Math has changed the shape of gerrymandering

The point of disproportional representation is to reduce the political power imbalance between of high population areas with low population areas. The alternative is to split up the country or union so that each unique area and demographic govern themselves in isolation. Few people want that outcome so a compromise has to be chosen. In iceland as an example, the combined country districts has a majority if they all band together, while the Reykjavík district is by size the absolute single biggest and has well above 50% of Iceland population. Its a compromise that while political power is still very much centered in Reykjavík, they can't blindly ignore the country population.

>In proper system with proportional representation, you need to ensure that each location doesn't abuse it's power to count votes and to fabricate population counts to gain an advantage, and you can only do so if you bring random people from different locations to count the votes in each place.

There are protections for the voting and counting processes. Each candidate gets to send a representative (often a lawyer) to audit. And the workers are chosen from the community. Allowing non-residents to become poll workers would quickly lead to national political groups sending partisan members across districts.

Population counts are created by the federal Bureau of the Census. Unless there's a constitutional amendment, that's a guarantee. Abd they're one of the last agencies we should fear about becoming politically corrupted.

- establishing multi-member districts - electing those members via a proportional (e.g. party list) or semi-proportional (e.g. ranked choice) voting system

The first of these is actually pretty common at the municipal level (think at-large city/county council seats), but unfortunately are almost always chosen by plurality means, which means that the dominant party within the district almost always sweeps. You really need both features for this to improve on the single-member districts.

There are lots of different voting mechanisms around the world. So e are "better" in the sense that people (including me) like them more... but...

Games mature and you end up with some sort of antipattern party politics emerging.

Eg in many multiparty systems extremist small parties can strongarm governments. Acceptability to the majority isn't a thing. Party leaders become little chiefs. Not saying it's worse. It might even be better, but it's not much better.

Also, the US has relatively strong separation of powers. The house, senate and president are weak independently of eachother. Weak institutions and weak parties will probably result in complete indecisiveness.

Imo, if we're suggesting progress on democracy, we need more radical steps. Eg a randomly selected representative body.

It's the opposite. A single compromised location can tip a in a national popular election. It almost becomes an arms race of cheating.

With district based they can only affect their district.

I've come to believe that the only thing we need to change to have a three party system is to make all votes for bills in Congress to require 70%+. Today things can be passed with 50.00001% which is basically binary. With the required compromise and negotiation, a third party would have power to swing the vote for yea or nea and dilute the power of the duopoly. At first, it might just take form as a caucus until enough power is built to build a proper party with funding for candidates.

I know it is a pipe dream because the powers that be wouldn't want to give up their hammer. I think this is one thing that the founders got wrong. Having to build compromise could be good for everyone in the end.

American elections are administered locally to prevent top-down rigging, especially from the federal to the state level. Presumably local politicians will be more accountable to local people than an election authority across the country. And if the local people don't want to hold them accountable because they like them, then the politician is at least representing their contstituency in some way. And from the perspective of other districts, a corrupt district cannot affect their own elections, only send, at worst, a representative they don't like as if the two districts sinply disagreed. If a national election authority were corrupted, there wouldn't be anything local political organizations could do, especially if this applied to local executive or judicial positions.

And of course the original states were not going to cede the counting of their votes the federal government. The electoral college is widely operated as a winner-takes-all system because it means that no state has to trust any other.

Whatever solution you might implement to avoid a deadlock can't detect which party is being "unreasonable" in causing the deadlock, so you would need to have another different way of drawing districts, and whatever method that is is likely to be affected by gerrymanderers too. Even something basic like using a uniform 2D grid would likely bias one party or the other, giving an incentive for that party to desire a deadlock for any reason, as they would then win by default.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781

For n>2 the simple I-cut-you-choose stops working.

I'd much rather have any algorithm that gives no power to any parties, and solves a better answer to the question "what is a district for?" (my short short: Local representation for local issues)

As other comments have also noted, lots of people don't want _geographic_ representation but some kind of other issue/identity Proportional Representation. Yup. Also true. My dream State Legislature has a PR Senate at-large across the whole state in batches of 20 or so, and a small-local-district House.

It's an incredibly simple, intuitive change that has the potential to increase overall happiness with the results and disincentivize extremism.

Yet it has been an uphill battle to get ranked-choice voting adopted, and some states and municipalities have even had to revert back to first-past-the-post voting after an outcry from voters.

If voters can't wrap their heads around that, I hardly think they would be able to follow along with the mathematical principles outlined in the Quanta article.

(1) those who don't think about it much if at all, which is probably the majority of people

(2) those who understand it but benefit from it so want to keep it

(3) those who understand it and want to change it but don't have the influence to get it changed

The supreme court ruled that it is 100% kosher for states to gerrymander for the purpose of consolidating power and excluding other parties. It is not legal to gerrymander to disenfranchise minority groups, but frequently they amount to the same thing.

The only way to change it would be for some novel legal argument to come before the supreme court that convinces them that their previous decision was wrong (very unlikely), or for Congress to pass a constitutional amendment. The latter is not going to happen because the current system is designed in part to make those seats "safe".

(1) A Boundary Commission may take into account, if and to such extent as they think fit –

(a) special geographical considerations, including in particular the size, shape and accessibility of a constituency;

(b) local government boundaries which exist, or are prospective, on the review date;

(c) boundaries of existing constituencies;

(d) any local ties that would be broken by changes in constituencies;

(e) the inconveniences attendant on such changes.

These do capture the idea of people being connected, but only in an extremely vague way.

Probably more important is that the boundary commissions are designed to be politically neutral, and in practice, seem to be. I don't think i've ever heard complaints otherwise.

[1] https://boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/2023...

A big part of the problem is that gerrymandering is only really effective when the House of Representatives stays fixed in size. That’s actually fixable and would significantly reduce the effect size of gerrymandering (and also reduces lobbying power because you need to corrupt a lot more people which gets extremely more expensive).

One way to do proportional representation which I think works well is to blend it with districts. All districts get a representative but you add floating seats that are filled in proportionally based on overall vote count. That way you both get local representation in a larger system while largely removing the benefits of gerrymandering because the power balance isn’t determined by the map.

Granted, that's what gerrymandering is intended to accomplish as well, but at least with a district based system you can in theory vote a specific guy out. It also means you have one guy you can turn to if you have a grievance, it's not a big blob of a party for your voice to get lost in.

Math doesn’t tell us what outcome to prefer — only how to accomplish it once we do. Eg, do we prefer an outcome that gives everyone maximum individual impact or one that maximally balances the power of racial tribes?

The reason the US doesn’t use math to solve gerrymandering is that it prefers to have districts focus on maximizing the power of minority racial tribes ahead of equal representation of all voters.

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Of course, that’s a contentious choice — with some people believing that such racist policies favoring minority groups are akin to the divide-and-conquer used to subjugate India by the British.

Understanding the pushback against “DIE” requires understanding the view of elites engaging in neo-colonial tactics to subjugate the average American, eg by disrupting class movements along racial fault lines.

Also, a small minority that can rule a majority due to gerrymandering has no incentive to give up their power.

Sometimes you don't need 15 years to get something done, just one term.

Read up on “cracking and packing”, it’s pretty obvious that gerrymandering provides a distinct benefit to the party that controls the map.

Gerrymandering causes another major long-term problem that you’re overlooking: it creates mathematically safe seats that the opposition party can’t reasonably win, even when they gain support. This is a major reason we are seeing more extremists in office, because they no longer need to win by aiming for the center, they win by being as extreme as possible because the party already controls the seat. The election becomes a de facto purity test, and you see this play out over and over again.

Gerrymandering could lead to a bunch of complete lunatics taking office and doing things so detrimental to the environment that we could never recover, or they could enact policies that stand for several centuries and restrict intellectual and technological advancements (a new dark ages).

But why play with hypotheticals when we can instead talk about real life: recently in the US, gerrymandering led to enough representatives getting elected that they were able to overload the third branch of government with partisan hacks. The partisan hacks then overturned a very important court case, despite reportedly 70% of the country’s population supporting said court case.

I’m with you, though, fuck people who are living today. Stop being so selfish! It’ll balance out in a thousand years or so.

The point of democracy is not to deliver an equal number of victories to each of the parties. It is to reflect the will of the people. A 10 percent lean in one direction is a 10 percent negative effect on democracy.