How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising | Hacker News Reader

How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising

demodexio.substack.com

275 pointslkrubner403 comments

The problem posed by gerrymandering is a social problem, not a math problem.

There are all kinds of geographical and legal boundaries in a country, with varying levels of affinity to them. Defining gerrymandering precisely isn't possible, it isn't even a know it when you see it thing, and in practice it's a Russell conjugation: they gerrymander, and we redistrict so that people get proper representation.

However, social problems can be solved with maths, law could require something like this to be performed after every census:

https://sites.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/uw_1034.pdf

I think this has considerable advantages, the biggest being that it's objective, the next being that just looking at a Voronoi diagram makes it clear what's going on.

This essentially removes human factors from redistricting, and says you get the Congressional district you get when the population heatmap is relaxed in the simplest way it can be into the appropriate number of partitions.

Remember there's nothing about this which is 'fair', except for the part where people could perhaps be persuaded to abide by the results.

Perhaps the best way to district is more about maximum contention in a race? Voroni partitioning so that the maximum number of "purple" districts are achieved makes sense to me.

But then you're maximizing the number of "loser" voters in each district, who don't feel that their representative in government accurately represents them. Is that the goal of a representative democracy?

Only looks like a problem on a micro scale. If elections are indeed 50:50 on a macro scale, then yes, you would want all purple districts, because the "loser" voters are indeed close to 50%.

If the voters are 70:30 on a macro scale, it wouldn't matter if you create a bunch of purple districts, because they all can't be purple when you have exhausted the 30% of that ratio.

Conversely, if you were to create fixed color districts, you could hide a larger majority as "loser" voters on a macro scale by stuffing them to a few of that color on a micro scale.

But to be clear, I don't think artificially creating purple districts for that express reason is a good idea, I just think it would be less of a problem than the current gerrymandering, when optimizing for democracy.

The problem is that you've fallen into the trap of modern political thinking: that all politics is national, and all that matters is the big decisions that get voted on that affect everyone equally.

And similarly, the false notion that all members of Party A are fungible, and it doesn't matter if I, personally, am represented by someone I hate, so long as there's a member of my party somewhere in congress.

But that's not really the point of a representative republic. Our specific, local needs and desires are supposed to actually be represented by by our members of Congress.

So in terms of actual representation, it would actually be better to have a district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate A, and another district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate B, because then the vast majority of people would be getting the representative that they voted for, and represents them.

In the scenario where every district is purple, fully half the people have no representation of their interests in congress.

Macro scale doesn't have to mean national. There are many precincts per district, and many districts per county, etc.

> So in terms of actual representation, it would actually be better to have a district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate A, and another district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate B, because then the vast majority of people would be getting the representative that they voted for, and represents them.

No, only the throwaway districts in gerrymandered maps are represented, all other districts swallow up many more unrepresented voters.

> In the scenario where every district is purple, fully half the people have no representation of their interests in congress.

But you missed the point, not every district can be purple. In absolute terms, more people would be represented than the status quo. It's better than gerrymandering.

But again, not my prefered solution.

From the essay:

-------------------------

Hmm, okay, so what would be fair? Perhaps we want to give each party a fighting chance in each election? Isn't that fair?

2 districts each hold 100,000 blues

8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets

So now the violets have a 50% chance of winning 8 districts. The blues are granted two districts automatically, but that is fair, since they are more popular than the violets. Each party has some chance of winning.

However, in this model, if 1 blue voter in each district changes their mind, then the violets end up with 80% of the legislature. We’ve engineered a system that is very unstable! If Katechon is like the nation of Hungary, where a 2/3rds majority can amend the constitution, then Katechon is now vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover, much like what happened in Hungary after 2010. And that's because 8 people out of a 1,000,000 changed their vote.

Unstable means each vote matters.

Ideally we'd do away with this bullshit electoral system entirely and make each vote matter by having it be proportional representation.

Until then: Maximum instability = maximum Government accountability.

You actually remove the possibility of accountability if you are drawing the maps so that a party that behaves badly still has a 50% chance of winning.

“Gerrymandering” is baked right into the constitution.

It’s a good thing. You want the representatives drawing the districts because they are closest to their constituents. You also don’t want random district allocation, you want the representatives to match with your constituents in a 90/10 split, not a 50/50 split where nothing gets done.

The barrels of ink used to slander redistricting is being supplied by very powerful money interests. They do this because it’s one of the last impediments to the NWO globalist government that is incrementally being setup.

The removal of representative redistricting, along with the installation of the horribly complex rank choice voting system the media elites are pushing everywhere effectively ends the American democratic experiment.

I am not a very powerful money interest.

it isn't even a know it when you see it thing

I'm glad you said this. One of the more infamous gerrymanders in the US is in Chicago --- the notorious "earmuffs". You can just look at it and see that something's hinky.

But what's really happening there is that there are in fact very well-defined Latino neighborhoods in Chicago, and the earmuffs capture a bunch of them neatly: Pilsen, Little Village, Cicero, Belmont-Cragin. If you know Chicago, you know these places, and you also know what the boundary between, say, Belmont-Cragin and North Austin is like; however artificial it looks on a map, it is a real border. That these communities are where they are is also not purely happenstance: a lot of very unfortunate social engineering took place in the early-mid-20th century to put those neighborhoods (and all the other neighborhoods) where they are now.

That's not to defend gerrymandering writ large, or even necessarily the earmuffs, but just to second your point about the complexity of the problem.

I think a lack of fairness is a inherent problem with districting first past the post elections.

We could solve the problem by moving to a proportional system with much larger or no districts. The more proportional representatives you have per district, the less value you get for gerrymandering it as it gets harder to ignore voters.

Proportional representation goes a long way of increasing fairness. Societies are not split cleanly by geographic lines. You can have a lot more diverse ruling class by coalescing single person electorates into at least 30 electorates per district.

But what would also be needed is to increase the total numbers of representatives by a whole factor at least. USA is one of the least represented democracies in the world (only India is worse). Even China has more representatives per capita.

This also extends to local elections where cities as big as Seattle or San Francisco only have 9 and 11 members in their respective city counsels. There is no way to represent such big and diverse cities with this few seats. In comparison Oslo has 59 seats in their city council.

You don't need much larger districts to get a much better distribution, depending on how you allocate the remaining seats. Somewhat larger districts would arguably also improve representation for people, on the assumption that if there is a local representative from a party that supports your viewpoints you're more likely to be listened to.

To the first part, while Norway have pretty large districts, the method used to allocate levelling seats to achieve reasonable proportionality (it's not maximally proportional, as there is a lower threshold of 4% to be eligible for levelling seats) maintains a regional link by sorting the parties in descending order of wasted votes (votes that failed to get them a direct mandate) nationally. Then you pick the party with the most wasted votes, then you pick the district with a free levelling seats where that party had the most "unused" wasted votes, and allocate it. You then remove the requisite number of wasted votes, and repeat the process until all the levelling seats are allocated. This means the representatives are all drawn from the regional lists, and are the closest possible match.

The higher the ratio of direct mandates to levelling seats are, the more likely the levelling seats will go to a party that matches the preferences of the population of that region, but even with one mandate and one levelling seat, most places will elect someone via the direct mandate that is withing normal expectations, and so will rarely be any worse off.

Another lesson to draw from Norway is that part of the problem of the US and UK systems is that the local link largely matters because of confusing political and largely apolitical local matters. In Norway, a lot of the issues people in the UK at least write to their MPs about are things you in Norway would write to the County Governor about (there are only 10 of them, for a population of 5m, scale accordingly). The role of County Governor is one often given to former politicians (e.g. about half of the current ones are former cabinet ministers, almost all are former MPs), who knows the system and have connections to get things done, but it's not party political, and they have a civil service staff to assist. When I moved to the UK the notion that writing to an MP was a thing was bizarre - it felt to me like an abject failure of government if you have to write to the legislative about non-political local stuff. You can certainly talk to them in Norway to. When I highschool I just called up parliament for a school project to talk to an MP for my region. But it feels like there is much less need to do so, because you have other avenues and if it's a political issue, the proportionality means it's more likely there's an MP advocating for your view already.

As with software, whatever the real goal is should be decided and then approached directly. Any effect that is brought about as an accidental side effect of an unrelated architectural decision should be regraded as a flaw in the system.

If we want better local representation, we can strengthen local government, or create governments smaller than a city. We can eliminate geographic districts, as units that elect representatives to some higher level of government, but we can still have excellent local government.

If we want cultural representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular culture, and then vote for members of that culture.

If we want religious representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular religion, and then vote for members of that religion.

If we want racial representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular race, and then vote for members of that race.

If we want language representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as speaking a particular language, and then vote for members who also claim to speak that language.

Again, the same rule we apply to software architecture should apply here. Whatever kind of representation we regard as important, we should approach the matter directly, and not try to achieve the effect accidentally, as the side effect of some other architectural decision.

Indeed, many of the problems we see in our political system are exactly because too many goals are being overloaded on too few institutions. If this was a legacy software app, and I was brought in as a consultant to clean it up, I would immediately suggest that a dramatic increase in both encapsulation and polymorphism was needed, and could only be achieved by introducing new branches of government.

To a limited extent, I implied as much when I wrote about the division of labor and the need for highly specialized committees:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-have-politics-in-the-us...

How do these multiple branches of government set policy for the population as a whole?

That's an open question and I think everyone would answer it differently. In an earlier essay I suggested that we live in a complex world with a sophisticated division of labor, and therefore all real power should move to the specialized committees. In that model, the legislatures simply appoint people to the committees. If we had 5 legislatures and they each appointed one person per year to a committee, for a term of 5 years, then all the committees would have 25 people. The committees would set policy and pass the laws. I spoke of specialized committees here:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-have-politics-in-the-us...

The purity of that argument is appealing, but the reality is that the underlying neighborhoods themselves are, literally, gerrymandered into these weird shapes, and trying to decouple districting policy from those early-20th century decisions essentially ratifies the injustice. "This district looks stupid" is not a good enough reason to eliminate Latino representation from Chicago, which (I think?) has more Latino residents than Phoenix and Dallas put together.

Drastically increasing the number of representatives sounds like a good solution.

Another approach is to incorporate that neighborhood as its own independent city. I think we should think about these issues creatively, while sticking with the idea whatever the goal, we should approach it directly, rather than achieving the effect accidentally, as a side effect of some other design decision.

Your proposal is to literally expel from government the people who inhabit a minority neighborhood?

Setting entirely aside the questions of morality, you also lose economies of scale by doing this, and there are already hierarchies that enable local governance as well as local representation in regional governance.

I'm not saying there aren't ways to improve the system, but what tptacek is trying to say is that "this shit is complicated and all about trade-offs, and you can't always get everything you want". In some ways it's the definition of a wicked problem.

It's not about "creative problem-solving towards some goal" it's about balancing competing goals from competing stakeholders. The status quo has stakeholders who benefit and will not like change, and will not like the characterization of the status quo as "an accident" or "side effects of some other design decision".

I think I was clear. My proposal is to have no geographic sub-districts to any polity. Everyone in a city should be free to vote for all candidates for city council, everyone in a region should be free to vote for all candidates for the regional assembly, everyone in a country should be free to vote for all candidates for the National Assembly. But if you really wanted to rescue some unique neighborhood, my suggestion is that you do so directly, without trying to achieve the effect as the accidental side effect of an unrelated architectural decision.

This sentence has no coherent meaning:

"It's not about "creative problem-solving towards some goal" it's about balancing competing goals from competing stakeholders. "

There is no meaningful contrast between the two phrases.

> I think I was clear. My proposal is to have no geographic sub-districts to any polity

You said to have them incorporate their own city. This seems different?

> There is no meaningful contrast between the two phrases.

Sure there is: in these cases, there is no single well-defined all-encompassing goal, and it may not be possible to define one.

"You said to have them incorporate their own city. This seems different?"

Everyone in a polity (a town or region or nation or perhaps special district) should be free to vote for every candidate running for that polity. The polity should have no geographic sub-divisions. If, as was mentioned above, a neighborhood in Chicago has a special culture, then:

its residents have their city concerns met when they participate in city elections,

and they have their regional concerns met when they participate in regional elections,

and they have their national concerns met when they participate in national elections.

But if you decided that their culture was so special, and deserved so much special protection, that the above was not good enough, then my suggestion is that the neighborhood should incorporate as its own city. Instead of being a neighborhood in Chicago, it should be an independent city with its own elections.

As I said, if you really wanted to rescue some unique neighborhood, my suggestion is that you do so directly, without trying to achieve the effect as the accidental side effect of an unrelated architectural decision.

"Sure there is: in these cases, there is no single well-defined all-encompassing goal, and it may not be possible to define one."

I was referring to Thomas's goals. What does Thomas want to do? What is he trying to achieve? Whatever his goal is, he should approach that directly, without relying on accidental side effects of unrelated architectural decisions.

Ok, I’ll bite: his goal is for every stakeholder to feel listened to, for their lives to get better, for no one to have an undue advantage, and for people to generally have what they need and want to the extent possible.

What’s the next step, then?

Thomas wrote:

"But what's really happening there is that there are in fact very well-defined Latino neighborhoods in Chicago, and the earmuffs capture a bunch of them neatly: Pilsen, Little Village, Cicero, Belmont-Cragin. If you know Chicago, you know these places, and you also know what the boundary between, say, Belmont-Cragin and North Austin is like; however artificial it looks on a map, it is a real border. That these communities are where they are is also not purely happenstance: a lot of very unfortunate social engineering took place in the early-mid-20th century to put those neighborhoods (and all the other neighborhoods) where they are now."

Assuming his goal is to protect the unique culture of that neighborhood, two options are:

1. the neighborhood already has its unique culture protected because the people in that neighborhood help elect the city government

2. the unique culture of the neighborhood is not sufficiently protected by the city government, therefore the neighborhood should incorporate and so become its own independent city

Again, whatever Thomas's goal is, I'd suggest that he achieve his goal directly, rather than trying to achieve the result as the accidental side effect of other architectural decisions. Gerrymandering is a very weak way of trying to defend the culture of a neighborhood. If his goal is to protect the culture of the neighborhood, then he should think of an architecture that would do so directly.

You are presenting option 2 as though it "achieves his goal directly" but it also comes with significant costs which you completely elide.

No option is clean.

Why should Thomas do something direct if something indirect achieves his goal, if a little bit less, but with far fewer harms?

Direct is not always better than indirect, especially in domains where any direct action has myriad indirect effects too.

What do cities have to do with congressional boundaries? Districts span cities.

My proposal is to have no geographic sub-districts to any polity. Everyone in a city should be free to vote for all candidates for city council, everyone in a region should be free to vote for all candidates for the regional assembly, everyone in a country should be free to vote for all candidates for the National Assembly. But if you really wanted to rescue some unique neighborhood, my suggestion is that you do so directly, without trying to achieve the effect as the accidental side effect of an unrelated architectural decision. The neighborhood with the unique culture has voters who will express their interests in city, regional, and national elections, and that should be enough, but if you felt strongly that this unique neighborhood deserves additional protections, then my suggestion is that you pursue that goal directly. Incorporating that neighborhood as its own independent city would be a way of achieving that goal.

About this:

"What do cities have to do with congressional boundaries? Districts span cities."

My point is that districts should not exist.

That's likely due to the Voting Rights act which requires what they call majority-minority districts. It prohibits redistricting to disempower racial minorities. It's another complication in the whole gerrymandering debate that makes it a lot harder to solve, because it requires districts that will look gerrymandered in a lot of cases.

See, the Russell conjugation is that it demands gerrymandering, to keep Democrat strongholds blue. I'm really only speaking to the 10% of you who can think about this stuff without feeling those delicious squirts of tribal belonging, not the 90% of people who ignored what I said so they could yawp.

> it isn't even a know it when you see it thing, and in practice it's a Russell conjugation: they gerrymander, and we redistrict so that people get proper representation

There are absolutely situations where it is obvious, most notably when those drawing the maps say they're motivated by partisan power. The situations at issue in Rucho v. Common Cause, for example, were not ambiguous in the least.

The rural populations seems would not like a redistricting where every district is dominated by its largest population center. Essentially this voronoi type redistricting would push more power towards cities at the cost of rural areas.

In the USA that is an unambiguously good thing.

No it isn't. There may be some aspects of it that would have good results. But there would also be aspects that would have poor results.

Pretending that larger population centers will make better electoral decisions and that those decisions will not ignore the legitimate needs of more rural areas reeks of unjustified superiority and is unbecoming.

I certainly would deem city like zoning for rural areas to be a nightmare scenario. And that is just one of the MANY MANY policies that would make problems.

Correct, as I said, it isn't fair, merely objective.

It isn't possible to get fair by drawing lines around people which are smaller than the actual sovereign boundary under discussion. You can hand that power to the government, an 'independent commission' (the government with extra steps), or an algorithm run by the government, those are your options. All outcomes will fail fairness, this has been extensively studied.

I agree that algorithmic redistricting based entirely on population density would be the best way to do strict single-member geographic representation. But even neutrally drawn districts give more power to the party that is less concentrated geographically.

Proportional representation solves this, but if you still value the notion that local communities should be able to have their collective power represented, then you need a solution that combines the two.

As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, multi-member districts with proportional representation are a good way to do this without needing to change the Constitution. The gist is, split states into a smaller number of larger districts, each of which gets multiple representatives. The representatives are allocated proportionally to the vote in each large district. So if the district has 5 representatives, party X gets 63% of the vote, and party Y gets 37% of the vote, then party X gets 3 members and party Y gets 2 members.

Political scientist Lee Drutman is actively promoting this approach, and recently founded Fix Our House (https://www.fixourhouse.org).

If I could rewrite the Constitution, I'd get rid of the rounding error by weighting the votes of individual members of Congress. E.g., if there were only two candidates in a district, candidate X got 60% of the vote, and candidate Y got 40% of the vote, send them both to Congress, with X getting 0.6 of a vote and Y getting 0.4 of a vote.

Of course all of this is better when combined with instant runoffs (aka ranked choice).

I haven’t ever heard of this. Seems really interesting. Thanks.

Another thought I’ve had for a long time: why not just lift the limit on Congress? My understanding is that Congress set a law to cap it (as opposed to the constitution specifying it) Which made sense 100 or even 50 years ago when members of Congress needed to be physically present to vote in DC.

But today in a world of the internet, video conferencing, etc. it seems like that limitation is arbitrary. Much smaller districts would exists. Making gerrymandering harder. Making a the house look a lot different than the senate. It would make the House more like … a mayor who writes and votes on laws in DC instead of locally.

The Constitution sets a minimum district size, but not a maximum. The minimum is 30,000 ppl, the average now is over 700,000 ppl.

Congress could easily double the size of the House, and should. That and a law requiring that districts have maximum compactness/population density would I think solve many of our problems with running a democracy.

Your 'rounding error' solution just moves the circus to ballot access. Here in Michigan the parties decided that since they are well organized and have gotten people on previous ballots, they should have lesser requirements for getting on future ballots, so it isn't really hypothetical that it would happen.

Just increasing the number of representatives would have some impact on gerrymandering.

"if you still value the notion that local communities should be able to have their collective power represented"

Your town assembly can take care of the concerns of your town.

Your regional assembly can take care of the concerns of your region.

Your National Assembly can take care of the concerns of your nation.

We can get rid of gerrymandering and still have different levels of government, each devoted to a particular level of localism.

Indeed, having one level of localism interfere in the affairs of another level of localism seems like a violation of encapsulation, in the sense that a software developer would understand the concept.

Here in NZ (but also in Germany and I'm sure other places) we use MMP - it's pretty simple - take your existing setup and halve the number of representative seats - we all get 2 votes the first vote chooses a local representative for your local seat. The 2nd vote is for a party, each party provides a list of candidates before the election, you count up the parties who have won the local representative seats, then hand out the same number of list seats so that the proportion of seats in total (list and representative district) match the proportions of the party vote - some places have a minimum threshold (3-5%) for a party to be included in that count.

Germany is a little bit more complicated as we also take into account proportionality on the level of each state. And you (at least in general) more than double the size of parliament. But the gist is correct.

> The gist is, split states into a smaller number of larger districts, each of which gets multiple representatives. The representatives are allocated proportionally to the vote in each large district. So if the district has 5 representatives, party X gets 63% of the vote, and party Y gets 37% of the vote, then party X gets 3 members and party Y gets 2 members.

Note that in order for this approach to be coherent at all, you need to abandon the idea that it's possible for a voter to vote for a candidate for office. The only kind of vote this system acknowledges is a vote for a political party.

This isn't actually the case. See either STV or MMP which allow the combination of proportionality and voting for individual candidates.

The above example is not STV nor MMP so the person you are responding to is strictly correct.

The concept of proportionality is not even well-defined for STV (a problem shared by several other aspects of STV). In the example of my parent comment, where two parties are fielding candidates for 5 seats, party X receives 63% of the vote, and party Y receives 37% of the vote, STV will happily assign all 5 seats to party Y. The assignment is completely dependent on factors that weren't specified in the example.

(As a side note, Wikipedia's toy example of "STV in a party system" considers a case where three parties field candidates for 5 seats and receive 48%, 45%, and 7% of the vote, resulting in those parties respectively winning 2, 2, and 1 seats. This is about as bad in terms of proportionality as any other system [Party A has 686% of Party C's votes and 200% of the representation; Party B has merely 643% and 200% of the representation], which isn't a surprise; 5 seats don't allow for proportionality unless you're lucky enough to see a 63-37 split in the electorate. But if party-based proportionality is a concern, the correct answer is fairly obvious - the three parties should receive 2, 2, and 0 seats, with one seat going unfilled. It is interesting to me that no one ever seems to contemplate this as a possibility.)

I agree and I don't understand why some people are drawn to to STV. Among its problems is the simple fact that it is complicated. By contrast, simple approval voting (given 50 candidates, vote as much as you want and the top 5 candidates will win) will produce results just as accurate, and the math is much simpler -- every voter can easily understand what is going on.

STV is pretty awesome to follow though, speaking as an elections nerd. Figuring out where the transfers will go entertains me enormously every election here in Ireland.

This is the only reason to study STV, to look at the interesting patterns. Likewise, I'm fascinated by a knowledge-graph pattern (I'm not sure if it has a name) where we use something like k-means clustering to discover less popular candidates who belong to the same cluster of voters who voted for the top candidate. I think the results would deliver good government, in that it would surface the maximum number of non-extremist ideas. But I think the math is too complicated for most people to follow, and so I think it would lack legitimacy. So I don't bother recommending it, except as a thought experiment regarding alternate systems.

I was drawn to STV in the past because I liked the level of control it gave voters, having them expresses preferences over parties and candidates. But now I'm more inclined to agree that its too complicated.

I don't think that the approval voting scenario you suggest is good though. If I want to elect five candidates, I want 5 candidates that represent the diversity of the population. But it seems to me that your suggested method will elect 5 candidates of the largest voting bloc, not at all what we want.

As I read the above example, it leaves it undefined which proportional system is in place. As such, the statement is strictly incorrect, because it makes a general statement which isn't true of proportional systems generally.

If you read the example, you must have noticed that there is no way to interpret it as describing a system of single-transferable-vote.

The example is very explicit that votes are cast for parties and all of the benefit of receiving a vote goes to the party for which it is cast. As such, the model is only coherent if there is no such thing as voting for a candidate.

The example given mentions voting for parties, but doesn't give explicit indication how this works. Are the votes directly for parties or for candidates from those parties? It doesn't say. I suspect that you see it as explicitly talking about votes directly for parties, but I see it leaving it undefined.

But really, what exactly the original example intended to convey is a pointless pedantic argument I'm not getting into.

The crucial point is that you absolutely can have multi-member proportional districts where you vote for specific candidates. So to someone who advocated for a such multi-member districts, the contention that you have to give up voting for individual candidates simply isn't true.

> But even neutrally drawn districts give more power to the party that is less concentrated geographically.

There's a certain appeal to that too however. As long as the advantage/disadvantage isn't overwhelming anyway. Perhaps it would help to encourage more diverse communities or give a disadvantage to political groups that isolate themselves while giving an advantage to groups who demonstrate they're both willing and capable of living and working in diverse environments. It might even help to reduce the amount of political and cultural divide.

The root of the issue is that the US doesn't separate elected lawmakers from district distribution. The fact[0] elected officials can redraw their own electoral map is just beyond belief, in a tough competition with Citizen's United for the worst political bug (well... feature) in the US. Cherry on top is calling/dubbing one such major and catastrophic instance of gerrymandering "REDMAP". So brazenly rubbing it in while openly chipping at US democracy.

As long as that holds true, theoretical solutions don't really matter when those using them will pry any model into their favor. Not that a mathematical solution even makes sense for a district map that accounts of cultural ties for local representation (short of going for proportional elections, which I think is desirable with some form of local representation).

In Canada, and I presume most countries of the G7, it's an independent entity[1], which one would think goes without saying. That's not incorruptible of course, but I wager it's held it's own for over 60 years here, modern district maps are quite reasonable.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

1: https://www.vox.com/2014/4/15/5604284/us-elections-are-rigge...

It's crazy that local elected legislators end up able to manipulate this, but you can't really prevent the government of the sovereign entity, in this case the Federal Government (which will presumably be elected in a democracy otherwise what's the point) from being able to seize this power if it determines to do so. If it can't then it's not much of a sovereign government.

For example in England an independent Boundary Commission draws these lines. But, they only exist because the government allows them to exist, Parliament can (and often does) ignore what the Commission says, indeed it's perfectly normal for a party who expect to lose seats to complain that it's unfair, and if that party happens to be in government they will stall boundary reforms. In practice the Commission acts as some sort of bulwark against gerrymandering overall, but it's for local stuff that this is more important, because local government just can't seize that power for themselves. That's where the US approach is crazy.

The extra crazy thing in the US is that its sovereign government acts as though it is permanently beholden to dusty old documents (a written "Constitution"), or rather, to the very modern interpretation of those documents by partisan hacks in its "Supreme Court". This makes no sense, and Americans shouldn't put up with it.

> It's crazy that local elected legislators end up able to manipulate this, but you can't really prevent the government of the sovereign entity, in this case the Federal Government (which will presumably be elected in a democracy otherwise what's the point) from being able to seize this power if it determines to do so.

They arguably have. The voting rights act took away redistricting power from... Bad acting districts. Some (certainly not all) of those districts have arguably made reasonable amends and are at low risk of 'stealing votes from minorities' but are stuck having the feds draw their lines due to a shitty history and no desire of the feds to give it back, while arguably racist northern districts get away with some bullshit Scott free because they aren't southern.

Why wouldn't a Constitutional Republic act as if was beholden to its Constitution?

It seems beyond odd to me to think "eh, this paper is dusty; let's just do what we want".

It is strange to pretend to be a democracy, and then give power to long dead men to decide what the rules are, offering a veto to a handful of unelected people to "interpret" what those men decided long ago.

A democracy should make its own rules as it goes. Americans living today ought to decide the rules under which those Americans live, not hope that somehow slavers who lived centuries ago magically determined the correct rules to live by forever.

I don't think writing some of the rules down in bigger type and calling those a "Constitution" helps much at all, and so I'd argue against it as a practice, but certainly a situation in which most Americans weren't born until after the constitutional rules in place today were fixed is not a success. The last successful new Constitutional Amendment to be written was in 1971. If you were born after 1971 your "democracy" never really decided any of these rules, if you were born after 1950 you never voted for the rules you live under.

In its early days the American Republic fiddled with the Constitution a great deal, and that's much less objectionable. Even as late as a century ago, there was some flexibility left in this vital joint, but today it's gone.

Constitutions are usually written after major crises in a period of national unity supposedly with large if not universal consensus. The idea is that a simple majority is not enough to change them.

Not everybody agrees, for example in UK the parliament is the ultimate sovereign and it is not bound by law other than self restraint.

Parliament offers the ultimate demonstration of how you know who is really in charge. King Charles kept starting wars, the Parliament told him to stop, he didn't and so they executed the King. That's a sovereign entity.

While requiring more than "a simple majority" seems like a mechanism to prevent certain regrettable outcomes, it really doesn't, it's just a line in the sand. We should oppose a million people voting to execute one innocent just as fervently as 500 people voting to execute 499 innocents, the problem isn't the ratio and so a correct solution can't be about the ratio.

Consensus is great, I love consensus - if you can find a consensus that's brilliant. But super-majorities are not a consensus. And of course when you really do have a consensus it tends to be naturally enduring anyway. I am very dubious of people who imagine that there might be a consensus for policy one minute and then shortly after the consensus is gone. I think there was only ever some clever sleight of hand to deliver the illusion of consensus at all for some purpose.

I don’t think the argument is that super-majority is consensus, but that it’s self-evidently closer to consensus than a simple majority is.

When contemplating making major changes in governmental structure, consensus would be best, but super majority is probably second-best and first-achievable.

You can’t run a country needing 100% consensus of over 200M people.

Uhm… no Rule of Law then?

In 2018 Michigan voted to create a non-partisan redistricting commission, and from the results of the 2020 census the 13-member commission has selected new districts for the upcoming 2022 elections.

The commission is made up of:

> 4 Republicans, 4 Democrats, and 5 members who identify with neither party; no member can be a partisan officeholder, an employee of such an officeholder, or a lobbyist

> Citizens can apply, and the Secretary of State picks 200 at random, with party and geographic diversity. Republican and Democratic leaders in the Michigan House and Senate can each reject five names, up to 20 in total. Then the Secretary of State picks the 13 members at random. The commission will have final say over the entire process of redistricting.

The results of this have been pretty bad. The chosen members rarely all met, attendance was a huge problem. They delivered the final decision well past their deadline to do so, and the process went over budget. The final map changed the overall outcome from Republican favored, to somewhat republican favored. Democrats sued because majority minority districts were removed.

The election will prove the final results, but the process so far has been pretty bad to get what appear to be not significantly different results.

A comparison of constitutional crisis in Hungary and the USA:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/thesis-1-there-is-one-corre...

The state and federal governments are both “sovereign,” and the states were there first, exactly like the EU. Some people think that the states are obsolete and should be absorbed into the federal government, but that’s definitely not how sovereignty works. (Ukraine has existed as a distinct sovereignty for less time than South Dakota, but they seem pretty fixated by these arbitrary lines on a map!)

> The extra crazy thing in the US is that its sovereign government acts as though it is permanently beholden to dusty old documents (a written "Constitution"), or rather, to the very modern interpretation of those documents by partisan hacks in its "Supreme Court". This makes no sense, and Americans shouldn't put up with it.

I’d lecture you about the concept of “laws” but let me try a different tack. A bunch of Americans are flipping out right now because the Supreme Court refuses to invoke those “dusty old documents” to overturn a validly enacted law from a duly elected legislature. Who are the “partisan hacks” here?

> The state and federal governments are both “sovereign,” and the states were there first, exactly like the EU.

The majority of the US states were not there first – the majority of the US states were effectively created by Congress. Federal territories–which as such were fully under control of the federal government–were elevated into states by Congressional decision; frequently, Congress also decided how many states some federal territory would be partitioned into. The only states which could be said to have had some independent sovereignty pre-existing federal control were the original 13, Vermont and Texas. One might also count Kentucky and Maine, being consensual splits from the original 13, in the list; possibly also West Virginia, although the degree of consent involved in its separation is more debatable. So we are talking about 15/50, maybe 18/50 if we are generous. (Hawaii doesn't really count because the State of Hawaii is not continuous with independent Hawaii, since for over 60 years in-between Hawaii was a federal territory–but even counting Hawaii, that's only 19, leaving 62% of US states created by Congress out of non-sovereign territories.)

It is also different in that US states can have their sovereignty further limited, against their consent, by constitutional amendment (which they may have voted down, but the other 3/4th of states supported), or by Supreme Court decision (who decide what "state sovereignty" means in practice, and can choose to interpret the concept broadly or narrowly, and may alter its boundaries over time as their case law evolves due to changes in judicial whim and the ideological composition of the Court.) By contrast, under EU law, any further major transfers of sovereignty from the member states to the EU require unanimous agreement.

And the biggest difference is that the EU is a club you are allowed to leave (as Brexit demonstrates), the US is a club from which exit is near-impossible (see the US Civil War). That fact gives EU member states vastly more sovereignty than US states have. Indeed, it is disputed whether secession of a state from the US is possible even if Congress agreed to it – many say it would require a constitutional amendment. The EU treaties now contain an explicit right to leave, and it was generally assumed that one existed implicitly even before it was explicitly stated. If the EU tried to reduce the sovereignty of a member state against its will, bypassing unanimity (such as via qualified majority voting, or via an ECJ decision), the member state can always respond by leaving – and it is likely a mere serious threat of leaving would result in them being allowed to stay but with an exemption from the decision in question. What US state could ever hope for that kind of sovereignty?

I don't know why so many Americans want to compare the US states to the EU member states–it is not a very sensible comparison. Better comparisons for the US states would be the Canadian provinces, the Australian states, the German Länder, etc–they are roughly the same kind of thing as US states are (units of a federation lacking their own sovereignty under international law), whereas EU member states are a very different kind of thing (fully sovereign states under international law)

Also, if you're say, British Prime Minister, or German Chancellor leading the EU is clearly a demotion and nobody would seriously retire from leading their country to head the EU instead - whereas if you were say, Governor of Texas, the job of US President is an enormous promotion that you probably can't get.

> nobody would seriously retire from leading their country to head the EU instead

Other than, you know, the previous President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, who did exactly that.

Fair, I wasn't thinking of the Council (historically President of the Council was not a role for an individual, Tusk was I think the second such person) and perhaps I should have.

> The majority of the US states were not there first – the majority of the US states were effectively created by Congress.

They entered the US on the same terms as the original thirteen colonies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_footing

> It is also different in that US states can have their sovereignty further limited, against their consent, by constitutional amendment (which they may have voted down, but the other 3/4th of states supported),

I’m not sure that’s a dispositive distinction. The EU and the US are, on paper, more similar than different. In particular, EU law overrides national law just like federal law overrides state law. In some ways the EU is even more powerful—for example it can directly force member states to enforce EU law, while the federal government can’t force states to enforce federal law.

> or by Supreme Court decision (who decide what "state sovereignty" means in practice, and can choose to interpret the concept broadly or narrowly, and may alter its boundaries over time as their case law evolves due to changes in judicial whim and the ideological composition of the Court.)

This is true of the EU as well. The ECJ has the power to interpret the EU treaties including points about sovereignty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_v_ENEL

> This groundbreaking case established the principle of supremacy in EU law, which is an independent source of law that cannot be overridden by domestic laws.

> By contrast, under EU law, any further major transfers of sovereignty from the member states to the EU require unanimous agreement.

The notion of the Supremacy of EU law over national law was created by judicial fiat. It was included in the EU constitution, which was never adopted by consent, yet remains the law of the EU.

> Better comparisons for the US states would be the Canadian provinces, the Australian states, the German Länder, etc–they are roughly the same kind of thing as US states are (units of a federation lacking their own sovereignty under international law)

The German Lander are a better comparison, because the Canadian and Australian states were created at the same time as those countries. And the German Lander are in fact sovereign entities.

More generally, international law doesn’t recognize one kind of “sovereign entity” and demote everything below that to “administrative subdivision.” Sovereign states can cede part of their sovereignty to a federation and yet retain part of that sovereignty, as the US states did, as the EU member nations did, as the members of the Soviet Union did, and as the members of the United Kingdom did. The aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the impending dissolution of the United Kingdom (of Scotland secedes) demonstrates that these sub-federal boundaries continue to have meaning.

The problem is that the primate of the ECJ over national supreme/constitutional courts is not settled [1]. As far as I understand, it is a fiction where everybody plays along, but an actual conflict can lead to a major constitutional crisis (see for example [2]).

In practice diplomatic solutions are found to avoid direct clashes.

[1] ECJ has of course claimed otherwise, but some national constitutional courts reserve the right to interpret and follow their own constitutions, even when they would lead to diverging from ECJ rulings. In fact they might not have other options.

[2] https://verfassungsblog.de/national-courts-cannot-override-c...

> The German Lander are a better comparison, because the Canadian and Australian states were created at the same time as those countries.

The Canadian provinces and Australian states were pre-existing self-governing British colonies, and are legally (under domestic law) considered to be continuous with those colonies. When the Colony of New South Wales became the State of New South Wales on 1 January 1901, initially very little changed – the colonial government became the state government, in fact it was the same thing, they just replaced the word "colony" with "state". Gradually, certain powers were transferred – over time, the Australian states lost some of their powers which were taken over by the federal government; concurrently, London gradually gave up the powers which it had over the Australian colonies/states, either passing them to the federal government, or the states. It was a slow process over decades, and is generally not viewed as having been officially completed until the Australia Acts of 1986, which formally terminated the UK Parliament's legislative power over the Australian states (which however had de facto fallen out of use decades earlier).

Also, under Australian constitutional law, the Australian states are considered "sovereign", albeit the term is understood differently than in US or German law – sovereignty comes from the Crown (the British monarchy), and the states are sovereign because their governments have a direct relationship with the Crown which acts as their formal head, separate from the federal government's relationship. In a certain sense, the Australian states are more "sovereign" than the Canadian provinces, because their relationship with the monarchy is more direct–Australian state premiers directly advise the monarch who to appoint as the state Governor (the monarch's representative in the state); by contrast, Canadian Lieutenant-Governors (the monarch's representative in the province) are appointed by the Governor-General on the advice of the Prime Minister.

> More generally, international law doesn’t recognize one kind of “sovereign entity” and demote everything below that to “administrative subdivision.” Sovereign states can cede part of their sovereignty to a federation and yet retain part of that sovereignty, as the US states did, as the EU member nations did, as the members of the Soviet Union did, and as the members of the United Kingdom did

The same word can mean different things in different legal systems. A good example is "treaty", whose meaning under US domestic law is much narrower than under international law. Under US law, something is only a "treaty" if the President asks and receives the Senate's consent to its ratification, otherwise it is just an "international agreement". As far as international law is concerned, "treaty" and "international agreement" are synonyms, and the distinction US law draws between them is largely irrelevant.

In the same way, when domestic legal systems such as those of the US or Australia speak of "state sovereignty", they aren't using that phrase in the same sense that international law uses it. Nevada is a "sovereign state" under US constitutional law, New South Wales is a "sovereign state" under Australian constitutional law; but neither is a "sovereign state" as public international law defines that term.

> The aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the impending dissolution of the United Kingdom (of Scotland secedes) demonstrates that these sub-federal boundaries continue to have meaning.

As long as sub-national boundaries remain sub-national, international law doesn't care about them. The moment they become national boundaries instead, international law suddenly starts caring. When independence occurs – which is primarily a factual rather than legal question - the status that entity had under domestic law prior to its independence has no international legal relevance. The US has "sovereign states" such as California and "non-sovereign territories" such as Puerto Rico; suppose the US suddenly breaks up, and both California and Puerto Rico become independent sovereign states – the fact that one used to be "sovereign" under US law and the other wasn't, has zero relevance to international law; from an international law viewpoint, they are both now sovereign, but prior to their independence neither was.

Similarly, whether a newly independent state is regaining its past independence, or has never been independent before, has little or no relevance under international law-as far as international law is concerned, prior to its independence, there was no "state" (in the international law sense); and when a state regains its independence, it is not always considered legally to be a continuation of the earlier state (whether or not it is really depends on the circumstances of the case, and whether other states choose to treat it as one or not). From an international law viewpoint, if Scotland becomes independent, effectively that is a new state called "Scotland", lacking any direct legal continuity with the former state of the same name

The boundaries between EU member states are within the scope of international law, because they are inter-state boundaries; the boundaries between US states or Australian states are outside the scope of international law, because they are intra-state boundaries, in the international law sense of "state".

> A bunch of Americans are flipping out right now because the Supreme Court refuses to invoke those “dusty old documents” to overturn a validly enacted law from a duly elected legislature. Who are the “partisan hacks” here?

A bunch of Americans were flipping out months ago because a local legislature basically flipped the bird to the Federal government and decided it gets to overrule national laws, and then a Supreme Court majority said yeah, we're not going to explain why but it's urgently necessary to let you go ahead with that with no further discussion.

In principle, if you believed a word of what these Supreme Court Justices said, you could do all sorts of violence to the Republic via this same mechanism. But of course if you were trying to, say, reduce gun violence, rather than help ruin poor women's lives you'd suddenly find they remember that you can't override national laws and there'd be an injunction in force before you could say "Shadow docket".

National versus state law is irrelevant here because there has never been federal law. There has never been sufficient support in the federal legislature to codify Roe as federal legislation.[1] Roe has therefore never been anything more than the Supreme Court’s interpretation of “dusty old documents.”

Phrases like “live by the sword, die by the sword” and “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” come to mind. You can’t, as OP did, call the Constitution “dusty old documents” that shouldn’t bind the nation on one hand, and in the same breath complain that the Supreme Court refused to rely on that “dusty old document” to overrule a law that the elected legislature of Mississippi chose to enact against a backdrop where the national legislature has never said anything different. There being no contrary federal law, that “dusty old document” is the only reason anyone has ever cared what nine lawyers think about abortion.

[1] There still isn’t—only 30% of Americans support Roe’s 22-24 week viability limit, and there is strong public support for restrictions that Roe prohibits: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-americans-stand-o.... Roe thus differs from even those other cases, like Griswold, that have become uncontroversial due to changes in public opinion.

There probably isn't strong support for the outright general ban that's coming to most states. My state has a trigger law and is unfortunately geographically right smack dab in the middle of a bunch of other states which will ban.

Where do you get “most states?” Only 13 states passed trigger laws after Roe. Nearly all are places where that’s probably what the majority in those states want. Several states like Michigan and Virginia have pre-existing bans on the books. I expect those will get quickly sorted out.

It is slightly less than half where abortion will likely be banned, my bad. I was looking at the chart on the link you gave. I didn't mean that most would automatically trigger.

> According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, a group that advocates for abortion rights, abortion would become illegal in about half the country if Roe were overturned. Its metric indicates that 24 states would likely ban abortion outright if Roe is weakened or overturned.

And I'd have to see numbers to believe you when you say that it's what the residents of those states want.

An estimate from an abortion advocacy organization about what happens if Roe is overturned means about as much as saying that america will become socialist if Biden is elected. If a state hasn’t been able to pass a trigger law yet—when they can do so just to virtue signal without actually having any consequences on abortion access—then it’s certainly not going to be able to do it after Roe is overruled when real chips are on the table.

It's literally a quote from an article you linked in support of something else you said. Anyway, time will tell.

The states all signed the Constitution, which requires a "republican" form of government. Such a thing was described (I think by Hamilton) as one where "the people choose their own rulers." There could be many implementations of this law, worthy of debate, but gerrymandering is not plausibly one of them.

I doubt that the concept of "laws" is a single coherent concept, but supports many different views, such as the conditions under which people are ethically obligated to obey them.

> There could be many implementations of this law, worthy of debate, but gerrymandering is not plausibly one of them.

The debate isn’t about whether gerrymandering is acceptable, but over who should be given the power, if anyone, to do something about it, and whether, if the courts are empowered to do so, they have clear guidelines to apply in exercising that power.

Right, and I'm not a legal scholar, so I don't know a technical answer. Who if anybody enforces the US constitution?

> The state and federal governments are both “sovereign,” and the states were there first, exactly like the EU.

To borrow from Mao Zedong, "sovereignty" grows from the barrel of a gun — in that sense, only one U.S. state has been sovereign in the past couple of centuries,* not least because of the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution, to say nothing of the Civil War Amendments and the 19th and 26th amendments (giving women and 18 year olds the right to vote).

And the former Confederate states are a special case: They probably make the most noise about their alleged sovereignty (apart from a few of the low-population, right-wing outliers in the non-coastal West), but they indisputably haven't been sovereign since Appomattox — they gambled and lost in a world-historic example of FAFO.

* The one exception was Texas, which was an independent republic from 1836 to 1845, with its own small army and navy as well as embassies in Washington, London, and Paris; Texas, of course, was one of the rebelling Confederate states that incontestably lost its claim to sovereignty in 1865.

> In Canada, and I presume most countries of the G7, it's an independent entity

Most countries have a proportional system, not a winner takes it all system.

With a proportional system where X% of the votes results in X% of the seats (corrected by 3% or 5% barrier and rounding effects) gerrymandering in some cases can effect who exactly is the MP for a region, but party association matches the vote.

In France two weeks ago they elected the president and the guy who in the second round got most votes nation-wide got the job. No counting per state/depardement/region. No electoral college, simple summing up.

In Germany there is an interesting system that a each electoral district has a candidate elected and then parliament is filled up to match proportion. Some gerrymandering there can lead to some party benefiting from direct mandates, but that has little effect in the end. (There is some weirdness as direct mandates are supposed to be 50% of seats, but if a party gets a lot more direct mandates than proportional weight the compensation is weird)

Generally the issue with giving districting away is that such commission have no democratic legislation, so if citizens are unhappy they have no way to vote them out. The University of Manitoba president is "unreachable" by the electorate. These core issues of core elements of the state (similar to rules for parliamentarians, election of supreme court justices, ...) are always problematic and rely on responsible individuals ...

Proportional vs winner takes all is a separate issue.

Yes, but actually no.

Gerrymandering is an issue precisely because of winner take all. In a proportional system the definition of districts (if they exist at all) doesn't have the same effect on the outcome of the election.

In fact, the best solution to gerrymandering is adopting an electoral system (proportional) that isn't susceptible to gerrymandering.

Proportional isn't one system, there are further details and depending on them gerrymandering can still be possible (but less important than in winner take all).

For example the mandates might be distributed proportionally globally or per district. In the latter case gerrymandering works when you have rounding problems (10 mandates per district and one party has 9% of support). There are also usually thresholds under which you don't get to the parliament altogether, and the "wasted" votes are distributed proportionally between the other parties - so again, gerrymandering still works when this is done per-district rather than globally.

This is exactly the situation in my country (Poland), and gerrymandering isn't a thing mostly because of people looking at it as corruption and protesting whenever some government tries to do it (last time it was PIS trying to change voting borders to add a lot of PIS-voting countryside to the capital city to finally win elections there :) - after protests they didn't do it).

You are right, it's not quite as simple as proportionality solving everything.

It's not a separate issue, it's the root cause of the issue. Without Winner Takes All, there's no point in gerrymandering. Without districts, there's not even the possibility of gerrymandering.

> The key difference is that Canada's commission members are all nonpartisan — they're mostly judges, political scientists, or retired civil servants.

Judges don't strike me as particularly nonpartisan these days...

In most of the G7 they are. Because they aren't voted on by elected officials, again...

It’s funny that you link an article about Canada “ending gerrymandering” when in 2019 Trudeau’s party won the election while losing the popular vote!

You actually just proved the article’s point that gerrymandering exists in any political system that uses geographic districts. Given that fact, maybe SCOTUS wasn’t so dumb in kicking that futile exercise to the states

> You actually just proved the article’s point that

That doesn't logically follow. Even "perfectly" distributed districts, you can win an election like this without having the most popular votes; all you need is for the districts that vote the 2nd/losing party to overwhelmingly vote that party, while the districts they lose be more narrow.

Gerrymandering is a separate issue, and will arrive pretty much any time encumbants can affect district boundaries, as there is an incentive to either create "safe"districts, or to dilute the effect of areas unlikely to vote for you.

You’re defining gerrymandering as a deliberate act, but a looser definition includes the entire effect of geographic districts on the outcome of elections, including non-intentional effects.

The article gives an example identical to yours.

> Gerrymandering is a separate issue

SCOTUS was asked to lay out a standard for courts to follow in deciding gerrymandering cases. A court can't know a priori whether a partisan skew in a particular map was deliberate or the result of geographic factors. So you can’t just treat it as a “separate issue.” Among other things, even if there’s evidence of intent, there might not be causation. You can intend to do lots of things that you don’t actually end up accomplishing.

You can kick the problem to a "neutral commission"--but that's giving tremendous power to unelected people. If "commissions of neutral experts" were a real thing that exists we could just dispense with democracy and rely on them! The Constitution is all about asking "who has the power?" but on issues like this people overlook that and get mired in "who would come up with the best answers under unrealistic assumptions about bias?"

Put differently, having legislatures draw districts might make it harder to "vote the bums out." But gerrymanders are actually pretty fragile. Democrats had massive geographic and gerrymandering advantages throughout the 1970s and 1980s: https://crystalball.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/conten.... But Republicans still managed to break through that in 1994, and since then it's flipped back and forth quite a bit. With a "neutral commission," by contrast, you've created a body with a lot of power that can't be voted out.

Also, what target are the experts shooting at anyway? That’s difficult to tell for the same reason it’s hard for the court to tell. Are the experts supposed to be leveling natural partisan skew due to geographic factors?

> You can kick the problem to a "neutral commission"--but that's giving tremendous power to unelected people

It works pretty well in Australia. Here, federal election district boundaries are drawn by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), an independent federal agency. I've never heard anyone remotely mainstream suggest the system is rigged or gerrymandered or politicised. (There are certain elements of "unfairness" built into the system – most notably, that the least populous state gets the same number of Senators as the most populous state, just like in the US – but the AEC didn't decide that, the Constitution says it.)

The AEC has total control over federal elections–the states have no role in decisions regarding them. For state/territory and local elections, each state and self-governing territory has its own electoral commission, similar in principle to the AEC – although some of the details, such as how exactly it is appointed, will differ. Unlike the US, in Australia, local government has zero role in running elections, even local government elections–all control of elections is at the state/territory and federal levels.

The AEC and its staff (and their state/territory equivalents) are required to be politically neutral. They are not allowed to belong to political parties or publicly support or criticise them.

The chief executive of the AEC is appointed by the government for a five year term. Although government politicians (effectively) choose the chief executive, they are required by law and custom to choose someone without a record of past involvement in politics – the current incumbent used to work in a civilian executive role for the federal law enforcement, before that as a manager for a defence contractor, and before that he was in the military – so obviously someone with some demonstrated experience in management/leadership but without any known political affiliation.

As well as its chief executive, the AEC has two other members – a chair and a third member. The chair must be an active or retired federal judge – the Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Australia gives the government a list of three judges, and the government gets to choose one from that list to become the chair. The third member is also chosen by the government, but legally must be head of another federal agency – (non-binding) tradition dictates that the government choose the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Australian Statistician. Major decisions–such as drawing electoral boundaries–must be made by the Commission as a whole, by a two-thirds majority vote.

> With a "neutral commission," by contrast, you've created a body with a lot of power that can't be voted out.

Nobody can vote out the AEC, but the government can remove its three members from office for "misbehaviour". However, the removed member can challenge the removal in the courts, so if the government tries to remove one without a strong justification, the courts are likely to strike down the attempt, whereas removing them with strong justification is likely to be upheld. To my knowledge, no removal has ever been attempted. (Also, the AEC is established by statute not constitutionally, so Parliament could amend the law to abolish the AEC and replace it with something else–highly unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.)

I can't see why you couldn't use a similar model in the US, and why something like that couldn't work there. (You couldn't copy the exact Australian model into the US, due to various differences between their respective national constitutions, but you could translate some of the major ideas of the Australian model into something that could work in the US context.)

> If "commissions of neutral experts" were a real thing that exists we could just dispense with democracy and rely on them!

No, we have democracy in order to choose between competing policies and ideologies.

An expert comission has a pre-defined, fixed policy - produce fair district maps, and they work to carry it out. The idea that no-one can carry out a task without bending the result to suit their personal views is absurd. If you ask some car designers to design you a saloon car, they'll design a saloon car, even if they personally prefer sports cars.

This is an important point, which I'd refine to: we have democracy in order to choose between competing goals and ideologies.

In theory, neutral experts could be used to determine the best policies towards the democratically chosen goals. And it actually works that way for the most part. The vast majority of stuff that goes through a parliament is stuff you never hear about, after all. They're like your car example. It's the few percent of topics where there's controversy where it's difficult, in practice, to find experts who will genuinely stay neutral - precisely because they're so controversial.

> This is an important point, which I'd refine to: we have democracy in order to choose between competing goals and ideologies.

I disagree with that. If you asked people what the goals should be for educating children, they’d probably be in broad agreement. But they differ widely in how they think those goals should be achieved.

Experts are only useful when there is a fairly rigorous scientific framework in place that has predictive power—the ability to predict what will work and what won’t.

Even in areas adjacent to those fields, the effectiveness of expertise quickly breaks down. Public health has elements of both medicine and social psychology, and the results were all over the place during the recent pandemic. When you get into other territory: education, welfare, etc., the real world value of expertise is even less.

> If you asked people what the goals should be for educating children, they’d probably be in broad agreement

At least in the US, this seems to be empirically false.

Forming a minority government is not gerrymandering. In a healthy pluralistic democratic country getting >50% of the vote is almost impossible, and it's definitely not a good thing when it happens.

I’m not talking about that part, I’m talking about the part where liberals got 13 percentage points more seats than conservatives while the conservatives got more votes.

It’s not possible to separate.

Most everyone has a political opinion. Only those loyal to a party are going to be in a position to make decisions.

Expecting those people to be neutral is absurd. Best you can hope for is appearance of neutrality.

Remaining options is for one side to try and be perfectly neutral usually the weaker side. The other side will definitely take advantage of this.

Or both sides will try and get as much as they can without it being too blatant.

In a tug of war game. It’s all of nothing.

Allowing politicians to own property is a big mistake. If someone wants to be the president or a similar high up office, permanent lifelong loss of property rights should be required. Upon rising to a high governmental office, all property is sold and donated to charitable causes. This helps weed out selfish people.

I don't think objective is the word right word to describe this. It's algorithmic and deterministic. But it's not objective in the sense that it's objectively correct to group people like this. You're baking in a lot of implicit assumptions about how representation should/should not work by choosing this particular grouping algorithm.

It also doesn't remove the human factors from redistricting; humans would have to choose and approve this method. It's just laundering the gerrymandering through an algorithm to give it credibility.

But if you're the party that stands to benefit from changing redistricting laws, then the system loses credibility because you picked this method.

And if you're the party that stands to lose from changing these laws, then you're unlikely to self-sabotage yourself by doing so.

I think you're wrong. An algorithm which will produce the same results every time you feed a set of numbers into it is objective.

I don't respect your attempt to make objective mean something it doesn't.

I think the two of you are using two different but legitimate definitions. GP is not trying to make it mean something it doesn't.

1. Existing independent of or external to the mind;

2. actual or real. Based on observable phenomena; empirical.

3. Uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices: synonym: fair.

For an example, I write an algorithm to use different seeds and distance functions for the Voronoi diagram to find the one that benefits Republicans the most. It would be deterministic and maybe objective in definition 1 and 2 but it would not fit definition 3. I would say it is heavily influenced by personal prejudice, just one step removed because it is the coders prejudice not the algorithms.

It's a funny thing, because the point of representation is that you want to group the people together by something so you can accurately represent them, but the only thing pretty much every nation has settled on is to group them by geography.

Why is that? How much of a connection does a rich white socialite in New York have with a poor custodian from an immigrant family? Sure, their representative may be trying to bring money into their district, but beyond that is it really possibly to represent both of their interests?

What if representatives could represent based on other factors, like sex or wealth or race? What would that do to the idea of representational government?

Or what if, in the online age, you could simply decide which representative represented you, no matter where they were from? Each representative could have no more than [US pop./num. districts] constituents, but they'd hail from anywhere, in some complex series of elections?

Thought experiments, of course.

This is a completely valid concern, and is the reason why many people believe single person electorates fail to offer equal representation. Luckily there is an alternative: proportional representation. Meaning your district would be represented by multiple people. In my opinion a well represented district should have at least 30 members (but ideally closer to 300). For example if you are of the working class, and want representation from someone to represent you that also belongs to the working class you can vote for—say—the workers party, and if your district had 100 members, that party would only need 1% of the votes and you’ll have your preferred representation.

In fact in many democracies with proportional representation so often had special women‘s parties which were voted into the national assembly when women were fighting for equal representation back in the 60s-80s

We don’t elect “parties” in the USA, we elect people. There’s no mention of political parties in the US constitution nor in most US state constitutions. This is a feature, not a bug.

You do effectively elect parties as long as the ballots mentions political party affiliation of each candidate.

Or as long as political parties are allowed to endorse candidates.

Ironically Cuba’s national assembly is the only one I can think of where political parties aren’t allowed to endorse candidates.

This is largely fiction, given how large a portion of the electorate will care more about party affiliation than anything else.

It's the kind of broken, bad feature thought up by people assuming everyone would be as politically invested as themselves.

Many democracies vote for parties, not representatives, and many have no geographical subdivisions that are represented at the national level.

But I agree with your point about groupings on other dimensions. I call that demotmimata. The USA used it wisely during the land reform the military forced on Japan 1946-1949. I’m working on an essay about that.

If we want cultural representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular culture, and then vote for members of that culture.

If we want religious representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular religion, and then vote for members of that religion.

If we want racial representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular race, and then vote for members of that race.

> Why is that? How much of a connection does a rich white socialite in New York have with a poor custodian from an immigrant family? Sure, their representative may be trying to bring money into their district, but beyond that is it really possibly to represent both of their interests?

Both of those vote Democrat. The middle class vote Republican.

What data do you base that on?

"Among voters earning less than $100,000 (78 percent of voters), 55 percent said they voted Democratic, 43 percent Republican. Among those earning $100,000 or more, 47 percent voted Democratic and 52 percent Republican."[0]

It's possible that the specific threshold chosen creates two artificial groupings which happen to have different partisan ratios, but if a similar trick can be done by splitting the population into three groupings then I'd be interested to see those numbers.

[0] https://www.minnpost.com/health/2007/11/party-rich-democrats...

You need a threshold higher than 100k. With a threshold of 100k, the middle class is split in both groups earning <100k and >100k. The comment I replied to said "rich white socialite in New York". These people vote overwhelmingly democrat, often finance democrat causes, and support far-left rhetoric on social issues (at least openly, but not necessarily in their own families).

I will concede that you are right about the average "rich white socialite in New York", but I was hoping you'd have some data to back your claim that "The middle class vote Republican."

It doesn't actually seem like an unreasonable claim, especially as there are so many contradictory definitions for "middle class", but I think we'd have a clearer picture if we could say, for example, "The median wealth voter in the US is 55% likely to vote Republican".

For context, here is what one source[0] says:

> Democrats have a huge advantage (63 percent) with voters earning less than $15,000 per year. This advantage carries forward for individuals earning up to $50,000 per year, and then turns in the Republicans’ favor — with just 36 percent of individuals earning more than $200,000 per year supporting Democrats.

> Interestingly, the median household income in the United States is $49,777 — right near the point where the Democratic advantage disappears and the Republicans take over.

[0] https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/economic-demogra...

Voting for a single letter, D or R, is very different from voting for accurate representation of your beliefs and needs.

Even taking the modern political reality, we have primary systems where one can choose, for example, a candidate that believes that Biden is an illegal president that belongs in jail and Democrats have a secret cabal of child-killers, vs one who merely thinks corporations should have lower taxes.

My point was that a single district can only be represented by one of these very different people.

> There are all kinds of geographical and legal boundaries in a country, with varying levels of affinity to them. Defining gerrymandering precisely isn't possible, it isn't even a know it when you see it thing ...

One way to define the problem is to maximize the number of competitive elections.

Interesting idea. Mathematically it seems that it would on average create a perfect distribution. But it'd also lend itself to some substantial variance.

Imagine you have a 650-350 voter lead in a state with 10 districts. The way you maximize the number of competitive election is by packing 3 districts 100-0. The party with 650 voters now has the same number of voters remaining as the party with 350, for the next 7 districts.

Mathematically this works out perfectly because the party with 650 voters has an overall seat expectation of (3 + 7 * 0.5) = 6.5, but if you run the math further here's how it looks. The party with 35% of the representation gets (assuming a 50% outcome per competitive election):

===============

0 seats = 1%

1 seats = 6%

2 seats = 16%

3 seats = 27%

4 seats = 27%

5 seats = 16%

6 seats = 6%

7 seats = 1%

===============

That would be wonderful for betting markets on the outcome of elections.

Would it produce good governance do you think? I think, perhaps, the opposite.

From the essay:

-------------------------

Hmm, okay, so what would be fair? Perhaps we want to give each party a fighting chance in each election? Isn't that fair?

2 districts each hold 100,000 blues

8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets

>Remember there’s nothing about this which is ‘fair’ except for the part where people could perhaps be persuaded to abide by the results.

With a kid on the way, I’ve been looking for a succinct explanation of life and politics. Thank you

> The problem posed by gerrymandering is a social problem, not a math problem.

Nope, it's "stupid broken laws" problem. Nothing else.

The real problem isn't even gerrymandering, it's having a district system at all. Gerrymandering is merely one of the symptoms of a district system.

Having a district system will tend to reduce the number of viable parties to two. The article doesn't even question the fact that there's only a blue and a violet party in the example. In reality, lots of people feel badly represented by even the best of those two parties. For as long as I've talked to Americans about politics, they've complained about voting for the lesser evil. Why not vote for a party you actually agree with? Because it's not viable in a two-party system.

If you've got 3 parties: Green, Yellow and Pink. 40% of the people vote Green, 30% vote yellow and 30% vote Pink. However, Green is supported all over the country, whereas Yellow and Pink are more regional, so in every district, Green gets 40% of the vote, whereas one of Yellow and Pink gets the other 60%, while the other gets none. Despite being the largest party, Green gets no votes.

Or let's say Green and Yellow each gets 40% of the vote and Pink gets 20%. All votes are distributed reasonably evenly, so about half of the districts are won by Green and half are won by Yellow. This sounds reasonable, until you realise that the Pink voters get no representation at all. It's possible to have a system where even a majority of voters wouldn't be represented, as long as the two largest parties manage to keep the smaller parties divided.

And in the US, that situation has devolved to the point that many voters don't even bother to vote for the smaller parties anymore, because they'd be throwing away their vote. And instead, they vote for candidates they disagree with because the only other viable candidate would be even worse.

Just use proportional representation. That's the only way to ensure that all political opinions get represented. It's not perfect, because nothing ever is, but at least the system is flexible, and voters can vote for completely new parties if they disagree with all existing parties, and those new parties can actually win seats.

Author here. Some people, who wrote comments in response to this essay, were focused on the intentional dishonesty of gerrymandering, and they wrote things like this:

"You can easily get rid of gerrymandering simply by proscribing an algorithmic process for districting."

There were several people who said this, here and on Reddit and on Hacker News. I believe they are defining gerrymandering as a deliberate and intentional act. By contrast, I was using the word "gerrymandering" to refer to the fact that any geographic boundary will establish a gap between the will of the voters and the final result of voting. So even if an algorithmic process is followed, and the damage done is accidental and unintentional, I am still referring to that as "gerrymandering." Indeed, the whole point of my essay is that if one group does its best to be fair when drawing lines on the map, and another group is evil and immoral and corrupt, and does its worst when drawing lines on a map, the damage done by both groups will be about the same, over the long-term.

Square state, two Congressional districts, relatively uniform population distribution but one party clustered in one section of state.

Sometimes you get different outcomes if you divide state in half north-south vs. east-west, depending on how the cluster is divided between districts.

Are you describing the state you live in?

No, I once saw this described for Nebraska. I don't remember the details or which party benefited from each possibility.

Here's an idealized example. Imagine a state with 1,000,000 people. 400,000 Democrats live in a narrow strip on the Eastern border, uniformly distributed in that strip. The 600,000 Republicans are uniformly distributed in the rest of the state.

Split the population in half by a north-south line. The Eastern district has 400,000 Democrats and 100,000 Republicans, and so has a Democratic representative. The Western district has 500,000 Republicans and so had a Republican representative.

Now try an east-west line. Each district has 200,000 Democrats and 300,000 Republicans. There are two Republican representatives.

Yet on a map, both divisions look fine.

That's one reason the anti-gerrymandering rules specify looking deeper than just population and compactness.

Yes, good example.

Very quick solutions that at least drive politics towards the middle vs extremes:

Open primaries with ranked choice voting.

Top two to general.

Done.

The current model, in a "safe" dem seat (45% R / 55% D) whoever wins D primary wins everything. This means the D primary (with 20% of voters - most activist) are deciding things. Same on the right.

With open primaries, you will get 2 D's potentially in general, but now the R vote actually matters. This drives towards the middle.

Additionally RCV in the primary (ie pick 3 in order) also allows votes for less well known folks without as much wasted voting.

Another method is RCV with a multi-seat election. So you rate 5 candidates and their are 5 winners in the larger geo area. This tends to give even groups with let's say 20% makeup of voter pool a seat at the table. Traditional winner takes all does not.

> Open primaries

I don't get the idea of open primaries - why should someone who is not a member of a party get to vote on who the party wants to represent them?

Imagine there was a Women's Equality Party party (there is in the UK.) Should a large number of men, with no interests in women's equality, be able to come along and tell the Women's Equality Party who will represent them in an election?

edit: was describing a jungle primary

If that is what GP meant, then they used the wrong term. The term usually used is "Blanket Primary" or "Jungle Primary" (Jungle Primary is a specific type of blanket primary) for what you describe. An open primary allows people to vote regardless of party affiliation; the states which have these may not even ask you for party affiliation when you register to vote (Virginia, where I first voted does not, for example).

It does make an aggregate difference because few people vote in primaries anyways, and even fewer will change their party affiliation every year, making raiding much harder.

That's a California-style jungle primary, not an open primary, and it's very dubious that it promotes centrism.

The California jungle primaries destroyed almost all of the right wing wingnuts in California. That's practically centrist by tautology.

However, the more interesting cases are actually where there have been two Democratic candidates, and, yes, much to my irritation, it really does seem to promote "centrism". See: Harris vs Sanchez for US Senate, for example.

Now, whether "centrism" is a good thing is up for debate as history shows that the centrist position is almost always the wrong position over the long run.

> The California jungle primaries destroyed almost all of the right wing wingnuts in California

No, they didn't.

> However, the more interesting cases are actually where there have been two Democratic candidates, and, yes, much to my irritation, it really does seem to promote "centrism".

Almost invariably, the candidate thar had the most institutional support (usually, a more centrist one) in the primary wins the general in that case, same as they likely would have in the prior system where the institutional support would have won them the party nomination. The difference is that they campaign against another (usually more leftist) Democrat in the general.

California used to have actual moderate republicans. Yes even in the Bay Area. Over time those guys retired. The voters moved left a little. And the Republicans followed the national party moving way to the right. The result was the Republicans inability to field viable candidates against Democrats.

The jungle primary was a response the loss of a viable opposition party.

Got to say after Feinstein won against de Leon in 2018 I'm kinda done with hearing conservatives bitch about her.

> anybody can register for any party

Presumably only if they'll have you? People often get ejected from political parties in the UK if they for some reason are being destructive (in someone's opinion.)

Not in Alaska, anyone can assert any affiliation in our primary: "If a candidate is registered as affiliated with a political party or group, it does not imply the candidate is nominated by, endorsed by, approved of, or associated with that particular party or group."

>Presumably only if they'll have you?

Not in the US. Primaries are just the method that political parties use to determine who they should run in the actual election. You do not ever need party affiliation to vote in the actual election, but some state primaries are run in a manner that require you to register with the party if you want to vote in their primary.

Primaries are typically held months in advance of the actual election.

Given that parties don't restrict membership in the US, in places that are majority one party, you effectively get an open primary. I'm registered as $MAJORITY_PARTY_IN_MY_DISTRICT because the primary election is essentially the only one that matters.

I am someplace that has open primaries and nothing like you are concerned about transpires. The reason is that if you participate in one primary you lose the ability to participate in the other. In some sense the threat of each side doing it keeps people from doing it.

Also you can't really in keep people from registering for a given party, so enforcing a non open primary isn't feasible in practice.

Alaska switched to a non-partisan top 4 RCV primary. This seems much more likely type of primary to actually benefit moderate candidates and voters. We've had moderate candidates get primaried and have to run and win write-in campaigns to stay in office. This means that reasonably popular moderate candidates will at least always get to run in the general election.

RCV has been passing in referendums here, which is changing some of the primaries, but at a very local level.

The point is that the party has no intrinsic right to a slot in the general election.

The WEP can put whoever they wish up to represent them, selected however they wish, in a process funded by their party resources.

Then the primary is a voting population wide decision to winnow the field to a reasonable final competition.

A state funded primary that is locked to a party selection process is an interesting use of public funds.

I can think of two reasons -

1 - Most voters are not a Republican or Democrat. So they're stuck choosing between what those at political extremes want at election time.

2 - Some cities/states will always vote R or D, pretty reliably. Choosing someone you dislike less has its advantages in such areas.

The current iteration of primaries, and the government paying for them, got going in the USA during the 1960s. It was the start of the populist revolt, and part of the goal was to weaken the political parties. Progressive reformers were motivated by the outcomes of struggles such as Fanny Lou Hamer.

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

Civil Rights leaders wondered why ultra-racist white men got to represent the Democratic Party in Mississippi, when someone like Fanny Lou Hamer seemed to have broad based support in her district. Why were ultra-racist Democrats able to make a backroom deal and nominate some staunch segregationist, instead of allowing someone to stand for the Democrats, chosen democratically?

The goal of the primaries was to weaken the political parties, which is why you might find them confusing. At the time, a number of scholars pointed out that weakening the parties would increase the influence of money, and also allow untested demagogues to step forward and become the leaders of the weakened parties. These concerns seem to have been borne out by events.

In a voting system that is not insane a party doesn't get punished for running more then 1 person.

So you could just have 3 people from the WEP run and then voters decide.

If the party has enough power over its member to force only 1 candidate, then they can do that. However once parties get larger enforcing that is difficult and other people will just run.

I'm with you on the ranked choice voting, but I would say that the general is the duopoly. This can enable more viable parties and the death to the duopoly.

And having more representatives (districts) will help immensely as well. The current limit is capped by statute and can be changed, this would especially help counter the over-representation of unpopulated states.

I, for one, think that extremely D and extremely D and even somewhere in the middle are all equally problematic.

As long as 3rd parties are not electable, we're stuck with some right wing, corporate-backed politician regardless of who wins.

All the talk of gerrymandering is just a partisan distraction.

It's also Democratic Party excuse-making. They act as if Republicans invented and have a greater propensity to gerrymander than Democrats, when they both aggressively and energetically gerrymander when they're in the position to. The constant discussion of it is to distract from Democrats being completely wiped out in state and local elections over the past 20 years, giving exclusive gerrymandering power to Republicans.

You are right, Democrats are catching on, and the house republican bias will be much smaller this year than it has been in the past. That being said, Gerrymandering still cause major issues in many state elections. Wisconsin for example had well more than 50% of votes go to democrats, yet republicans still hold a super majority in their legislature, making the dem governor powerless. North carolina has similar issues. I'm curious which state you think has gerrymandered for the dems so successfully that even when 55% of the votes go to dems republicans are still able to pass any law they want.

As soon as 3rd party candidates become viable, they will become owned by special interests also.

And calling all politicians "right wing" is pretty unclear on the concept.

Perhaps they are when compared to your opinions, but if you can't see daylight between your options you have been manipulated to extreme cynicism by corporate forces that benefit from your disengagement.

> Very quick solutions that at least drive politics towards the middle vs extremes

This is a very good goal if you want to replace duopoly which alienates a large number of people with monopoly which alienates a larger number of people.

What we need is almost the opposite: a system that, to the extent possible without compromising things like manageable legislature size and personal electoral accountability, provides proportional representation so that governing compromises are forced out in the open between parties in government, rather than done behind the scenes within parties so as to attempt to attain a minimal winning coalition leveraging limited substantive choices in the general election.

(Using Single Transferrable Vote, or a similar system, in small multimember districts, say 5 members per district, would do this quite well.)

Can you say why you were prefer STV over simple approval voting where the top 5 vote getters win? Substantial distortions are still possible with STV, and it is complicated. By contrast "50 candidates are running, the voters get 50 votes, the top 5 vote getters win" will have distortions similar to STV, but the math is simple and everyone can understand it. What benefit does STV have?

Score voting is far better then approval or ranked choice.

Giving every candidate 1-5 or 1-10 points like Amazon reviews is by far the best system.

But Netflix tried score voting for years, with tens of millions of users, and in the end they gave up on score voting and switched to approval voting.

That might be the right system to make voting on lots of media practical threw terrible input devices but when we are talking about a political system that decides how to use nuclear weapons, the effort is worth it.

RCV encompasses a lot of different systems, but the most common instantiation is something resembling instant runoff, and I am skeptical that it drives towards the middle.

If we believe that the appropriate compromise is no one's first choice, the first thing IRV does is throw away any "appropriate compromise".

Yep. Actually the behavior of IRV is extremely unintuitive (despite how nice it sounds). Even using very simple models that assume every voter has political opinions completely described by a 2d political compass, prefers candidates that are closer to them on the compass, and that voters are normally distributed around a central point, you get very strange behavior! Here are some diagrams that illustrate the effect: https://rangevoting.org/IEVS/Pictures.html

interestingly, IRV is not even monotonic! It's easy to construct a situation where converting people to have the same ranking as you causes you to get a candidate you like less. (The concave parts of the voronoi diagrams describe areas where this happens.) If you're curious about this, a few years back some friends and I tried to make a video describing this phenomenon: [0]. (Our editing and presentation skills are nothing to write home about but I think the video is interesting.)

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m7vtt9jXpM

Here is another, interactive explanation of this phenomenon in IRV, as well as some alternatives that do not suffer this issue: https://ncase.me/ballot/

I don't understand why Ranked is so popular. Range voting is just easier and better in every single way.

> better in every single way.

Range can't satisfy Condorcet (that is, if there is a candidate that would win every head-to-head, that candidate should win the election).

Of course, the most common approaches to RCV also fail that criterion, but it's potentially a way some ranked methods are better than range methods.

> Range can't satisfy Condorcet

That is not necessary a desirable feature. If that is desirable or not depends on your value system of what elections should achieve. What is 'fair' or 'correct' is not universal.

Granted, but it seems a reasonable enough thing to ask for that "better in every single way" deserves qualification.

Most US districts are not competitive. E.g., there's an almost zero chance that AOC, MTG, Cawthorne, etc. loses in the general election. You have a higher probability of losing a primary than a general.

If a moderate of their party runs, it'd be easy for their own members to vote for the moderate as #1 ahead then #2 the more extreme person, and not for the awful evil other party person. The opposition can also vote for the moderate of the dominant party, #1, their candidate #2, and not for the aweful extremist.

I think that's true, and pushes things more extreme, but is pushed against (incompletely) by jungle primaries and to a lesser extent by open primaries; and ... I don't see the relationship with RCV, which was all I was discussing. Did you mean to respond one level up?

I'm not disagreeing with you about the instant runoffs for competitive elections. Then the more moderate could get squeezed out.

The relationship with RCV for non-competitive races (e.g., those districts that are gerrymandered or naturally not competitive which is the majority in the USA) is the RCV can easily address the extremes versus moderates. Moderate candidates don't run because they won't get support from their party and are perceived to be stealing votes. E.g., If you're not voting for $EXTREMIST you're voting for the $THEM. RCV lets you vote for the moderate AND your party's extremist in order to thwart the other side.

"If we believe that the appropriate compromise is no one's first choice"

The winner in RCV will always be someone's first choice.

No, some methods of counting rank choice ballots will sometimes pick a candidate who was no one's first choice. In particular, this must be so for any Condorcet method, because the Condorcet winner might be no one's first choice (imagine a setting where 1/3 of voters want candidate A then D, 1/3 want B then D, and 1/3 want C then D; 2/3 of voters would vote for D whether run head-to-head against A, B, or C, and yet D got no first place votes).

In instant runoff it is certainly true that the winner is always someone's first choice, and that was my point - sometimes the winner the method selects should not be the winner.

Why not simply run something other than FPTP in the general and eliminate primaries altogether?

>Open primaries with ranked choice voting.

Primaries aren't part of the official voting process though. They're entirely defined by parties and in fact parties can completely do away with them if they want. Primaries aren't actual elections and election laws don't really apply so there is no mechanism to force them to be open.

The solution it would seem, is to do away with political parties completely. Just like George Washington suggested from day one.

How do you define parties in such a way that you can effectively outlaw them? And would that not make fundraising even more important to individual candidates, when there’s no party mechanism to provide support?

>How do you define parties in such a way that you can effectively outlaw them?

To start, you remove party designations from the ballot and any other official voting material. Then you block local governments from being able to assist political parties with primaries/caucuses/conventions - no governmental support for any of the party infrastructure.

People want to have informal parties (ie Tea Party, The Squad, Freedom Coalition, Congressional Black Caucus etc), you can't stop that without infringing on free speech. But government isn't required to support all of the party infrastructure outside of the general election ballot access rules. And with no political party designation on ballot, anybody who meets requirements could gain access, which means no need to fall in line with a party platform. People can vote their conscience.

I think Top-2 is a dead-end. It bakes in the assumption of parties as the ultimate power brokers, and further entrenches FPTP.

Even simpler option: implement STV. Then primaries are optional as you can essentially bake the primary candidates into the main election if you like.

I think it’s quite repugnant to offer Republicans the choice of two Democrats to vote for. (I’m not a Republican). Top-2 admits that FPTP with party primaries is broken, but declines to actually fix the problem beyond a band-aid.

Easiest thing is to ban party affiliation in ads and on ballots

Doesn’t work very well with judges, which are elected in many states.

I like this commenters suggestion of ranked voting. Would lead to more centrist candidates.

For example, i believe that’s what we saw play out in France, essentially. Center-left Macron got most votes. Far-right Le Pen got second most votes. And far-left candidate got third most votes. Once it was down to the top 2, Macron handily won.

> “Far-right Le Pen”

> “Center-left Macron”

That media / framing is exactly why the election method doesn’t work as well as banning affiliation. Le Pen is not really “far right” by most standards, but media labels her in that position and can get away with it due to name and party recognition.

You can still do both, change the election method and ban affiliation. Probably would be the best of both worlds.

This would be an improvement, but i think it illustrates the paucity of thinking in American politics.

You shouldn't be using single-member districts at all. It's basically impossible to represent people fairly with them. You should either have proportional election of entire legislatures (or state delegations to federal ones), or at least proportional election of a smaller number of multi-member districts.

Enshrining the two party system in law is something that even the current power system in the US hasn't managed. By doing "top two to general" you'd be converting a de-facto duopoly into an actual duopoly.

At that point we might as well just skip the entire election process to save money and let the parties work out a power sharing agreement where it alternates every so many years.

I don't think so – France uses this exact model, and their party system has just in the last 15 years or so transitioned out both of the former top two parties (PS and LR).

If anything, I would expect this model to reduce duopoly. An unpopular republican might be overtaken by a candidate from the libertarians in the first round, giving them a shot at victory which they could hardly get if the ghost of "wasted votes" on third-parties was haunting them.

> Enshrining the two party system in law is something that even the current power system in the US hasn't managed. By doing "top two to general" you'd be converting a de-facto duopoly into an actual duopoly.

Just the opposite, the top two candidates, regardless of what party they're from will appear on the ballot, this would allow people to vote for a 3rd party candidate in the primary without worrying about "wasting" their vote. If the 3rd party candidate is one of the top two they'll appear in the general, if not that voter can still pick the lesser of two evils in the general.

The US government at all levels is controlled by two parties. While neither side is going to just hand over control to the other, they certainly aren't going to vote in a system that would allow a 3rd party to emerge.

There is no way such a system would ever be allowed to produce a ballot without a Republican and Democrat on it. If you're not on the ballot, you don't get elected. Full stop. There would be all sorts of bizarre measures and "tests" added to such a system before it was ever in place to make sure that only the existing parties would ever be on the ballot.

I guess we could just throw our hands up and say nothing will ever change, but I think things could change, and a great first step would be a grassroots push to adopt voting systems which make it easier for 3rd parties to break in.

If you choose to do that, it is your own decision. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that "top two to general" will become anything other than "Republican or Democrat" in America. I was already coerced into reading textbooks by the state that told me the US has a "two party system" and that when you vote you can choose between Republican or Democrat. This is obviously propaganda, but I'm not going to support a move to a system that makes propaganda a reality. It's incredibly dystopian.

Ranked choice voting in general is a real bad idea. Its better then first past the post but that's it.

If you are gone change the voting system, why not just go for the much better score voting, or Star vote.

RCV leads to incredibly very strange and non-intuitive outcomes in some situations. Score voting beats it in pretty much every way while also being far, far simpler for people to actually use.

In general you need to eliminate all per-elections and make districts larger as well.

Then you are starting to approach something actually good.

> You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.)

Madison said the same thing, but we didn't have contemporary communication tools. My company's Slack has over 5,000 people and works just fine. Why is it unrealistic to repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 and increase membership in the House by an order of magnitude?

Increasing membership of the House has the effect of reducing the advantage less-populous states have (both in the house and in the electoral college). That might make it politically infeasible to pass.

> politically infeasible to pass.

Probably true. But I would hope that argument could be deflated easily, since it was the senate that was supposed to give smaller states a disproportionate amount of influence.

Which is why people who don't want to pass it for this reason will state some other reason, like "5000 representatives is obviously silly and way too many"

Because it might be possible to stand out in a crowd of 500 but not 5,000. And it certainly is not possible to do deals other than "this is good for everyone".

It would almost certainly end political parties. Lead to good ideas being debated openly by people who have no chance of hanging together long enough to force a direction.

My god man what are you thinking !

(/s)

> (/s)

IMO we should just drop this notation altogether and just let angry people get angry, and ignore 'em. Sarcasm is better when it doesn't have to be labeled.

> Sarcasm is better when it doesn't have to be labeled.

Which is why nobody ever uses a different tone of voice when speaking sarcastically.

This does not match my experience. One of the reasons /s exists is because it’s much harder to read the intent of a written paragraph than the intent of someone speaking directly to us.

The hallmarks of sarcasm are subtle, and come in a few forms - sometimes it’s intentional emphasis on a particular word, sometimes it’s a quizzical look or raised eyebrow, etc.

But at least in my experience, I can usually tell when someone is being sarcastic in person, but it gets harder and harder to tell on the Internet.

I read GP's reply as a sarcastic one, and that they intentionally omitted the /s just to prove how hard sarcasm actually is to detect through text.

Hah, I think you are right. I bit hard, and maybe helped them prove their point.

Exactly. Also it's different when you are talking to one person vs 1000s of people. Even when it is obvious, 0.1% of readers will read it just a little to quickly and get confused. Given that "/s" makes it more obvious, the intentional omission of it is intentionally requiring more effort of the readers.

There are times and places when one might want to make the readers work harder, but HN comments doesn't seem to qualify.

Why stop at 5000 make it 50 000 to make it even harder. It would mess with everything from party discipline to lobbying.

> Lead to good ideas being debated openly by people

Do you have examples of any ideas at all being debated openly by 5000 people?

In UK we have a ratio of about 1 MP to 100k people (600 MPs 60M citizens). In US it's 1:1M (300:300M) (all calculations to order of magnitude and from memory)

If you are literally one in a million, certain perks come with the trrritory.

I think we might get better results if we see our elective representatives as "cattle not pets"

> Madison said the same thing

Interesting, I didn't know that. I looked it up, and I really liked this Madison quote:

> In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

(from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._55)

How many people in your company with 5000 slack users are the real decision makers ? I highly doubt it’s more than a few. If you had 5000 people in the legislature they would most likely still vote party line based on the decision of a few.

Exactly. Why do people need representatives in the age when everyone has a voice? Education is still crucial, and not everyone can have an opinion on all matters, but the current first-past-the-post and representative system is blatantly corrupt. It's unlikely those in power would give it up easily, but we need a new system that's truly of the people, by the people, for the people.

Flux[1] was a step in the right direction, but unfortunately seems to be recently disbanded. The idea of everyone voting for issues they care about, where leaders are subject matter experts, is a sound one. It's ludicrous to think that a single person can politically represent thousands or millions of people on all matters. Modern politics is a reality show where charismatic and unscrupulous power-hungry egomaniacs compete for the top celebrity spot.

[1]: https://voteflux.org/

>Why do people need representatives in the age when everyone has a voice?

Because people are capricious, easily manipulated by emotion and generally refuse to acknowledge their ignorance on matters in which they insist on having opinions about.

Using the Twitter/Reddit voting model to run the world is absurd.

> Because people are capricious, easily manipulated by emotion and generally refuse to acknowledge their ignorance on matters in which they insist on having opinions about.

So are a huge number of politicians.

It's also a slippery slope- where is the line drawn? We allow everyone to elect the government, but you don't trust them to vote on a referendum?

> Because people are capricious ...

Right. So you'd rather have them vote for a single candidate who sells them hopes and dreams that they'll make the right decisions to solve all their problems 4 years at a time, instead of voting for solutions to specific issues they're interested in where subject matter experts can actually improve things?

Corruption and greed are inescapable. At least by not giving a single person and party absolute power over everything, the damage can be contained to specific areas of government.

> Using the Twitter/Reddit voting model to run the world is absurd.

What's absurd is the current absolutist model that is easily corrupted via social media (Cambridge Analytica, etc.).

"where subject matter experts can actually improve things"

How to correctly mobilized the talents of subject matter experts is a complex issue, and no one is certain of the correct answer:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-have-politics-in-the-us...

National referendums on major political issues where the vote goes direct to the public would be a welcome addition, too.

Direct democracy is an awful idea. Picture Twitter deciding policy. No thanks.

> the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.

Perhaps one solution would be for those 5,000 people to be entrusted with the job of picking (for each bill being considered) 100 "second-level representatives" to go forward and do the hard work of debating and evaluating proposals and reaching consensus.

These SLRs could be a mixture of subject matter experts and people good at political logrolling, so that the legislation which passed would reflect the priorities of the 5,000 representatives (and their voters) while still allowing a meaningful discussion to take place and shape the result.

Are the 5,000 people on Slack in leadership positions? I'd bet that when a decision needs to be made, it is made by smaller groups.

"Gerrymandering is universal in any political system that has geographic units that demand representation." A unstated assumption here is a winner-takes-all election system, which is common in the US and UK, but not other countries, where parliament is proportional, and coalitions are common. It works.

A more interesting question would be how to build incentives in a winner-takes-all election system towards reducing gerrymandering, and to discuss what it would take to change away from a winner-takes-all geographical election system.

"A unstated assumption here is a winner-takes-all election system"

In terms of the math, increasing the number of representatives from each district is the same as making the districts smaller. As the essay said:

"As the districts get smaller, then the size of the shift needed (to punish the previous majority party) describes the asymptote of the tangent, converging towards the reality of what the public actually wants."

Increasing the number of representatives from each district is the same thing, as the number increases, the shift needed (to punish the previous majority party) describes the asymptote of the tangent, converging towards the reality of what the public actually wants.

But there remains some distortion, however small. You eventually get into infinitesimals that have no practical impact, but it is still there. If you have districts that only have 1,000 people each, and each district elects 1,000 representatives (everyone in the district) then the distortion disappears, but if you have districts with 1,000 people, and they only elect 999 representatives, the distortion reappears, however small that might be.

Also, from the essay:

---------------------

Some nations have fine-grained representation of land but course-grained representation of ideas

Some nations have fine-grained representation of ideas but course-grained representation of land

You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.)

  You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.)

I think as one of the comments on the article mentions, that this concept is far too easily dismissed. A large part of creating a functioning democracy is actually gridlock when a strong majority can't agree. There are a _LOT_ of advantages of expanding the US house of representatives back out to not only 5k members but maybe 15-20 thousand to match the 30k-50k people per representative that the country was founded with. Starting with the fact that it would cost large organizations a _LOT_ more money to lobby them, vs the amount of lobbying that an individual could perform, and gerrymandering suddenly is a lot more difficult, a representative could actually meet all their constituents, etc.

Many of the difficulties are simply wiped out by the fact that we have computers to count votes, and the ability to record and stream multiple debates at the same time. And of course nothing says that any given representative needs to vote on smaller issues that don't affect their district/etc, and it becomes harder to have country wide parties because local ideals are allowed to express themselves.

Basically everything suddenly has the option to become finer grained, and the difficulties that presents are mostly actual advantages.

So, one limit that I face is that most people won't read an essay on the Web if it is longer than 3,000 or maybe 4,000 words. So it is impossible for me to repeat every idea in every essay. But I did recently (this week) write suggesting a larger intermediate assembly, holding perhaps 5% of the population (the exact number doesn't matter). Please see here:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-democracy-empowe...

Of course, to iron out a deal, typically some leadership needs to meet, so I make the assumption that there will be some smaller, higher level assembly that allows the leadership to move quickly, especially when facing an emergency. Parliamentary systems have the distinction between the assembly and the Cabinet. But I think having a mass assembly, as an intermediate structure between the general public and the higher levels, is a great idea.

Agreed.

Despite the author namedropping some other places, the whole piece is struggling to gain the validity it seeks due to pretending the US is the only country on earth and no one else could have figured out some solutions.

Also, the wrong use of "gerrymandering" makes me wonder how much the author actually knows about the topic.

While Germany is mentioned in the article, they don't mention the best features of the German system: two choices -- one for the candidate who will represent your district, one for the party you prefer. So you get someone who truly represents the district, and you also guarantee that the party that wins the most votes gets the most seats.

MMPR. There's a balancing step to enforce proportional representation.

Overhang seats. The size of the German parliament is variable to make everything come out right. If some party wins more first-past-the-post seats than their share of the second (party) vote entitles them to, extra seats are created to give the other parties more until things balance.

Why not solve the problem of gerrymandering by getting rid of the "winner takes all" property?

E.g. instead of having 100 districts selecting 1 representative using the winner-takes-all principle, which are very sensitive with respect to gerrymandering, make 10 districts where each one sends 10 representatives, where the distribution of representatives approximates the distribution of the submitted votes.

This should decrease the problem a lot.

That would be my preference. Or split between a number of representatives selected by winning a district and a number of representatives selected by the popular vote. Germany has a system like this.

From the essay:

Some nations have fine-grained representation of land but course-grained representation of ideas

Some nations have fine-grained representation of ideas but course-grained representation of land

Why do we need both? It's not like my house rep gives a shit about what I think even though I'm in his party. Having "your" rep seems incredibly overvalued.

Coming from a non-Anglosphere country with a long tradition of proportional voting, this idea of "my" representative has simply never made any sense to me. How can a member of a legislative body represent voters that didn't actually vote for him? What does it effectively mean to have "your" representative that you share with half a million other people and who doesn't share your values?

NZ has both geographic seats and list-based proportional seats?

Yes. NZer here. The list-based implementation is hideously undemocratic.

The party chooses the list candidates. The problem is that the two major parties get to choose some of our members of parliament, because they are at the top of the party list. We get members of parliament that have zero franchise and that you effectively cannot vote out.

Personally I think it's a really fucked system. Although even with all its suckiness, it is way way better than a two-party system like in the USA. We get some kooky third parties, but somehow the third parties seem to keep everything honest.

The crux of this is that the majority/plurality system is a winner-takes-all outcome. I would like to propose a completely fair (and totally unacceptable) Voting system:

Blues and Violets each get a single vote. On election day, everyone puts their vote into a big hat, and one of the ballots is pulled out. Whoever is on that ballot, gets a unilateral victory. This system has numerous good properties:

1. Power never falls into a state where the majority party can stay in control. Gerrymandering is a non-issue.

2. Every vote counts. Instead of a single, tie breaking vote changing the outcome of the election, each additional vote increases the odds. If there are 40% violets and 60% blues, the likelihood of a violet leader is still 40%.

3. Extreme minority votes still matter. If 99% of the population is blue, and 1% of the population is violet, violet supporters still feel their voice can be heard.

4. (edit) Political spending is massively reduced, since there is a diminishing return to spending ever more money trying to tip the 49% into being 51%.

Assuming that the 1% extreme minority wants to turn it into a dictatorship, you'd be guaranteeing that sooner or later the democracy would fail.

Sure, but we could have separate rules for changing how the voting works, compared to the day to day operation of the groups. Also, on the good end, maybe the 1% have some amazingly good ideas that the other side would never implement otherwise.

> Assuming that the 1% extreme minority wants to turn it into a dictatorship, you'd be guaranteeing that sooner or later the democracy would fail.

Luckily a single election isn't enough to make a dictatorship, in the US.

There is never a guarantee that a government will stand forever.

If used to elect something like a president, yeah, that could be problematic. But if used to elect a legislative body then its not really a problem. Sure 1% of the body would be pro-dictatorship, and occasionally a bit more due to the randomness, but its not a serious risk that a majority of the body would turn out to be pro-dictatorship.

This is called random dictator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_mechanism#Random_...

A variant on this is to pull 3 ballots out and take the majority (if none, keep pulling until there is a plurality then stop).

This would make the extreme outlier results less likely, but still maintain most of the properties you said. For example, if there are 40% violets and 60% blues, then chance of a violet winner becomes only 35.2%. If there are 10% violets, their chance of winning is only 2.8%.

Depending on how risky you want to be, you can replace 3 with 5, 11, 31, or 101. For example with 11 ballots, 40% violet in the population, their chance of winning is 24.6%; with 10% violets, their winning chance is only 0.03%.

Reminds me of of the cache eviction strategy 2-random (pick two entries at random and evict whichever is oldest).

Amend this so that the time in power is proportional to their vote.

Proportional representation has many of the good qualities listed here but is probably more politically feasible.

> Extreme minority votes still matter. If 99% of the population is blue, and 1% of the population is violet, violet supporters still feel their voice can be heard.

Why do they feel this?

Or just use approval voting: you're allowed to checkmark as many candidates as you want (instead of just one), and whoever gets the most points wins.

1. No spoiler effect. If you really want Green to win, but you think Blue is the lesser of two evils, voting Green and Blue at the same time is strictly better than voting only for Blue.

2. It's about as easy to understand as FPTP. No funny business where politicians mislead people about how the voting system actually works. Approval voting has a few downsides, but they are obvious downsides, so everyone is on equal footing.

3. You can still use those nice scantrons and hole punches.

4. No weird questions about "should I give the candidate I want most a 1, or should I give the candidate I want most the 10?"

5. It's a majority rules system and not a dictatorship.

I don't really get the love that approval voting gets.

Approval voting requires the voter to decide whether or not to approve the lesser of two evils. It seems to me that this isn't a simple question it depends on the odds of different outcomes, level of preference between two evils, etc. To me that seems like it would make voting harder for most people, and politicians would absolutely be trying to mislead people about the appropriate strategies for who to approve and not approve.

Is it worse in that respect than regular "pick-one, winner-take-all" voting? Ironically, it might be the lesser evil.

Honestly, I'm not sure.

Pick-one, winner-take-all is pretty bad. Approval voting might be slightly better in some ways, but I'm not sure its better enough to make up for being just a little bit more strategically complicated.

I think on balance Approval Voting would be an improvement, by removing the spoiler effect and allowing new parties to emerge (and old parties to split), but you're right that burdening voters with difficult strategic questions is not a decision that should be taken lightly.

Of course, FPTP has its own strategic problems, leading to people having choose whether to vote against their actual preference, but this is at least a familiar problem for people that have experienced this type of election before. I suppose that voters who are confused by Approval Voting could continue to treat their ballot as if it were a FPTP ballot, but this does feel like it is giving more voting power to people who are more intelligent (which some people here might undemocratically see as a positive) or more devious (which people might not see themselves as).

For me, though, the biggest issue with Approval Voting is that it makes the counting process harder, which risks entrenching the need for untrustworthy electronic voting machines. Approval Voting does at least satisfy the Summability criterion, but, if counting by hand, the ballots ideally need to be divided into 2^N separate piles (for N candidates), or there needs to be N separate running tallies of votes, as opposed to under FPTP where there only needs to be N piles, and the piles could even be weighed to count them.

I don't believe that it is an unreasonable requirement that an electoral reform proposal allows easy hand counting of ballots, as MMP can be just as easy to count as FPTP. (If a separate ballot paper is used to express party preference in addition to candidate preference, that effectively means 2N piles, but the Zweitmandat system allows the party preference to be inferred without needing the second ballot paper).

The important feature that approval voting has, and plurality lacks, is that approving your favorite candidate is never against your own interests. What you do with your second favorite is a matter of strategic voting, but that’s what you were doing in FPTP anyway.

I thought most people vote for who they like, or at least don't know they dislike, or just for those in their party. If that assumption is true, then approval voting wouldn't be nearly as challenging as you're making it the case to be.

Sure, approval voting is easy if you don't care about making effective use of your vote.

If you want to make effective use of your vote, you've got to make calls about supporting you people you dislike, but don't dislike as much as the other guy.

I think an additional neat property is that the representation of a particular district would be proportional in time. I.e. 40% red, 60% blue district would be represented by a red member 40% of the time and a blue member 60% of the time.

> Power never falls into a state where the majority party can stay in control.

That usually only happens when power gained by elections is used to change the system, often outside of the formal rules of change. Obviously, no election system can safeguard against this, since it is an effect outside of the electoral system.

> Every vote counts.

Only one vote counts. This is literally the textbook example of a system than fails the non-dictatorship criterion.

> Extreme minority votes still matter

Well, again, since only one vote matters, it's only an extreme minority of votes that matters, but it's extremely unlikely to be one from an extreme minority position.

> Only one vote counts. This is literally the textbook example of a system than fails the non-dictatorship criterion.

This depends on how you state the non-dictatorship criterion. Wikipedia's discussion refers to a "single pre-determined person's preferences." But since the dictator is selected randomly, they aren't pre-determined.

Further, every vote counts in the sense that every additional vote for a candidate increases the odds of them winning the election. The candidate has an incentive to get additional votes no matter how many votes they currently have. You don't have the situation where its futile to vote because the outcome isn't going to be close.

In fact, in that scheme, votes for a minority party are more significant than they are in our current system.

Simple solution to get rid of gerrymandering: Create a pool of extra mandates, not assigned to a specific district. Distribute them to the parties however needed to make the overall vote proportional.

This way districts still have a representative, but there is no insentive for gerrymandering.

This is a commonly known as Overhang seats in MMP: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhang_seat

I'm not an expert but the mixed system is used in Hungary, and the result is that Fidesz (Orban's party), with ~50% votes, gets ~68% seats (just above 2/3 they need to have infinite power), third time in a row

The Hungarian system is basically two separate elections at once where the results are just added together. There are single-member districts where the candidate that wins the plurality of votes in the district is elected (almost always a Fidesz candidate). Then there are party list elections in larger multi-member districts where the party affiliation of the MPs elected is roughly proportional to the votes to each party in the district. There is no effort in this system to make the final results proportional.

Germany, New Zealand and devolved legislatures of Scotland and Wales use a different sort of system where the party lists are used to achieve proportionality. In a system like that, Fidesz wouldn't get a lot of seats from the party listes because they are way overrepresented already in the single-member districts.

I'm not really an expert on the issue, but there's this suggestion that I kinda like: let people living in a district choose to vote in the adjacent districts if they want to do so. This "blurs" the arbitrary lines a bit.

Also, this is probably an unpopular opinion, but I actually kinda like gerrymandering. In the sense that I like the fact that it exposes the absurdity of counting votes and claiming that it somehow represents the voice of the people.

The outcome is clearly very dependent on what voting method is used, how the districts maps are drawn, who is eligible to vote, etc. It's all just vanity of vanities.

>it exposes the absurdity of counting votes and claiming that it somehow represents the voice of the people.

I actually 100% disagree with this sentence. I do not, honestly, believe it exposes that. My experience with people who vote is that they harangue about the "other side" gerrymandering, but when their preferred candidate wins their district, it's because voting works.

I genuinely believe people are either (a) willfully ignorant, or (b) pants-on-head idiotic when it comes to this issue.

There is no "both sides" to be had here.

Republican candidates winning Staten Island sometimes is not gerrymandering.

The Republican National Committee hiring gerrymandering consultant Thomas Hofeller in 2009 to draw them maps of Wisconsin and North Carolina that will give them absolute supermajorities even if they lose the popular vote by a wide margin, and then using those supermajorities to strip incoming Democratic governors of all of their powers thus instituting permanent one-party rule forever, that's gerrymandering.

What if I told you FiveThirtyEight’s ongoing investigation into gerrymandering is finding that the Democratic Party is gerrymandering much more than the Republican Party? 538 is a left-leaning site too.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-2022-maps...

> is finding that the Democratic Party is gerrymandering much more than the Republican Party

Are those findings somewhere else? That particular page does not clearly support that claim.

You should go look. They're making a claim and showing their work, and when you make a opposite claim, if you've looked, you'll have work to show.

I did go look. If the claim made is supported by that page, I sure didn't see it. You may also go look. We're all using the same link here, and it's already been supplied.

[EDIT] Incidentally, I'm not making "the opposite claim". I'm saying I can't find support for their claim (or the opposite, in fact!) on the link they, not I, supplied. That is not the same thing as making the opposite claim.

In 2020, 222 of 435 seats were D, so 51%. The popular vote was 51.5% D, so the D's should have an extra 2 seats.

In contrast, 538's analysis shows that the R's have an advantage of 52% of the seats 538 identifies as "leaning" (with 68 seats left to have lines set).

538 shows the D's doing slightly better so far in the current redistricting balance, but they are still behind the R's on balance.

You need to read 538's work if you think corrral is wrong.

"Redistricting has created more lean-blue districts than there once were, reducing the red bias in the house" and "dems gerrymander more than the reps" are different claims.

538 is claiming that dems are fighting back in the gerrymandering war this election more than they have in the past. Not that they gerrymander more than republicans, just that they are gerrymandering more than they did in the past. I don't see how anyone could expect any other outcome once gerrymandering begins and is seen as acceptable.

That’s exactly what I wish we’d codify: gerrymander as much as you possibly can and don’t be bashful about it.

Having this ridiculous system where each side gerrymanders just as much as the other but then stops when they get caught accomplishes nothing. If they’d just concede the morality of the matter and let the government dictate the morality (like it should), then we’d stop with this silly finger-pointing.

> let the government dictate the morality (like it should)

Here's a radical alternative, though: Let the people decide what is moral, and force the government to follow those moral principles.

I'm hopeful that if you asked people "Do you want uncompetitive elections where the government chooses its electors rather than the electors choosing the government?" a super-majority would say "No!".

Unfortunately that's not really the question that gets asked at election time. Instead we end up with a terrible Prisoner's Dilemma where the question is more like "Do you want a fair system that lets the other side win more often?", but such a question is itself a result of the systems that the major parties have put in place, and in any case fails the Rawls "veil of ignorance" requirement for a moral question.

What you're describing as "democratic gerrymanders" are what normal people would call "majority rule". More blue districts are being created because Republican-favoring minority-rule gerrymanders have been done away with, and the playing field is being made level.

It's local lingo.

From Wikipedia:

> A distinct set of definitions of the term "republic" evolved in the United States, where the term is often equated with "representative democracy."

The term "representative democracy" is typical in poli-sci circles and basically everywhere that's not the US, but I don't think that's actually the distinction the poster was looking for—some kind of constitution or other super-law that's relatively hard to change, plus strong rule of law (which is more about practices and norms than about what's written on some paper), seem much more important for preserving minority interests.

if you enable to choose districts freely this can be mass gamed.

Why do they need to only have single-member districts? How about having fewer districts with more members per district? It seems like Fix Gerrymandering is a solution aimed at the wrong problem when the entire problem could just be eliminated.

That's what the Senate is. This has neutralizing effect on tyranny of a single party by forcing that party to win in separate kinds of representation strategies.

It doesn't talk about a senate at all:

> It is divided up into 10 districts, each of which sends one representative to the national legislature, which consists of 10 people.

They take this as a given and try to come up with convoluted ways to 'fix' the problem, when just fixing this axiom would solve it much easier.

Yes they don't talk about the Senate because it's not gerrymandered because it's a statewide position not subject to districting.

We already have the bundled-population representation in a senator, the House uses a different strategy explicitly because it's different for the benefits of competing means of representation to even out power.

> the Senate because it's not gerrymandered

You make it sound like there aren't partisan considerations that go into deciding which states are added to the union.

In the US, the Senate directly causes the tyranny of the minority that we're currently experiencing.

The House also has representation issues: since the total number of representatives in the House hasn't increased over time as population has increased, there's a "floor" on the number of per-state representatives that causes smaller states to have outsized representation.

The article doesn't really deal with any of this, though: it assumes each "district" has the same number of people in it, which isn't the case for House or Senate seats when you consider the entire country. The article is more about considering the representation within a single US state, based on its division into districts.

I have a hard time with this because it's not like the tyranny of 20% of the population, elections are all pretty damn close to 50:50 overall much of the time. People have a hard time accepting that about half the population voted for things they really hate and choose instead to attack the small percentage of difference as the unfairness responsible for all their woes instead of the other high-40s percentage of people who want want happens when the majority loses.

Currently, arguably, democrats in power in the senate had fewer popular votes than republicans. (48 dem + 2 independent popular vote was about 1.5 million less than the 50 republican senators, with VP deciding ties... well it's just not so clean cut a minority-in-power situation)

(I blame most of the current situation on democrats being bad at politics and not having the guts to do things they should have.)

There's no way to be completely fair, the current setup is there in order to prevent several kinds of runaway power processes and really it has worked quite well for a very long time (unless you expect people to just be angels then go pick a dictator you think will be good).

The real test for your hypothesis will be what happens the next time the Republicans get the presidency, the house, and 50% of the senate.

If the senate still acts as a moderating force (and doesn't push through extreme new legislative and judicial changes that tilt the system to further their advantage) then the wisdom of the current system will be empirically validated.

The senate is wildly antidemocratic giving power to a party just based on the amount of land/states they control. It's also effectively single winner from the party level because there are only 6 split senate delegations at this point.

What are the qualifications to label something as "antidemocratic"?

There are many separate interests in a large country and thinking the only morally correct government is strictly majority rule is definitely a matter of debate.

The founders made it the way it is to prevent tyranny of the majority which was a major topic in political philosophy. You likewise wouldn't want to live in a place absolutely controlled by the 50% +1.

Geographic areas with lower population densities getting higher representation makes sense, interests aren't equally distributed nor are they distributed just to areas of high density. If you don't do this you risk power concentrations where people have to leave lower density places for higher density places if they don't go along with the majority opinion because they don't get representation and get disadvantaged by the majority.

People tend to like this when it benefits them and hate it when it doesn't, but there is good sense in it, especially when nationally the party split is nearly always very close to even.

It replaces population proportional representation with representation based on political subdivisions completely separated from demo- part of democracy. It's even worse with the current filibuster where representatives of ~3% of the population (20 senators from the lowest 10 population states + 1) can block everything legislative going through the Senate.

Doing away with the Senate would be change to the fundamental agreement that was made when each state joined. The only moral way to do it would be to dissolve the existing United States and then let each of the 50 individual states decide if they want to remain as their own independent country, join the newly formed United Residents of America, or join some other country, perhaps Mexico, perhaps Canada, perhaps one of three or five new countries formed out of collections of the 50 states that used to be part of the United States. Simply removing the power of the individual states that they were given in exchange for joining the Union is immoral.

> The only moral way to do it

What makes you say that morality demands accepting the premise that states are the fundamental unit, here? That is, even acknowledging that the people who signed the constitution imagined themselves to be acting on behalf of the [landowning male] residents of their states, why are we morally bound to adhere to their model of political authority?

Also, the Constitution itself provides a different avenue without dissolving the union, so it can't simply be a matter of invoking the original agreement—which would beg the question I'm posing, anyway.

(I'm not expressing any agreement or disagreement with your claim, just its support.)

>why are we morally bound to adhere to their model of political authority?

We're not, the Constitution can be changed, the government can be replaced, you can go somewhere where government works differently.

The philosophical ideas behind some of the "unfairness" of the Constitution were good ideas and have led to a lot of higher-level fairness which people tend not to appreciate.

We're also just the longest surviving government in the world besides some very small exceptions, so apparently quite a few things worked.

What's immoral is that I'm forced to be governed under an unfair agreement that I had no say in accepting. Giving some people more votes because they live in a different state is absolutely immoral, agreements change.

You vote, you didn't leave for somewhere else. How can you otherwise consent to being governed without you individually being in charge? There are people who would think how you want things to be governed to be unfair, how do you reconcile that?

Leaving your country isn't exactly a cheap and simple process. Doubly so for the US where you're still liable for US taxes unless you fully renounce.

I think it's a fundamentally flawed system and it's telling that the numerous times the US has had a chance to setup a new government in the aftermath of overthrowing the last one we've always as far as I know go with the good old parliamentary system of some flavor.

Yes, because the US is a republic. Being non-democratic is an explicit goal of the Senate.

Yeah, I never understood really this district thing... Do they that often really represent only the certain area? Or would it be more sane to have larger districts? Maybe in some cases up to whole state where the winners were selected in proportional way.

Then again this would allow third parties to actually gain foothold and the corrupt duopoly can't allow that.

Also this whole electoral college thing. Why is there this idiotic winner takes all method? Why not also maybe have lists. So electors would be chosen in order of list and voters could pick a list endorsing certain candidate pair?

Larger districts give you less accurate representation, not more, as you lose the opportunity to granularly represent the populace. It also gives you more opportunity for individual representatives' personalities and opinions (rather than the policy interests of the electorate), and make it necessary for large interests to bribe fewer people. Lastly, larger districts (and party-defined proportional representation based on them) reduce individual regions' capacity to elect representatives who are responsive to local concerns; as much as the political commentariat would like peoples' policy preferences to be divided perfectly along party lines, that isn't how it works in real life and it risks making collaboration across party lines on any given issue more difficult (by making representatives more beholden to the party than they already are).

To some extent, I feel like Germany's system (where the legislature is elected based on local districts, but then members are added from party lists to achieve proportional balance) could be the solution that incentivizes the least political gerrymandering, but I don't have a finger on the pulse of Germany's political problems to see the drawbacks.

> Why is there this idiotic winner takes all method?

So that slave states could count their slaves as 60% members of their populations for the purposes of gaining electoral votes without having to let their slaves vote.

> Larger districts give you less accurate representation, not more, as you lose the opportunity to granularly represent the populace.

Not if the smaller districts are gerrymandered and/or you have a winner takes all system.

Yes. After observing San Francisco’s acrimonious supervisor redistricting last month (in which politicians and special interests lobbied the nonpartisan commission to move neighborhoods to one district or other to maintain or gain political power), this article has convinced me that the problem is single-winner district elections in the first place. Every map is flawed when only one person represents the district per election. And the solution is proportional representation where multiple people win in each election (although the exact method of proportional representation can be debated).

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfchronicle.com%2F...

Space partially, the US House of Reps is already pretty packed so to add enough to get to >2 members per district you'd have to add a lot. You also get into potential issues diluting power that much, with so many members things like committee memberships become the only people with real power on an individual level.

> Space partially, the US House of Reps is already pretty packed so to add enough to get to >2 members per district you'd have to add a lot.

Then make the districts bigger to compensate for this effect.

Increasing it up to the state level maybe any smaller and you'll still have room for gerrymandering. Could even have districts still for people to have a person to directly go to but who represents which district is down to the statewide percentages. I'd love to see something like that combined with a ranked choice system. First past the post really heavily incentivizes a 2 party system.

>You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical.

Australian five-member STV districts beg to differ. As does MMP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repre...

And DMP:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-member_proportional_rep...

And PR-OAC:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2778867

One of the biggest problems we run into is not that there are no options, but there are so many possibilities that people who study the problem in detail end up arguing with each other rather than forming a coalition for a single reform! I also designed a system based on a simplified CPO-STV, but I keep putting off writing it up.

> Some countries, such as Israel, have purely party based parliamentary systems with no geographic representation ... Some nations have fine-grained representation of ideas but course-grained representation of land

Before putting this on a pedestal, it's worth noting that Israel:

  1. Has smaller some power blocs which have non-proportional power at the parliament due to being the "swing vote".
  2. Had other smaller political parties completely eliminated (voter desertion) due to ineffectiveness.
  3. Had 4 elections in 2 years due to inability to form a ruling government with more than 50% of the parliament approval.
  4. Had a government average run-time of 2.5 years since 1999 due to "no confidence" votes that force re-election.

Less than ideal. The American system, with its flaws, significantly more stable.

In NZ, MMP is doing us well.

There's still electorate MPs (members of parliament), but there's also MPs determined by their party's percentage of the party vote.

So at election time, you vote for your preferred local representative, and then you vote for your preferred party.

The Netherland has pretty much the same system as Israel, there is slight geographic representation but nationwide party votes do dictate the composition of parliament.

All the Nordic countries also use a proportional system with multi-member districts and measures to make the overall party representation in parliament align with their national share of the votes.

Maybe the problems with Israel are just problems with Israel rather than their particular system of voting.

From what I understand, Netherland has practically the same system as Israel. There's no regional representation at all, you vote on the party, and although you do vote on a specific candidate from that party, seats are assigned in the order of the list that the party determined, unless a candidate receives enough individual votes to reach the threshold for a seat on their own (which is rare for anyone not on the #1 or #2 spot for their party).

As a result, Dutch parliament currently has 16 parties, and the senate 13. And although governments do fall, and sometimes have trouble forming a new government, the system is very stable. Every government is a coalition, a compromise between enough parties to hold 50%+1 seat in parliament, and that means you generally see the same big parties in government. Sometimes one of the big parties loses popularity and thus seats, and doesn't govern. Other, possibly fairly new, parties can take their place. Parties that most other parties think are terrible (like the racist parties) still won't be able to form a government even if they're large, because nobody wants to work with them.

I think this article is too absolutist in its conclusions (and its interpretation of Arrow's theorem). There are definitely ways to limit the worst effects of gerrymandering. We came close with a lawsuit from Wisconsin (I forget the details) and there was hope that Justice Kennedy was waiting for that to make it to the Supreme Court, but then he decided the other way and promptly retired.

EDIT: I'm thinking of the Efficiency Gap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote#Efficiency_gap

I believe that sortition is a solution to this. Being a politician should be like jury duty, there's a low but significant probability that you can lose the lottery and have to be a representative for a couple of years. The same mechanism should be uses to select peace officers also. There are certain roles that society appears to need, but that the kind of people who want to fill those roles are likely to be the worst people to do the job (i.e. anyone with a hint of megalomania). Sortition solves this problem.

Absolutely.

Some people (especially the ones profiting from the current system) do not want to change the fundamentals though. In those cases shortening the feedback loop by cutting the cycles could also mitigate the problem. Also reducing the obscene amounts of power we put in a selected few hands could help.

This article nicely explains the problem, but is a bit defeatist about the possibility of reforms that could mitigate it. To offer one reform, allow me to present the following:

Suppose in the hypothetical country, the total number of votes cast for Blue is some number "B", and the total for Violet is "V". Further suppose that the number of seats won by Blue is "C" and the seats for Violet is "W". A non-gerrymandered map would be one where B:V is approximately C:W (or at least there is no possible change to the seats result that would make C:W any closer to B:V).

My proposed reform, therefore, is that after an election, if those ratios are not as close as possible, the electoral officers would go down the list of seats that were lost by the under-represented party (from best performance to worst) and flip the result so that the under-represented party gains representation, until the ratio can't be improved any more.

Obviously this would feel hugely unfair to the voters in the districts where the result was flipped, but they should blame the people who drew the unfair map in the first place. Indeed, the incentive would be on both parties to draw districts which were most likely to produce a balanced result that doesn't need any flipping. This method has the added bonus that it would encourage parties to appeal to voters in "safe seats" just as much as "swing seats", since everyone's vote would count towards the B:V ratio.

The maths gets a little more complicated when dealing with more than 2 parties, and with independent candidates who don't belong to any party, but I don't believe these are insurmountable obstacles. Solving the problem of gerrymandering, unrepresentative legislatures, and voter apathy with this one weird trick (that doesn't involve changing the ballot papers or counting process) seems like such a big win that the cost of a few flipped seats has to be an acceptable price to pay.

Or you could just do IRV or multi-member electorates or any number of other things done in other more democratic countries that are at least harder to characterise as stealing votes.

Like I say, my proposal allows the electorate to keep the same ballot papers, the same counting process, and the same number of seats in the legislature.

You're right, though, that if voters were prepared to sacrifice some of that familiarity, they could do much better than the system I proposed (which was somewhat inspired by the multi-member system I mentioned in another comment).

>My proposed reform, therefore, is that after an election, if those ratios are not as close as possible, the electoral officers would go down the list of seats that were lost by the under-represented party (from best performance to worst) and flip the result so that the under-represented party gains representation, until the ratio can't be improved any more.

This seems like an implementation that would harm the trust in the system. If you're going to bother having representation by geography in a democratic system, it should be based purely on geography, not based on demographics within the geography.

I agree with the author of the post that the geographic element itself is the source of the issue and that there are perhaps other better ways of dealing with the "tyranny of the majority" issue that the founding fathers intended to handle via republicanism.

Part of why partisan gerrymandering has become such a problem is that the tech makes it easier to gerrymander.

But mostly, political party matters much more than ever before. The electorate is more ideological and the candidates for office are much more loyal to the party platform. In an era where political party mattered less than, say, geography, then partisan gerrymandering was less of a national problem.

Of course, there are several types of gerrymandering and this is just one of them. The best summary of possible solutions and their limitations I've seen was done by 538 as part of a larger gerrymandering project: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-probably-not-possib...

>Congratulations, you've now created a totalitarian one-party dictatorship! The blues hold 60% of every district, so they win every district, so 100% of the national legislature is in the control of the blues, even though they only hold 60% of the vote.

I'm afraid too many people would be ok with this. There is a strong desire for "democracy" over "republic" (not a combination of the two), meaning 51% of your average voters can do whatever they want to the remaining 49%. Fundamentally, including a "republic" in the formulation means that some people get a prioritized say. I think a strong case can be made for that, but the idea itself is deeply unpopular.

If you donate to both sides, you can do whatever you want with 1% of the vote. Imagine the horror if the 99% could do whatever they want to the 1%!

I'm not sure how this is relevant to my point, please explain.

I grew up learning that "republicanism" means that you are opposed to the monarchy so I'm really confused by your comment. It seems that you are using the term "republic" as an equivalent of "pluralism" or possibly of "indirect democracy"?

There's rule by majority and then there's individual rights. Pure democracy prioritizes majority rule and does not guarantee any right to individuals. A Republic has a constitution that usually lays out the fundamental rights of a person and laws are valid only if those rights are not violated.

I'm using "republic" here to point out that a district is acting like an elected representative.

Yeah, thank you I get it now, I knew that concept under a different name, "indirect democracy".

I guess in the USA, because of your history, you don't have a lot of debates around the pros and cons of monarchy and so the other meaning of "republican" is probably less common on your side of the ocean.

"The United States is a republic, not a democracy" is a meme started by the John Birch Society that spread to the broader conservative movement and beyond, losing much of its coherency and substance. Now it's just become a hollow rebuttal to [often equally hollow] claims of anti-democratic policies or opinions. But those who have received the meme tend to understand "republic" as having a far more specific definition (centering on Birch Society political philosophy) than in general discourse, including historic discourse--the Founding Fathers used the terms "democracy" and "republic" more loosely, including giving republic the meaning you ascribe (which, I think, is the more correct literal definition), but also sometimes using them interchangeably or at least ambiguously.

Thanks for the background info about the founding fathers. Growing up in Europe I only ever heard of the definition of republicanism as being opposed to monarchism. I guess the other meaning is specifically American, in the same way that "liberal" in America doesn't mean what it means in the rest of the world.

>But those who have received the meme tend to understand "republic" as having a far more specific definition (centering on Birch Society political philosophy)

This is not how I used the word, so please don't speak for me.

Your usage of "republic" earlier seemed to be premised on an argument centering around the design and function of Federalism in American governance, which in turn implies certain arguments regarding how American political culture leverages political structure to address potential (and manifest) pathologies in simple systems of majoritarian rule.

Otherwise, your use of "republic" makes little sense in the context of this thread as the principal and general meaning of the term is a contradistinction to monarchy and similar systems--e.g. Roman Empire. Early American writing tended to conflate "republic" and "democracy" because in the context of contemporary 18th century European political discourse they were as a practical matter two different ways to describe the same systems; there was little need to make finer distinctions. Today we understand nations like the U.K. or Finland as both democracies and [constitutional] monarchies, but that shift occurred later. Similarly, as more identified modern democracies came into being, they created contrast to the particular structures of American government.

Importantly, "republic" and "democracy" were not mutually exclusive or in tension. The John Birch Society created the modern meme of "the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy" as a way to embody and emphasize a particular set of political arguments regarding the proper way to understand the design and function of American political institutions; that proper way becoming a premise to arguments opposing reforms which were popularly deemed more "democratic" in the contemporary narrative. (IOW, rather than trying to reappropriate the meaning of "democratic" from liberals, they decided to run in the other direction.) Those arguments were motivated by their notorious opposition to the Civil Right movement and [claimed] racist and sexist ideologies.

But I didn't mean to suggest that you or others share the latter ideologies, or even knew about their historical association to the meme. The meme has succeeded in part because it aligned well with broader, subsequent evolutions in American conservative, especially libertarian, thinking. And it survives as a pithy way to oppose certain "democratic" reforms by alluding to a general set of arguments emphasizing the role and importance of political structure, and in particular the specific arrangement and form of American political institutions. Though in its modern form it arguably only begs the question--which aspects of structure matter, and why, precisely, should they be privileged in the particular situation under discussion. Conversely, claims of a reform being more "democratic" beg similar questions.

For people who have yet to encounter the meme, the usage can be confusing, presuming they're even able to identify the conflicting meanings of "republic" at play. Today these people are often directed to web sites or videos that "teach" the meme as an historic fact of American political philosophy, often paraphrasing or directly quoting original John Birch Society literature and media--though almost never saying so, perhaps because the author may not have even known the provenance of their source material.

To be clear, there's no denying that political structure is and always was heavily emphasized in American politics. Federalism is embedded deeply in the American Constitution, as are other organizational structures at both the state and federal level. But "republic, not democracy" is a modern, manufactured dichotomy designed to package and sell a particular set of political arguments, albeit arguments which have become more general and amorphous over time.

> Finland as both democracies and [constitutional] monarchies

I really appreciate your detailed exposition of this complicated issue, but I can't help picking up on this one example you used. To quote a character from Die Hard: "As in Helsinki, Sweden."

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

> There is a strong desire for "democracy" over "republic" (not a combination of the two), meaning 51% of your average voters can do whatever they want to the remaining 49%.

This is the dumbest argument for first past the post, how is this better than "35% of your average voters can do whatever they want to the remaining 65%"? No matter how you count the votes you will have a winner, and that winner can abuse the loser. 51% winning just means you get the fewest number of losers, and any other protections you can get with first past the post can also be gotten in a popularity vote system. The only thing you now miss is that some votes become worth much more than other votes, instead you just have 1 person 1 vote, which I thought was the standard of modern democracy.

>51% winning just means you get the fewest number of losers

That's the wrong thing to optimize for.

I've studied redistricting and gerrymandering for 15+ years ( https://bdistricting.com ), and yes the punch line is that people don't even want geographic districts at least half the time. Sometimes you want 'your local rep' to talk to about local and regional issues, but all the argument is about ideological representation (party, culture, pet issue, etc.).

My best guess solution is a two part legislature, one house of small local districts, one house elected in at-large Proportional Representation.

Your town assembly can take care of the concerns of your town.

Your provincial assembly can take care of the concerns of your province.

Your National Assembly can take care of the concerns of your nation.

We can get rid of gerrymandering and still have different levels of government, each devoted to a particular level of localism.

Indeed, having one level of localism interfere in the affairs of a higher level seems like a violation of encapsulation, in the sense that a software developer would understand the concept.

My "local" representative at the state level is a several hour drive to another city which has nothing in common with the city I live in.

Don’t some European counties like Germany have the number of delegates forced to roughly equal the total vote totals for a party? So if you have “60% violet party and 40% teal party” but the seats are split 50/50 10 closest seats move over to violet?

Theres no perfect way to solve it but the ultimate problem is social: one party is willing to gerrymander to win and the other doesn’t because they don’t have to but would if they actually saw any gain in it.

As someone living in a country that uses proportional representation for its electoral system, my first introduction to gerrymandering was this episode on the Data Skeptic podcast which I highly recommend: https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2021/gerrymandering

The rules don't need to be perfect. The fundamental issue with gerrymandering is that we want politicians to compete by appealing to voters, rather than competing by toying with election rules.

And while I agree there are tradeoffs involved in having geographic representation, these bizarrely shaped districts don't really provide that. They don't align with any administrative or cultural borders.

This is dumb. We could just vote for parties instead of candidates, then have the party choose representatives, or have party members vote to choose representatives to fill their slots.

Not everything is first past the poll, vote for your candidate, etc.

Or you could have situation in between. Have people vote for candidate and share the votes between party and then rank those candidates in order of votes received.

Would mean that winners would first be the most popular and the extra votes would still go towards the party. And the unpopular in terms of votes received candidates of party wouldn't get elected.

Basically a delegate system? Sure

Live in California? The candidates for (Republican|Democratic) parties are wildly different in their ability and likelihood to do a good job. A 30 yearold candidate of the same party as a 50 yearold are going to have vastly different social networks, favors to lean on, money, appearance, etc. Picking the person is a much better choice to make than the party.

And the people who are good at winning elections are different from the candidates who are good at governing. So you're screwed either way.

At least with parties, the members of the party get to choose the boundaries of their concerns. E.g. the working families party in NY is a powerful presence in the state democratic party, and that is in a FPTP system.

If you vote for parties based on platforms, and then parties coordinate with one another to build coalitions, then you might just end up optimizing for governance.

Not perfect, but less flawed.

If you're going to call a system dumb, maybe at least try to get its name right. Jeeze man.

I notice a lot of the discussion can't think beyond the current two party "system" - if we do this then A will always win, do that and B always wins... but actually other than the US, democracies that I know (Europe at least) have multiple parties. And these, if they can't win, can at least take away enough votes to shift the power. Other than that, some countries have a combination of "first past the post" geography based voting, and seat distribution based on vote totals. Which I think is a good system.

There is nothing wrong with gerrymandering. It's not me saying it, it's Sandra Day O'Connor, whose words I'll be paraphrasing (from memory; maybe later I'll dig up the actual opinion).

You can gerrymander to make your party's representatives' seats more secure, or you can gerrymander to have more seats for your party. In the former case your overall majority will be smaller when you win all the elections you expect to win, while in the latter case your overall majority will be bigger, though in each district the popular vote majority will be smaller. Either way your party can lose badly in the event of a wave election, either because few seats need flipping (in the first case), or because popular preferences change enough to swamp your large majority of small majority districts (second case).

We've had one anomalous period of 62 years of no wave elections in the past 100 years in the U.S.: 1932-1994. Since then we've had these wave election years that flipped the House or greatly enhanced the majority party's majority: 1994, 2006, 2008, 2010. That's... quite a few wave elections. That's in spite of the democrats having had 62 years to gerrymander before 1994, and despite the mid-cycle gerrymandering of the 00s. We can expect more wave elections.

Gerrymandering is self-limiting.

Phrasing this in terms of two tribes each with precisely one candidate and geographically homogeneous support bakes in some assumptions that I think break the model quite fundamentally.

In the real world:

* Rural vs. Urban produces a very strong polarization in party/policy support. So you simply cannot get the result described where you have one party winning all districts.

* There are many candidates both within a party and between them that would receive approval from a given voter beyond their first choice.

* Currently because of the structure of the system there can only be two serious parties. (A serious third party splits the vote and prevents either from being successful). But if you had more parties you’d probably get better representation.

Basically, I think this model is both oversimplifying to the point where it is useless for making claims about what would happen in our current system if we eliminated gerrymandering, and also not interesting as a model for other voting systems.

For what it’s worth I think Single Transferrable Vote and Approval Voting are both interesting options that get round most of the problems in our current system.

> You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical.

Worked for Athens.

"Estimates of the population of ancient Athens vary. During the 4th century BC, there might well have been some 250,000–300,000 people in Attica.[4] Citizen families could have amounted to 100,000 people and out of these some 30,000 would have been the adult male citizens entitled to vote in the assembly."

"There were three political bodies where citizens gathered in numbers running into the hundreds or thousands. These are the assembly (in some cases with a quorum of 6,000), the council of 500 (boule), and the courts (a minimum of 200 people, on some occasions up to 6,000)."

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

Athenian eligible voters to boule ratio: 60-to-1

US eligible voters (233M) to 5000 representatives ratio: 46,600-to-1

US eligible voters to House + Senate (435+100) ratio: 435,514-to-1

Let's not discount the possibility.

I think we should fill most elected positions basically at random, and eliminate the presidency.

Populations make great quantitative judgements, but not qualitative. It seems that selecting at random would be best to get voices of folks experiencing homelessness and poverty. Rich folks would still get a couple of seats.

My guess is less war, more money for anti-poverty and education programs.

The problem is that most people are idiots

I fail to see how elections rectify that problem.

Sortition!

I really do think it is the only way. Everything else gets distorted.

People say, well, most people are stupid. But I'm not so sure. Juries are a sort of pseudo-sortition, and they actually fare pretty well (far better, I would argue, than legislative or even judicial bodies).

I think many positions would be admirably served by random appointment.

These people like the TFA’s author who come up with good-faith solutions to problems caused by those acting in (very) bad faith…

I mean, bless their hearts, but they just seem so completely naive. No policy will ever be pursued by the US government that gives more political or economic power to the poor and middle classes. Not ever.

That's historically not true, and especially in that light, such extreme pessimism seems irresponsible—by convincing people they're disempowered, you're just encouraging the result you hope to avoid.

Name something that has benefited the poor or middle class that has passed within the last 50 years. Because what I see is… dick. Nada. What I see is never ending transfer of wealth upwards, without exception. Maternal leave? Get fucked. Universal health care? Lol no. Hell, legalized marijuana at the federal level? Fiiiiilibuster.

Nah. I’m “encouraging” nothing. Just pointing out historical — and contemporary — reality.

Doubling the standard deduction.

Well, the FDR presidency is kind of instructive. FDR succeeded in creating things like Social Security and various New Deal programs that definitely benefited poor people and bolstered the middle class (Rural Electrification and Homeowners Loan Corporation respectively, plus others). However, a key point he leaned on was that failure to act would lead to either a communist or a fascist revolution of the kinds seen in Russia and Germany.

Such an argument would carry weight today.

Obamacare.

Yep. The first US Constitution was actually scrapped because it gave too much power to the people. The founders knew that would only lead to disaster, so they drafted a second one that reigned in democracy and empowered oligarchy.

Does the author argue for geographic representation? I don't think so, but I already know why it's important: the cold north whom has 60% of the population votes to ban air-conditioning, leading the 40% in the hot south to suffer.

I think that ultimately, the best solution wrt. fair elections is to enable free movement across regions and countries. Then people can choose to live in their own communities of like-minded people. Nobody has to be a minority at least in the issue they care about most, they can just move. Also, even if you do gerrymander, if the oppressed 30% blue just move to the 90% blue regions it becomes ineffective.

Unfortunately free movement has its own problems re: the migrant crisis, housing prices, etc.

>I think that ultimately, the best solution wrt. fair elections is to enable free movement across regions and countries.

This sounds good but you just get the people with the means to do so constantly migrating away from the fallout of their bad policy every decade or so.

Some ability to flee is definitely a good thing but on the other hand if you make your bed you should sleep in it.

> the cold north whom has 60% of the population votes to ban air-conditioning, leading the 40% in the hot south to suffer.

This is solved by better legislated states rights not by creating a less undemocratic voting system. There is no reason why the fed should be allowed to ban something like air conditioning or showerheads. But now they did, people in low water states complained that saving water is important since they lack water, so now even in very water rich states it is illegal to sell high throughput showerheads. So the current system doesn't protect against such shenanigans at all.

Another approach is to do what Romania is doing. They tried implementing FPTP, but it failed in the referendum, so they implemented it half-way: you still have FPTP, so you get a representative from the local community, but the national votes that are "wasted" get redistributed nationally to each party , such that the popular vote matches the seats closely. The only thing is: your party needs to clear 5% of the popular vote nationally, and it will have guaranteed seats. It's a bit more complex, but that's the crux of it.

This system allows for parties to be created and destroyed very easily, we had 2 new parties in the last 10 years that at some point got 15-20% of the votes

Hmm. This is interesting because I've always wondered about using mathematics to generate a "gerrymandering-ness metric" from a given population/boundary distribution. The idea being that instead of having the supreme court scratch their heads wondering if a boundary assignment was unfair, you could just compute the metric.

But this article seems to imply that this metric can't exist.

Ok so now I wonder about the corollary: use an algorithm to generate the boundaries. If the article has a proof that all boundary assignments are unfair, then presumably an algorithmic boundary generator can be made to be randomly unfair one way or the other, balancing out the unfairness overall.

I think the "gerrymandering-ness metric" you are looking for is called the "Efficiency gap". The problem, of course, is getting everyone to agree what the acceptable range is for this value, and to make it the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote#Efficiency_gap

> Hmm, okay, so what would be fair? Perhaps we want to give each party a fighting chance in each election? Isn't that fair? (etc.)

This is trying to solve gerrymandering with (more, different) gerrymandering. That's not the way it should work.

Districts should represent something from the real world, outside of political affiliation.

It's natural for the political "color" of a district to change over time, because people move, and sometimes get older and change their mind. This should not result in a change of the shape of the district.

The only solution is removing geographic districts entirely. The focus is on how squiggly the district lines are rather than the underlying issue that your vote is worthless in almost any election.

Interesting to read the spread of opinions on multi member seats here, and a strong element of "doesn't work" from people who I think haven't experienced it.

Gerrymandering made a single party run Queensland for 19 years. it was very real in Australia, but the downside of democratising the election method was dis-enfranchising the rural voter. Multi Member would fix this.

No matter what, I think the vast majority of people here agree the US system is particularly bent out of shape in many respects.

> Congratulations, you've now created a totalitarian one-party dictatorship!

This is not true. It totally discounts independents (38% of American are independent), and districts obviously evolve and the popularity of the party in power tends to wane as that party either fails to fulfill its promises or abuses its authority in some way. It is no coincidence that in modern times whenever a party has control over all three houses in the U.S., they lose that control in the very next election.

Gerrymandering is irrelevant because elections are irrelevant. The USA isn’t a democracy or even a representative republic[1].

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

I think the US needs some form of representation based on the popular vote and not by winning districts. For example if a certain percentage of the House would be allocated to parties based on the popular vote, districts would be less important and third parties would be viable.

Basically we should reduce the importance of districts and give the popular vote more weight. In my view everything else doesn’t have a chance to solve the real issues.

Probably would be better to split the Congress into three, one that represents the states (Senate), one that represents communities (House of Representatives/Communities), and one that represents ideologies (House of Values) and then come up with a new balance between the three.

Keeping a geographic based house is necessary because sometimes people of a wide variety of values still having needs in common due to shared local geography. Both rich and poor are impacted if the dam above their town breaks and a flood doesn't care about your race, gender, sexual preference or anything else. House of Values wouldn't even need to be based on each state but rather could be something like "One representative for every 250,000 votes the group receives nationwide". Maybe even allow people to split their vote between groups. Perhaps under this arrangement the Senate could go back to being appointed by governors and state legislatures as the earlier issues with corruption would not necessarily apply (depending on how laws get passed between the three houses).

The above of course would require near universal support from the public as it would be a change to the basic working of our representative democracy. Not sure if we're capable of getting that level of agreement on pretty much anything anymore.

We've already got states, and under those states we have counties. I don't understand why we can't mandate that congressional and legislative districts must conform to county boundaries (which is fundamentally where people live, vote, are regulated, etc anyway). My guess is this would result in a simple and fair answer and that couldn't possibly work because politics.

Well to take the most obvious problem, each California congressional district has to have roughly 750k people but Los Angeles County has 9.9 million.

I get that, and yet the root of my observation is simply that there are are already existing valid political boundaries. The core problem with legislative and congressional districts is that they are utterly arbitrary and subject to change based on political whims (yes I understand there is also a nominal census reasoning as well). My point then is simply: could there be permanent, non-arbitrary boundaries that would no longer be subject to political manipulation?

I don’t think so! Even permanent and supposedly non-arbitrary boundaries are subject to intense political contestation. Observe how in the first decades of this country’s history states were often admitted in pairs, one slave and one free (for instance Missouri and Maine), in order to maintain the balance of power.

Whenever I read some article like this about politics in the US, I wonder why they never look at how the world's largest democracy deals with these problems, instead of looking at trivial countries like Hungary or New Zealand with like 5 people.

Is it ignorance? Racism? Some "stuck in the 60s" notion that third world countries are run by dictators?

Anyone should be able to submit new boundaries to break up a large area into the required districts. It should be accepted automatically if; the populations are equal based on the last official census, no boundaries pass through a residential property, the total length of all the boundaries is less than the current divisions.

The solution is not having any form of "winner takes it all" voting for anything with a lot of power.

Due to the dynamics it creates "winner takes it all" is fundamentally undemocratic.

Through that would be a fundamental change in US politics on all levels, so it's a bit too much to ask for.

And a bit tricky wrt. the president.

Gerrymandering is very easy to fix: don't make voting districts matter that much. Have local seats in districts so they get represented, but also have popular vote seats to even out so each party gets seats corresponding to the total vote. Done, gerrymandering no longer matters enough for it to be a big deal.

Yes, this is effectively the solution that Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP) offers.

The normal complaint with this is that it typically involves having closed lists of candidates who get a free ticket into parliament without any local accountability, and this is only slightly improved by having an open list system (although that requires teaching voters to mark extra ballot papers in unfamiliar ways).

Fortunately a better solution has been found and actually implemented in Baden-Württemberg, and they call it the Zweitmandat system. Basically, the "proportional seats are filled by losing candidates who won the highest proportion of votes".

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

Yeah, that seems reasonable. I'm all for giving more power to people to pick the candidates they want instead of having political parties handpick the last ones.

The answer is easy. Instead of electing officials, we give them our votes to cast. No one is disenfranchised.

Do I miss something,but isn't the real solution for this to elect using proportional representation?

I think this article is more damning of a simple two-party system than it is of re-districting. How does the math change if you simply draw arbitrary boundaries of roughly equal size but have multiple parties and ranked-choice voting?

I was hoping the “math” might be a Euclidean analysis of how … concave? … or dumbbell-shaped? … a district boundary is. I don’t see how a district that narrows to 100 yards wide in the middle could be fair.

> Gerrymandering is bad, right?

I know TFA is not addressing this point intentionally, that's ok. You can choose what you want to focus on.

But does anybody have a logically sound argument that supports this assertion?

I'm not understanding this math can I get a hand?

1,000,000 people that can vote

600K : blue & 400K : violet

4 districts hold 400K : blue

6 districts hold 33.3K : blue & 66.6K : violet

if that's all of the districts... then isn't that only 500k?

> the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic

why is it not realistic?

There is no political will to do anything whatsoever about gerrymandering. Sad state of affairs.

Of course not. Both parties use it at all levels of government. Getting rid of it only helps non-politicians, ergo politicians will never support it (unless they are losing).

Assuming you're talking an an American context, is is absolutely not true that "both parties use [gerrymandering] at all levels of government".

The US Democratic party has a national policy of non-gerrymandering at all levels of government. Maryland had a Democratic gerrymander in the 00s, but it was exchanged for a fair map in 2011.

The US Republican party, on the other hand, has a national policy of gerrymandering as much as possible. The national committee hired gerrymandering consultant Thomas Hofeller to draw Republican-maximizing maps for every state in 2009, and used those maps as the backbone of their REDMAP plan to seize permanent control of every state through extreme gerrymandering.

An independent council just rejected New York states proposed congressional map because it was so obviously gerrymandered. Democrats do it too.

The independent council that rejected the map was set up in law by Democrats. If they hadn't passed that law recently (or just undid it), then there would be no legal problem. So it's actually their own check that stopped them.

Similar to how only companies with an ethics hotline get ethics complaints.

You have it all wrong, just read this article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/nyregion/primary-election...

They’ve tried to take it to multiple courts that have all found it unconstitutional. They are still trying to hold elections with it.

The commission was set up on 2014 (this is the first time it's been in place). My point was that the Democrats put the amendment on the ballot in the first place. If they had decided otherwise, it never would have left the state legislature.

They were, in a very real sense, the people who instituted the independent commission. A commission that deadlocked itself before the state legislature decided it failed and they needed to draw the lines.

Had they not voluntarily limited their own power, there would be no legal case at all.

How does that explain the new NY map that was recently tossed because it was so obviously gerrymandered in favor of Democrats? I believe the same happened in Maryland a couple months ago as well.

Believe it or not but parties don't always follow their policies.

When the party in power gets to decide how the lines are drawn, there is zero incentive to do anything to fix it.

I think the solution is really, really easy. Treat politicians like kids.

One gets to draw the lines, but they have to draw several different versions, that are at least XX% different, in terms of voter groupings. Then the other gets to pick which one gets used.

And when they can't get along, I get to send them to the naughty step.

An interesting and related problem is over-representation of swing-vote regions in public policy and the alienation this can cause in other regions. Let's use an example from the post:

> 2 districts each hold 100,000 blues

> 8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets

In this situation, the government is considered to be unstable, since a small number of people changing their minds in the eight swing districts can decide elections.

This is an example that closely matches reality in which some regions tend to be "strongholds" while others have swing ridings. The strongholds always vote for the same party, so their parties are motivated to to ignore their interests and, instead, pour all their efforts into competing in the regions with swing ridings.

Why don't neglected regions gradually turn into swing regions? Sometimes they do, but sometimes the parties involved make region a part of politics. Say that, in the above example, the 2 districts with 100,000 blue supporters were in a regionally distinct part of the country. The violets discover that there is an undercurrent of mistrust about that region in the 8 other districts, and demonize the blues by claiming they have a secret agenda from the blue region.

This gives the violets an edge when it comes to winning in the 8 swing-vote districts, but it also frees up the blues to almost completely ignore the interests of their stronghold. Sure, citizens in the stronghold are free to vote for the violets, but if the violets actively demonize them in elections, why would they?

Instead, they might become disaffected from politics entirely, since elections are decided entirely in the other 8 districts according to the concerns of those districts, and not theirs. Even though the blues are more numerous overall in the country, there will frequently be governments with strong violet majorities in which the blue strongholds are completely neglected. It's easy to see how this can lead to alienation and even separatist sentiments.

If this seems far-fetched, take a look at "Western alienation" in Canada. Most Western provinces tend to vote overwhelmingly CPC on a consistent basis. The LPC has won majorities and now controls a coalition minority government with a smaller share of the popular vote because the East is dominated by swing ridings. In the past, they have smeared CPC leaders by saying they have "hidden Western agendas". The result today is disaffection from federal politics in the West, alienation, and, yes, some separatism.

Hence, getting rid of geographic representation might actually help reduce geographic alienation. Of course, in the case of Canada, why would people in swing-ridings, who currently control the outcome of elections, ever vote for candidates who are actually serious about electoral reform that might reduce their influence?

gerrymandering has the potential to increase homogeneity of voting districts...more homogeneity means that the electorate is more united and can therefore force the politicians to do what the voters want.

Gerrymandering and a first-past-the-post electoral system can result in parliaments where a clear majority of all voters chose party X, yet the majority of seats are held by party Y. (There are several examples of these in the American states.)

That doesn't seem to represent "what voters want" very well.

That only works if the elected official from a particular voting district has complete say over the law in that district, which they do not. They go on to represent their district in a larger body, which may then vote against that district's wishes.

Swiss canton? We prefer blood than clocks...

That's not what gerrymandering does. No districting scheme forces the elected representative to do what the voters want. Once they get elected, they have their term, and can vote however they want barring expulsion or recall.

Gerrymandering is where you draw up districts such that the voting power of people who won't vote for you is minimized. It doesn't have to result in homogeneous districts. The point is to maximize your party's voting power as durably as possible.

This is written in such a way that it seems like it makes sense, but it ultimately takes its conclusion as an axiom and is thus essentially meaningless.

Gerrymandering is to draw districts according to political party affiliations. So of course if you only divide up your districts by political party affiliation (in rather extreme ways) you will discover that doing so doesn't lead to stable political systems. No shit, that's the problem with gerrymandering.

Any serious analysis of this problem needs to confront the realities of geographical location and migration.

> Gerrymandering is to draw districts according to political party affiliations.

That not really what it is. It's to draw districts in order to give a particular party an advantage. Usually the way to do that is not to draw them along party lines, but to mix voters of different affiliations in the same district such that your party comes out with a majority in as many districts as possible.

The practice of using political party affiliation as a criteria at all for drawing district borders inevitably leads to gerrymandering. This part of the article does seem apparent, which is why the solution, to _not_ do that, seems mysterious in its absence.

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