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Comment by anonfordays | Hacker News Reader

>Also why do we base districts based on racial breakdown anyway?

This always felt like "treating the symptom, not the cause" approach to the problem. Voting district lines should always coincide with county lines. There should be some rules about the allowable shapes (no string of counties running East to West for 200 miles for example) of these districts. That would give representation that reflects the population. Taxes, governance, etc. are county driven in many (most) states, why not add electoral boundaries that match?

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> This always felt like "treating the symptom, not the cause" approach to the problem.

Given the historical treatment of racial groups in the US, I'd say a little column A and a little column B. Racial minorities have not always been free to choose where they lived - redlining was only phased out in the late 60s and 70s.

Nominally ended then. The shockwaves of it are still felt today [1] because it's a compounding effect - these neighborhoods are still seen as less desirable meaning housing prices are still depressed & rely on richer people extracting wealth out of the area through gentrification to raise home prices.

Also it's not clear mortgage practices have changed all that much:

> FairPlay AI’s “State of Mortgage Fairness Report” in 2020 found that equality in mortgage lending is little better today than it was 30 years ago. In 1990, it found, Black mortgage applicants obtained loan approvals at 78.4 percent of the rate of white applicants; by 2021 that figure had risen, but only to 84.4 percent.

> A National Fair Housing Alliance report from 2020 revealed that Black and Hispanic/Latino renters were more likely to be shown and offered fewer properties than white renters.

[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redlining/

[2] https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/what-is-redlining/#ongo...

>Racial minorities have not always been free to choose where they lived - redlining was only phased out in the late 60s and 70s.

Which means county lines make even more sense: racial minorities may have been redlined out of specific neighborhoods in a city, but they still reside in the same county.

Was it only for specific neighborhoods?

Yes.

"Redlining is a discriminatory practice in which financial services are withheld from neighborhoods that have significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

What about counties that had "significant numbers of minorities"?

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

>What about counties that had "significant numbers of minorities"?

What about them? They would get proportional representation as well in the counties they reside in.

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

Not entirely that simple, but it removes an entire class of problems.

Many electoral districts are smaller than counties, or even cities/townships.

Yes, but they don't have to be with the aforementioned system. Maybe some districts encompass a single county only, and the number of votes it gets is proportional to its population.

For many US offices, such as state and federal legislators (except federal senators), the districts need to have approximately equal populations - each voter needs approximately the same fractional influence in the legislature. Counties don't have equal populations.

Yes! So with the model I mentioned, there would be fractional influence as well! So LA County would likely be its own district, and it would have more voting power than several Central Valley counties combined.

For the US House of Representatives, I think the current setup (approximately equal representation) is in the Constitution. It would be hard to change.

we could move to proportional voting per county.

There's actually been quite a bit of scholarship on how to draw district lines. We could certainly do better than the status quo, but it's a hard problem.

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