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Comment by no_protocol | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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.

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