Anti-gerrymandering measures on Florida ballot

[Chronos]

And if you really want to respect county lines and rivers, you can make length along one of those count at a discount. Like, your total score is half the length of boundaries that run along county lines and rivers, plus the full length of boundaries that don’t.

[septimus]

Minimizing geographic perimeters is not clearly desirable as a criterion. What is the point? Minimizing carfare during campaigning? If cultural closeness, rather than geographic closeness, seems useful in districting, then some of the odd districtings we see are good!

The real problem with gerrymandering is not the odd-shaped districts, but just the fact that a party with political control can enhance that control. The reason for proposals like SlackerInc’s is not that compact districts are “better,” but just to impose any arbitrary districting method to interfere with the ability to do politically-motivated gerrymandering.

Here’s an off-the-wall approach, which may seem extremely stupid and assumes exactly two political parties, but which would solve a few problems:
  Let the minority party do the districting!
(A simple restriction, e.g. that only a fraction of districts can be redrawn in any cycle, would impose a useful inertia.) For one thing, this would counter the strong tendency to reelect incumbents, which is one of the problems in present-day America.

[DoctorJ]

Mere gerrymandering is amateur hour compared to the bushwa that just occurred here in KY.

The Democrats scored a “victory” (I guess) by re-drawing the Congressional district around Lexington to save Ben Chandler’s ass. It wasn’t easy, since no one really likes him on either side. Unfortunately, they had to give away the store to the Republicans to make it happen.

Kathy Stein has represented downtown Lexington in the state House since 1998 and in the state Senate since 2009, and is one of the few truly progressive voices in the state legislature. She’s a constant thorn in the side of the Republican Senate leadership, which had pretty much free reign to redraw the Senate districts.

The problem is that it was hard to redraw Kathy’s 13th district to guarantee that she couldn’t win. So what did they do? They just re-numbered the districts. Kathy’s 13th district is now in northeastern KY, starting about 45 minutes away. Downtown Lexington is now the 4th district, represented by a man who lives in Henderson, KY–200 miles west.

But it gets better. Odd-numbered Senate seats are up for election this year, and even-numbered seats go in 2014. In order to run for her 13th district seat Kathy would have to uproot and move to the new district, and she almost certainly wouldn’t win since it’s a far more conservative area. Meanwhile the district where she lives–now the 4th–won’t elect a new Senator until 2014. So she has effectively been kicked out of the Senate for the next two years.

The upshot, I guess, is that the Republicans had to spend a ton of political capital to make this happen. But since our Democrats aren’t really that much better, it remains to be seen whether that will turn out to be a good thing or not.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@septimus

Minimizing geographic perimeters is not clearly desirable as a criterion. What is the point? Minimizing carfare during campaigning? If cultural closeness, rather than geographic closeness, seems useful in districting, then some of the odd districtings we see are good!

The real problem with gerrymandering is not the odd-shaped districts, but just the fact that a party with political control can enhance that control. The reason for proposals like SlackerInc’s is not that compact districts are “better,” but just to impose any arbitrary districting method to interfere with the ability to do politically-motivated gerrymandering.

And that’s exactly it for me. I don’t much like the geographic thing, anyway: I have a lot more in common with another geeky teacher in Oregon than I do with a Sons of Confederate Veterans used car dealer down the street from me. In our diverse economy, people’s occupations aren’t so much determined by their location, nor are many of their interests. But preventing gerrymandering is amajor concern, and geography provides as good an arbitrary stop to gerrymandering as any.

Here’s an off-the-wall approach, which may seem extremely stupid and assumes exactly two political parties, but which would solve a few problems:
  Let the minority party do the districting!
(A simple restriction, e.g. that only a fraction of districts can be redrawn in any cycle, would impose a useful inertia.) For one thing, this would counter the strong tendency to reelect incumbents, which is one of the problems in present-day America.

Sorry, but I don’t much like that–gerrymandering to favor the minority party is just as bad, IMO, as gerrymandering to favor the majority. Worse, possibly, inasmuch as it provides a way for minority interests to gain an outsized influence, leading to rule by a minority.

[Buck_Godot]

@BrotherCadfael

Heinlein once suggested that we should assign voters to districts alphabetically, or by birthday. Thus everyone born from Jan 1 through Feb 13 would be in District 1, Feb 14 - March 28 in District 2, etc. That way, every district would be of absolutely equal size (aside from a tiny rounding error), ensuring one person, one vote. As he put it, “surely where a person lives is the least important thing about them”.

At the time he wrote it, this proposal would have been unwieldy, but today, with databases and the Internet, it could work.

The problem with this is that it could lead to tyranny of the majority. If the state is 55% republican and 45% Democrat and everyone voted along party lines the result would be a state legislature that is 100% Republican.

In my fantasy, redistricting would be assigned to the Math department of the state University, and would not be implemented until the methodology was accepted for publication in a peer reviewed applied mathematics journal.