Evaluating bias and noise induced by the U.S. Census Bureau's privacy protection

Someone else will be telling me that the map where the 60% majority gets 100% of the seats is unreasonable because they should only get half of the seats since 60% is closer to 50% than 75%, much less 100%. Then someone will say that the map where each party always gets half the seats is unreasonable because then it's four safe seats and none under contention, which removes democratic accountability from the representatives in both parties.

The actual problem here is first past the post voting, which results in a two party system. You can't gerrymander STAR voting because drawing a moderate district would result in a moderate candidate instead of the district going to whichever extreme gets 51% of the vote in a two horse race.

That's not actually what that does. The map where you have four totally uncontested seats because each party has a hard lock on two of them would minimize the "efficiency gap" because both parties would be minimizing the number of "wasted" votes from losing the other party's districts. So would any other map where they each get two seats, because making the districts more contentious without actually changing who wins just shifts votes wasted in victory to votes wasted in defeat in equal numbers.

The only thing that really matters on that metric is to make the number of seats proportional to the number of votes; it's basically a disguised requirement to replace the districting system with proportional representation.

You could have a different system that does what you're asking: First draw as many districts as possible that are 50-50, then whatever is left would inherently be districts that go to whichever party has the majority in that state. But that system is weird too; the people in the remaining districts that are approximately 100-0 instead of 50-50 are effectively disenfranchised because their vote can never change the outcome.

> Basically any process where the parties are picking their voters is an unreasonable gerrymander and undemocratic.

But that's what they all are. Who would you have choosing the map? You can't even put it up for a popular vote because the map proposed by the party with the majority in the state would win the popular vote and have the same result as their politicians doing it.

I reiterate that the real issue here is the two party system, and if you want to fix it, switch to a cardinal voting system like score voting or STAR. Then you can't draw e.g. two out of there districts going to Republicans in a nearly evenly split state, because that map would instead give one seat to a far left party and the other two to a moderate party, with the Republicans getting nothing.

I'm just saying, is it really as simple as "Use county borders" and you're done?