral lines at all?

Proportional representation of house members per state is one option. Which would be completely constitutional, btw.

We already have that. Each state gets allocated a number of representatives in proportion to its population, which, in turn, determines the number of congressional districts in that state.

I believe they meant to have only a single congressional district per state, with multiple representatives allocated to parties proportionally according to election result.

Proportional representation is the most common electoral system for national legislatures (and is also used by e.g. EU parliament).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation

Yes, exactly.

Seven US states have "at large" congressional districts, and a few states have one at large district. This seems easier and maybe more sensible for a state's representatives in the US Congress. [0]

Apparently, there used to be more at large states, except states were using it to dilute minority votes. (The white majority was large enough to elect all-white representatives.) In 1986, this was ruled to violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-large

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornburg_v._Gingles

Hard to rely on voting when the voting is rigged re: gerrymandering...

As for how to fix it, I'm no expert but off the top of my head

1. Allow public submissions for districts to prevent rigging choices

2. Create an objective set of measurements for scoring districts with the , e.g. maximize compactness, minimize perimeter, other measures that would help combat gerrymandering

3. Highest score wins? Top N finalists are voted on by legislature?

Hardly perfect, and I'm sure someone's thought about this harder and could do better. But nearly anything has got to be better than "the party in power every 10 years is given a carte blanche opportunity to further solidify their power"

You shouldn't have electoral lines at all. Proportional representation has a couple of advantages: all opinions, and not merely the majority opinion, gets represented; you're likely to get more than two parties, which means parties have to compromise with each other; and the system isn't nearly as easy to game.

> so you can at least vote them out if they gerrymander.

Aren't voting them out and gerrymandering somewhat mutually exclusive?

I don't know if you're intending those questions about independent commissions to be figurative. People have thought about this and, in Michigan, we voted such a commission in:

https://votersnotpoliticians.com/redistricting/

We'll see how well it works after this census.

One approach is to shift to multi seat constituencies under a proportional representation system. These are effectively impossible to usefully gerrymander.

Algorithmically...

Algorithms can be gamed, unfortunately. You'd have to carefully limit the free parameters: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/06/21/how-to-fit-an-elep...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com