A Partisan Solution to Partisan Gerrymandering: The Define–Combine Procedure
cambridge.org
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Edit: changed this tautological sounding sentence - "None of the countries using PR suffer from the sillinesses arising from FPTP."
The US is not going to switch to proportional representation at any point in the near to medium future. It's just not going to happen. There's zero public awareness or desire -- right now we're having a hard enough time just making the much smaller incremental improvement of ranked voting.
On the other hand, there's no strong tradition of any kind behind drawing districts. If someone really can come up with a fair, objective way of doing it, it's far easier to see it getting adopted. Gradually at first (state by state), and then possibly nationally. Still difficult, but within the realm of possibility (unlike PR).
Honestly I think a main way it could be adopted is imposition by the courts -- we've seen increasing cases of "stalemates" where states can't seem to produce maps acceptable to the courts at all. So courts do have the ability to say, "if you can't produce a satisfactory map, we will, and this is it."
I'm not saying it's easy or quick, I'm just saying it's in the realm of the possible, unlike PR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-large#U.S._House_of_Represe...
Frankly, I'd be surprised if they did. It seems much more likely that they'd suffer from the problems of PR instead.
- Clusters of minority populations tend to not get as much representation, because they are but a small voice in a bigger ocean of voices.
- Representatives can't focus on representing a smaller geographic area, including field offices, outreach, constituent services, etc as easily, because they have to represent a much broader geographic area.
- A lack of community ties, as representatives are representing a broader geography, the representative is less likely to know the names, places, and small cultural quirks associated with the communities they represent.
The resulting problems are actually the opposite: very small clusters of voters typically end up wielding a disproportionate amount of power. That's because PR invites people that are ideologically affine, to run separately, effectively campaigning against their "friends". It's obviously better, for any given politician, to be the head of a 5% party than being a "rank&file" in a 30% one. The resulting fragmentation has to be later recomposed with alliances to form a government, which will go on bickering constantly; and it often results in executives that can count on very thin majorities, increasing overall uncertainty to bad overall effects (instability, higher borrowing costs, etc). Such executives then have to spend inordinate amounts of political (and often monetary) capital, appeasing very narrow interests. One of the most infamous expression of such dynamics is the Italian experience from 1948 to 1994, but also France before Napoleon III, Weimar, etc.
This is why modern PR systems end up with forceful thresholds, where a party with less than 2 to 6% is kept out of parliament - but that's literal, direct disenfranchisement, not particularly better than the indirect one resulting from FPTP.
IMHO the better approach is FPPT but with ranked voting to reach 50%. This reduces the worst distortions of FPPT (i.e. "winners" literally hated by 60-70% of the electorate), while promoting a balanced approach to minority interests.
I mean what are political parties under FPTP other than alliances to form a government? Bickering is rather common within them.
Democratic politics always requires a broad coalition of different interests and groups to assemble a majority. I'm not convinced voting system changes that much, but tensions may erupt in different ways under different systems.
"Within" being the key word. It's a completely different level, believe me.
The last 6 years of UK political life have been exceptional, and the overall sentiment is that they were pretty bad. They were also absolutely run of the mill from a PR perspective: a new executive every few months, elections every 3 years or so, a constant fight to reconcile fundamentally un-reconcileable positions, extreme public brinkmanship, etc etc. PR will fix nothing of that, it will only make it worse.
Where I think a broader range of parties would benefit the US system is reducing the degree by which measures and bills are passed and opposed along consistent party lines. With more parties, there would be coalition building that would encourage more negotiation and cooperation.
Germany addresses them by doing a FPTP pass and then filling the remainder of the parliament such that the overall parliament has PR according to a second, independent vote given at the same time. This creates some other issues again, but works surprisingly well for the most part.
It was successful enough that it also served as a blueprint for the Eastern European countries once the Soviet Union fell.
Always puzzles me why these three countries never took the opportunity to learn from their very own experiment.
It's very difficult to change the existing system because the people currently in power are there because of the way the system is built, so any change will almost by definition be disadvantageous for the people who have the power to change it.
Which in the US is actually 51 separate governments consisting of the Federal government which only has enumerated powers, and also the 50 sovereign states.
In NZ, citizens vote for a candidate in each of the 60 electoral districts and so they get the representative that they vote for. Similar to Germany? Also our citizens vote for a party, and the other 60 seats of parliament are filled from lists of candidates (one list created by each party). The 60 seats are allocated to candidates from the lists, selected so that that we have the same percentage of members in parliament to match up the percentages of party votes by citizens.
New Zealand gets members of parliament that were chosen by the party. That is a problem because those members have no constituency: citizens can't really vote out someone (because a party selects some of its members).
I personally think that a critical feature of democracy is being able to vote out someone we dislike. I'm sure we can think of undemocratic countries where they would love to vote out a disliked politician. MMP fails here: citizens can't vote out some of our members of parliament.
the party list gives disproportionate (force multiplied) political power to a few key players in each party.
The second problem is also a feature: we often get small parties that get outsized influence. To get 50% control of parliament multiple parties join together in a coalition. Coalitions are an emergent property of MMP: and coalitions create some terrible incentives for parties to do misrepresentative things.
Outsized power is misused particularly by one celebrity politician with 5% of the population voting for him. The guy is a tool.
In theory a small party should be able to focus on a single cause. In practice, The Green Party gets 10% of the seats but it then refuses to form a coalition with our "conservative" party. The Green Party gives up its minority power, because the thei politicians are too strongly greenie and they won't compromise. The idiots fail to make green tradeoffs against economic policies. They are idiots because the planet is strictly worse because of their political failings.
New Zealand avoids the worst excesses of a two party system. However MMP is no panacea: politicians do the same political things.
In theory a left wing and a right wing party should form a coalition together to run the country. In practice such a coalition can't form.
Humans are shit at making good compromises.
Also with respect to "can't vote out a list MP" I think this is exaggerated. "Bad" MPs are very common in constituencies in many countries. They are often hard to get rid of since they have local support and control their local party organisation. Whereas a list MP can be pushed down or off the list placing even if they cannot be made to resign their seat.
You can't vote out a constituency MP if 2/3s your neighbors like him. Or will always vote for his party no matter who they put up as a candidate.
There are lots of practical reasons why geographical constituencies make sense. But nobody ever questions them as the natural way to group voters in elections. I've always wondered what politics would look like if constituencies were based on other criteria. For example, age group, profession, gender, marital status & number of children, or income-bracket.
But with a party list system, there can be a perception that the party machine has more control over who gets elected. If a party can realistically expect a vote share of 20-30%, and ten candidates are being elected proportionally, then the top two candidates on the list are pretty much guaranteed a seat, whether or not they work or campaign very hard. This puts a lot of power in the hands of the people who decide the party list.
But to be honest, FPTP has a very similar problem with safe seats.
A cluster of a minority population might be able to elect 1 of 5 members, instead of being shut out.
Representatives would still represent the same geographic area and have the same community ties.
The main argument against is the difficulty of running the House with ~3000 members. There isn't a room big enough, and there isn't time for all to get their 5 minutes to speak on each bill. That said, there is no constitution requirements for either. Changes would have to be made to accommodate.
This is largely solved by the districtized version:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-member_proportional_repre...
In fact I had been writing up a little paper about another system like this, but I've been busy with other things.
For instance because you have the electoral college in the US you have the possibility of the electoral college going in the opposite direction of the popular vote. An event like that reduces the mandate of the winner.
If a PR system or single transferable vote or something like created events that were hard to explain on the news that's trouble.
This would be true if not for gerrymandering. Look at minority populations in states like Texas and Alabama and then look at the distribution of state and federal representatives. These voters are packed and cracked and would have a greater voice in a proportional system.
> A lack of community ties, as representatives are representing a broader geography, the representative is less likely to know the names, places, and small cultural quirks associated with the communities they represent.
My house rep lives 100 miles away from me in a town with very different demographics than mine. I am very confident that he does not know the cultural quirks associated with my community, except that he thinks that we are all cultural marxists indoctrinating children to be communist heathens.
I generally follow a political philosophy that the larger the geography of the political body, the fewer laws they should make, and the less those laws should impact daily life of most individuals. For example, (in the USA) the Federal government shouldn't make as many laws as the State, and the laws they make should focus on Federal issues, like national defense and interstate commerce. States shouldn't make as many laws that impact daily life as the counties and cities do, etc. Likewise, more taxes should be levied and paid (as a proportion, not necessarily in aggregate) locally than nationally.
The American ideal is NOT just that you have a Representative, but that Representative knows YOUR community.
Proportional representation could result in all my States Representatives coming from LA or SF, but not the rural areas.
Ideally, I'd like Representatives that I'd have realistically met before in normal day to day living in the community. We need it representative for every 25,000 people, in my opinion. and that representative coming from my local community of 25,000 or so people.
For many people, the most important communities are not based on geography. And even if your geographical community is important to you but you live in a city that elects multiple representatives, single-representative districts may prevent you from voting for your local candidates.
Also, proportional systems are often not fully proportional. You can guarantee some geographic representation by combining local administrative units into districts that elect a reasonable number of representatives each.
Our House should go back to something like 1 per 75,000.
More representative, more locally bound, less tied to corporate interests because you don't need to raise that much money to run a campaign for 20,000 citizens you represent. That means instead of spending half their day, every day, fundraising, they can attend to business.
For actual decision-making power, they need a parliamentary majority, which by design requires the support of a majority of voters.
I hope the UK system isn't quite so rigged as to deny any seats even to a party that gets >50% of votes.
Again, Republicans are (and it's weird to say) literal model examples of diversity and minority inclusion if you compare them to the front national more or less 100% white christian party.
A big problem with Gerrymandering is that it favors extremists. When a district is competitive, a candidate must appeal broadly to people of various political positions. When a district is artificially created to cater to party X, a candidate only has to be selected by party X, because then they're practically guaranteed to win. Thus candidates who are more loyal to party X is more likely to be elected, regardless of how they're viewed by the general population.
PR has the same problem - someone who's at #1 position of Party X's list is as good as elected, and the position is determined by internal party politics. Thus, the top positions will be filled by those who always toe the party line and never compromise.
Although I agree PR is better. The German version also even keeps the districts if you really like them.
The UK’s AV referendum was not for proportional representation but instant runoff voting for single member electorates. Which is a better system but in the UK in 2011 clearly would benefit the Lib Dems much more than actual multi member electorates would.
That might on some level be right, but it's completely unhelpful.
The hill people from Appalachia deserve to be represented by someone local. The low lying coastal communities in the outer banks also deserve to have someone that understands them, rather than someone from NYC. The border towns in Texas are better represented by someone from there, rather than someone from Ohio. There is some value to local representation, it doesn't need to be all in.
Romania for example has a hybrid system: it's "first past the post" first and foremost, so people get local representatives, but all the unused votes that would otherwise get wasted (both winning and losing ones) are then put together in a big national pool and then you have the second round of MPs appointed because of that pool. That way popular vote matches the percentages in the parliament, but you also have local representation.
And think of this. Today House members spend all their time mooching for donations, because to get elected requires a BUNCH of money. That money is increasingly dominated by money outside your district. If we have a Representative for every 20,000 citizens for you 15,000 number, that means you can run a small campaign for very little money. Heck you could just knock on doors for no money.
THAT takes a lot of power away from moneyed interests.
Also, 331,000,000 citizens / 50,000 citizens/rep = 6,600 reps
I agree that uncapping the house would improve things, but I do not think that it is fundamental to improving things.
I don't think we should base our political system on the assumption but I don't think it's unfounded. It's tough to want to have the makeup of my state legislature reflect the will of the population at large while making sure when the pool is distributed my district gets a democrat because anything else would be insane given the political makeup of the area.
Note that this paper contains no optimality proofs.
There's a lot of mathy-looking stuff, but then instead of a proof we get "yeah we took this one particular Markov-chain algorithm and had it play against itself and it failed to generate a gerrymander".
If deployed in real life, an immense amount of power -- and therefore money -- will be at stake: certainly more than enough money to hire persons with intelligence equal to or greater than the creator of "the ShotBurst Algorithm" as consultants.
If an optimality proof is not possible, the only alternative is to test using real humans and (very substantial) real rewards.
[1]: https://static.cambridge.org/content/id/urn%3Acambridge.org%...
Here's the Stonewall algorithm to gerrymandering with contiguous Define-Combine:
1. Start by gerrymandering a map with N contiguous districts the usual way.
2. Pick one of the districts to be your "mortar", the others are your "bricks".
3. Shrink all bricks minimally to open gaps between them without changing the population or election outcome.
4. Fill in the gaps with your mortar, so that all bricks are completely enveloped.
6. Split all bricks and the mortar in half, ensuring that one of the mortar halves does not touch any bricks. This gives you your final map of 2N contiguous districts for the second mover to combine.
Then the mortar half that doesn't touch any bricks can only be combined with the other mortar half. And since all bricks are completely surrounded by mortar (which they can no longer be combined with) the second mover can only combine a brick half with the other half of the same brick.
This leads to a map with the same outcome as the original gerrymandered map.
Of course it would be blindingly obvious if anyone actually attempted to do that, but there might be subtler ways to use contiguity to create a forced-choice situation.
Of course, the chromatic polynomial is #P-complete, so this may pose some difficulty.
The real problem with this strategy is that it accepts self-interested gerrymandering, rather than starting by rejecting it as wrong; immoral; anti-productive.
It would be nice for that to work, because it means that you don't have to overcome the automatic argument of "I'm not immoral and anti-productive, you're immoral and anti-productive". You never have to tell anybody they're wrong or bad. You only have to tell them that they're not in the majority, which is an objective statement.
It would similarly be nice if we could have an objective but blame-free way to resolve the meta-question of electing representatives. Or at least, to have people say to their own partisans, "Hey, this is obviously unfair, could we tone it down a bit?" But the reply is always "If we don't do this unfair thing, the other people will do MORE unfair things, and then it will get even worse".
It would be computationally feasible for small numbers, but not if the algorithm requires a human to try strategise and act in its own interest for every single step.
The defined subdistrict plan selected by the Democrats results in three seats for Democrats and two seats for Republicans. [...] Similarly, if the Republicans move first, then in equilibrium the Republicans win three seats and the Democrats win two seats. Thus [...] under DCP there is only a one-seat difference depending on who draws the define-stage map.
Abolish political parties now, before it's too late. It may already be too late.
Fundamentally, political parties are based on freedom of association.
Freedom of association allows people to form their own groups, for whatever reason. A group of hikers, model railroad enthusiasts, or a group seeking political ends.
Political parties also cross into advocacy, which is/can be petitioning government for redress. Another constitutionally protected thing.
Best option that I can see is having elections ignore party affiliation. Basically the jungle primary thing.
But in my experience, with nonpartisan elections, everybody still knows what ‘party’ the candidates are.
Is there any institution that can do that which isn't dominated by these two parties?
I'm not sure how this could be avoided in the US system of 2 senators per state. You can't exactly send 2/3ds of a senator to Washington if you had a proportional system.
Make the state legislatures proportional, impose a deadlock-free contingency procedure and repeal the seventeenth amendment. Either that or random ballot.
Though, I wouldn't necessarily consider either of those good ways of solving that problem, which would probably involve increasing the size of the senate as well somehow.
- 3rd parties can't compete
- Campaign spending spirals upwards because of the consolidation of money
- Regular people can't run without party support
- Politicians get campaign money in exchange for giving in on policy
- Lobbyists can consolidate their efforts (it's easier to buy one or two parties than many)
that means, i think it is reasonable to demand that a political representative be neutral and not have any associations for which it could be argued that they represent a conflict of interest.
parties influence or even control who gets to stand for election. why should that be the case? anyone should be able to stand for election, regardless of affiliation.
in many countries, parliaments have a concept of requiring that members of parliament vote along their party. that should be illegal, MPs should only vote according their conscience. influencing them should be illegal. lobbying should be illegal.
none of this restricts freedom of association.
This statement directly contradicts your view that ‘none of this restricts freedom is association’
Define ‘demand’. Voters demand, like their opinion is they won’t vote for someone who has associations. Or government demands that candidates have no associations.
it restricts your freedom of association only as much the rule of law already does.
with demand i mean a potential law that demands that representatives be independent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscience_vote
Of course I can eschew those responsibilities and then the club can deny me the benefits or kick me out.
* There's been an increased focus on federal (vs local) governing. People "over there" now need to adopt the solutions we have "over here". Since federal gov cannot possibly be in tune to all voters micro-needs, a successful federal-first party needs to focus on high-profile outrage-fueled issues.
* The main focus is on proportional representation, where votes for legislators are in proportion to the people who they represent. This avoids winner-take-all elections at congressional level, and removes the need to both pander to moral outrage and gerrymander.
* Another huge factor is increasing the number of seats elected, and pinning it to # of people they represent. This allows minority groups to have their say in congress, rather than having to jump on the bandwagon of "least evil" candidate. Congress has not expanded in a long time.
The fundamental problem with parties appears to be that they're a way to exert undue influence on and ultimately break down democracy. So it seems like measures that increase democracy and reduce the power of any person or organization are what's required.
From a voting perspective, that means things like multiwinner districts and races (improves minority representation and blunts gerrymandering), compulsory voting, paid voting holidays, independent voting commissions that draw maps, ranked choice voting...
It also means either reducing the mechanisms by which capital can be converted into political power or reducing the amount of capital the entities at the top have, or both. So antitrust laws are not only good for the economy, but also for democracy.
But this has to be addressed:
> Abolish political parties now
You can't. "Parties" are just agreements. I want something, she wants something else, you want something different still, etc... I decide to vote with her because she'll support my stuff in return, where you won't. Now we have a party. That's all that a party is, they naturally arise any time you have any kind of collective decision making (not just democracy: treaty coalitions are just geopolitical "parties", etc...).
The two party system, likewise, is a natural evolution of first-past-the-post/winner-take-all voting. If you need 50% to do anything, then you need to get your party to be bigger than that. And the folks left out need to band together in order to get what they want. So the two sides naturally seek (via compromise, coercion, etc...) to an equilibrium where they both win about half the time. Anyone in a "third party" never wins anything.
[1] Again, why the ridiculous hyperbole? It's not like this is some new evil plague; "parties" have been with us for thousands of years!
That seems unimaginative. The agreement to create the party is recognized as some sort of incorporated being for the purpose of receiving and spending money. This could be shaped in various ways by taxing authority, or by retroactively changing the pay structure of officers, or by optimizing the valuation of different asset classes for the purpose of taxation. I'm sure others can think of even better ways to pursue abolition without expanding the already expansive controls on how people express the freedom of association.
If you want the system to change we need to restructure how elections work, not somehow try to abolish the idea of people working together politically.
We can't even prevent private corporations from unlimited funding of campaigns. How on earth would we be able to abolish political parties?
Switching from FPTP to IRV changes the balance of power in any state that is not dominated by one party. The party that stands to gain supports it, the party that stands to lose opposes it. That's it there is no other motivation. If the balance of power were flipped you would see the stances flipped.
You can see the happening right now where the Democrats who initially opposed those state laws meant to undermine the ACA now loudly support them because almost all of them banish government from healthcare extremely broadly where Republicans now want them gone because it inhibits their ability to restrict abortion access.
I guess we have to work state-by-state and county-by-county in swing areas to get IRV/ranked choice voting enacted, then scream very loudly when someone tries to change it back.
So it claims that it doesn't require bipartisan agreement to reach 'optimality'. Fine, I won't argue that point as I haven't looked that deeply into it.
But it still requires the parties to agree to adopt this Define-Combine procedure in the first place! And why would they do that? They're not, when the rubber hits the road, interested in "optimality" (however you define it), but power. Power at the expense of the other party, to be precise.
1. it's imposed on them by an outside force like through a voter referendum or court order 2. the party is currently in power but thinks it might lose power soon, they could adopt this on the way out to limit the ability of the opposition to get a supermajority but in a way that will be harder for opponents to object to compared to other things they could try.
Power at the expense of the people, that is the most important part by far. Gerrymandering corrupts the democracy by devaluing votes, giving more power to current politicians regardless of side.
Giving power back to the people almost never happens.
The major sociopolitical issue is that gerrymandering can be used for both good (minority-majority districts) and "bad" (supermajority plural houses when there's only a bare majority; or, worse).
The root of the issue is that map-drawing is unfair and we'd like a fair system. I think for most of the interested parties, you can find middle ground on fair electoral mechanisms. For parties just trying to keep power you can make this argument: gerrymandering moves the election to the primary; the turnout for primaries is abysmal, and the result is that our government is weaker for having gerrymandering.
In my state, Texas, there are some districts where the outcome of the election was decided by as little as 2% of the voters, i.e., only 3.5% of the voters showed up to the primary.
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"...redistricting is a particularly hard problem to solve because there are a number of different goals that are mostly incompatible:
* It seems like a system should offer partisan fairness such that control of a legislature is typically in line with the population’s overall preference.
* Districts should align communities of interest and correspond in some sense to real places that we can characterize, like “the South Side of Chicago,” rather than just be arbitrary zones, like “some of the suburbs of San Antonio and some of the suburbs of Austin plus a big disconnected patch of rural Texas.”
* Racial minority groups should get fair representation. A state like Georgia that’s 30 percent black shouldn’t have an all-white congressional delegation.
* There should be fair-fight districts with real electoral competition, not just everyone segregated into safe seats that protect incumbents.
* Districts should be compact and look like a nice checkerboard of squares and triangles, rather than a bunch of crazy squiggles.
Sometimes you can make this all work together, but oftentimes you can’t."
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We can't have an "optimal" algorithm when we're trying to optimize for several different things, some of which don't even have a formal definition.
[0]: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/11/16453512/...
I think that's a little too defeatist. It's like saying "tactical voting is a political process" and can't be "solved". But you can adopt voting mechanisms that reduce the effect of tactical voting, and many countries have! It doesn't completely solve the problem, sure, but it helps.
[1] This occurred while I waited in line to vote.
I'm just saying, if you did somehow legislate for change, what should the change look like? "Stop gerrymandering", sure, but how? This paper offers a potential solution, or at least a path towards one.
Seems like a pretty trivial way to break the algorithm. But I probably misunderstood something.
> "Valid districts are contiguous and have equal population. Strict constraints on compactness, geographic splits, or other restrictions are not necessary, but such limitations could be included. However, valid districts may not include “donuts,” where one district entirely encircles another."
Maybe I'm missing something too. That seems like a pretty big deficiency.
On the other -- unfortunately I don't see how it would actually help, because the first party which defines the half-districts is generally going to "win".
If party 1 is the Republican party which wants to maximize rural votes, they just split up every city like a pie, with each slice extending far into the countryside, halfway to the next city. Then it doesn't matter which slices party 2 (Democrats) combine, because they're always stuck with rural votes outweighing city votes.
While if party 1 is the Democratic party which wants to concentrate city votes, they do the opposite and surround the city with two halves of a ring that is half-urban half-rural, so the city can't be diluted. Party 2 (Republicans) can combine rural areas only with the ring, while the inside remains totally protected.
So one strategy is skinny pointed daggers to invade the cities, the other is about skinny ring shields to protect the cities. By controlling the initial shapes, you control nearly everything.
(Of course with real geography it becomes more complex, but the general principle of districts shaped as skinny daggers or shields is still going to be the primary strategy here -- you're not going to win all the districts, but it'll get you the extra 10% or 15% you need.)
If you're interested, here is a (still in-progress) simulator I wrote where you can try out Define-Combine on a simple grid. https://mpalmer.shinyapps.io/DefineCombine/
I gerrymandered during the define phase using classic packing / cracking strategies, such that I had 8 majority-B districts (2:3) and 2 majority-A districts (4:1 and 5:0), and unsurprisingly, the only districts I was able to combine that were majority-A were those that included the packed districts.
If the overall split was, say, 27:23 instead of 25:25 such that we could define 9 majority-B districts in the define phase, then I would only have been able to define a single majority-A district in the combine phase.
(And yes, all of these gerrymandered districts would be considered safe B seats, as one would expect with a 20% margin)
There are also potentially issues if the packed districts are geographically clustered -- we see this a lot in states with a single predominant urban center (e.g. Kansas, Minnesota, Kentucky). In those cases, you might be forced to combine multiple packed districts due to pathological maps. For instance, consider a map where a Democratic bastion is districted into concentric rings -- that satisfies the contiguity requirement, yet only the outermost district abuts any Democratic-minority districts.
If instead we had 9 population nodes we could assign to each Define district, then we might be able to draw nine 4:5 districts in favor of B, and a single 9:0 district in favor of A. In that case, A cannot recover any of the unfairness that B introduced.
It doesn't matter at the abstraction of proportional representation, but it potentially matters quite a bit when you get into the nitty-gritty of actual elections.
Please do not get discouraged by anyone or anything. We need more of this.
(The UK has reasonably neutral boundary commissions, but it seems for whatever reason there's no hope of that approach working in the US -- at best there's just an almighty legal battle in state supreme courts.)
It's a technical solution to social problems: polarization and intolerance. Those never work.
It would be very hard, but the only thing I see actually fixing the fundamental problem is limiting the degree of policy change per time period to something below what would trigger a backlash. That would lower the stakes, lower the perceived threat level, and maybe allow people to recover their sanity again. I think eventually the country would mellow out.
Except in this case, polarization itself isn't "organic", but being pushed by large organized entities; and these entities are pushing it because there's a value to be gained from polarization. Reduce ways to capture value from polarization, and you reduce the incentive to push for polarization.
The opposite: technical solutions are the only ones that work. Approximately, you can't solve social problems.
I don't think technical solutions to social problems tend to work really well (on average); I just think that non-technical solutions have an even worse track record.
So when you say 'people being hurt by the current system' what the alternative you are implicitly comparing to?
Well, it assumes that there are exactly two sides in politics. Even the UK has more than two relevant parties.
Both the problem and the solution are very US-centric, but it's still important work.
In 1912 (the last time we added more), the US population was ~90 million, and it's currently at around ~340 mil and we still have only 435 representatives.
1912: 1 rep per 20,000 people
2024: 1 rep per 780,000 people
This doesn't "solve" gerrymandering but it does blunt the effectiveness of it (among hopefully some other positive effects.)
The flaw is it doesn't mean anything so long as there's a 2-party system. Congress is stuck on part-line voting. Lobbyists only have to gain the favor of party leaders and the rest will follow. But one of the barriers to getting 3rd and 4th party candidates elected is there are too few seats that they can compete for.
Both solutions need to be implemented together. An expanded Congress is only useful with a plurality of ideologies. Getting alternative parties into office requires more competitive districts. Doing only one of those wouldn't be enough to significantly change the makeup of Congress.
This is indeed an interesting question, and I submit that the US is in an awkward state where the national assembly is simultaneously too large and too small.
I've seen some statistics that suggest that assemblies tend to start degrading in quality when you get past 300 or so: you end up in a situation where too many members just have nothing to do. At the same time, it's almost certainly the case that the US House has too few members for them to be sufficiently responsive to their constituents.
It works when both sides are cynical crooks.
We have proper information systems, we can do this. A representative gets qualified by having the appropriate minimum number of people sign up as their constituents. They then represent exactly those people.
Better proportionality in representarion also has a whole host of other benefits.
Everything with messing with how you draw lines in single-member winner-take-all districts is just shifting representation problems around and not actually solving them.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/primary-el...
Carve the geography into small population density based chunks
Identify boundaries like Bisecting Highways, railways, Rivers, mountains, etc.
Create boundary informed population chunk clusters.
Identify features Food Industry Schools
Find the shortest road based path from each bounded cluster to each feature.
Create convex hulls that enclose bounded population chunk clusters of the target population size and paths to features.
Rerun after every census.
A community is a village, town, administrative parts of a city, etc.
Every 10-15 years, there is a vote across the country in which every community rates adjacent and nearby communities according to who they want to be in the same district as.
Then you run some pre-decided fixed algorithm that uses these ratings to join adjacent communities in a province/state in roughly equal populations. The design of this algorithm is left as an exercise to the reader.
https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2017/november/i-cu...
Neither wants the practice to stop. Politicians will pretend outrage when they personally are negatively impacted by a change of course.
I think there ought to be precise rules and regulations for how and what you can do, but of course for the reason above, this wont happen.
This is why states like the Stare of Jefferson need to be allowed to exist.
It would be far from perfect, but it would take the precision out of the gerrymandering process which I think by would be a net positive.
I think the answer has to lie in an algorithmic solution dependent on a high-resolution population density map.
A partisan districting protocol with provably nonpartisan outcomes https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781 by Wesley Pegden, Ariel D. Procaccia, Dingli Yu
What this seems to ignore is the legitimate desire to keep towns or counties in the same district. Most people would consider it silly to have the dividing line be a side street, or even in between two houses.
- I get to cut the cake in half
- you get to choose which slice to eat
> Academic researchers have drawn inspiration from the cake-cutting problem to propose processes for fairer redistricting. While this logic has inspired several redistricting proposals (Alexeev and Mixon 2019; Benadè, Procaccia, and Tucker-Foltz 2023; Brams 2020; Ely 2019; Landau, Reid, and Yershov 2009; Pegden, Procaccia, and Yu 2017), none has addressed implementation across the full range of U.S. states and electoral contexts using real-world data. The complexity of previous proposals also precludes real- world applications or even simulation using modern computing techniques.
They don’t
The practice of gerrymandering is self acknowledged adversarial social engineering intended to create an unfair split to consolidate power. Is intentional and domination based
The singular and only possible way to execute equitable democracy is enthusiastic engagement by the population in the running of the system.
Until you can create a society that gives individuals the time, space, and resources they need to make fully informed decisions on the complexities and externalities of human action, societies will continue to be run by a small handful of high energy narcissists.
I am unaware of any large scale (>1000 people) human communities that have demonstrated long term peaceful self organized society, spanning the lifetime of a citizen (~100 years) without a major destabilizing event in their community.
The cutter _always_ has the ability to divide the whole in a way that will result in an unfair outcome: that's why the choice is given to the other party. The process is unfair when the division _and_ the choice is held by a single party.
That's the real problem. It's nothing to do with how we draw lines on a map, it's how do you get whoever is currently in power to agree to a more fair system, given that it's (by definition) not in their interest.
If so, where I can I find more?
Maxwell Palmer: https://maxwellpalmer.com
Benjamin Schneer: https://www.benjaminschneer.com
Kevin Deluca: https://www.kevinmdeluca.com
What a load of crap and what dream world do they think that could be accomplished? We can't even get ranked voting to work, and most places this past year where they did use it, it's gonna go away because they didn't get the nutjub they wanted, and this is the age of the nutjub.
Most Americans want to gerrymander, so do their representatives. It's a total myth this will get fixed or people have the will to do it or that you can somehow have these 2 parties work together, at all. Even if that's some silly "contiguous and combine" setup. Shit, one party would get angry with you for even using a word like "contiguous", that's the bar you have to get passed. Good luck with that.