I am thinking of a simple Constitutional amendment that dictates how a district must be drawn and not simply making gerrymandering illegal.
Eliminate districts. Everyone in the country who is eligible to vote votes for every single office being filled. Problem solved.
I think the dangers of gerrymandering are inherent in voting districts.
One idea might be randomization and using some sort of random number generator as an input to a piece of software that automatically chooses district lines, but then you still have the problem that certain populations that share certain traits often live close together.
Well in 2008, California passed Proposition 11, which tried to address the problem. There were 2 main components:
First, and most importantly, it established a process for creating a California Citizens Redistricting Commission to draw the district lines for Congressional, State Senate, State Assembly and Board of Equalization districts. The Commission is composed of citizens (not legislators) chosen through an application process. State Auditors determine which applicants are qualified, and after a process in which the legislative leaders can veto a certain number of applicants, Commission members are drawn randomly. The Commission includes 5 Democrats, 5 Republicans, and 5 Decline to State.
The Proposition also established rules for the Commission to use in drawing districts:
[ul]
[li]Districts must be of equal population to comply with the US Constitution.[/li]
[li]Districts must comply with the Voting Rights Act to ensure that minorities have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.[/li]
[li]Districts must be contiguous so that all parts of the district are connected to each other.[/li]
[li]Districts must respect the boundaries of cities, counties, neighborhoods and communities of Interest, and minimize their division, to the extent possible.[/li]
[li]Districts should be geographically compact, that is, have a fairly regular shape.[/li]
[li]Where practicable each Senate District should be comprised of two complete and adjacent Assembly Districts and Board of Equalization districts shall be composed of 10 complete and adjacent State Senate Districts.[/li]
[li]Districts shall not be drawn to favor or discriminate against an incumbent, candidate, or political party.[/li][/ul]
So far the process seems to be working, and Californians seem to prefer it to the old political system. If it works, maybe it could be expanded further.
the problem was, gerrymandering works both ways. At one time, it was devised to split up communities so that they never had a majority in any one district, to prevent them from becoming uppity and having the temerity to elect “one of those”. basically, racism.
Today, based on supreme court standards, the gerrymandering is the opposite. Districts can be drawn to include a majority of “those people” so that they can easily elect the necessary token minorities. The obvious collateral problem is that then there is a distinct lack of even a decent minority of a minority in other districts, making it extra hard for a minority to win. I mean, do you ever expect to see a balck president in our lifetime?
In fact, the biggest problem with gerrymandering today is not race, but voter trends. If districts are not designed to ease the victory of the party in charge of the re-district process, they are a trade-off between the aprties so the incumbents are guaranteed an easier ride in trying to keep their seats.
So before you can devise a “fair” method, you have to explain - what would make it truly fair? More balance? More splits so that one of each can get in? An exact representation of the state-wide distribution?
This is why the most important component of fairness is not the rules for drawing districts, but who is allowed to draw them. California is now experimenting with having the lines drawn by citizens, not legislators, with the goal of creating a system that is not biased by either incumbency or partisanship.
I was thinking of a formula that removes all political and human intervention.
Here’s the problem I see: any formula is going to slightly favor one party over another, at least at the time that it is passed. It’s a given, really. It would be impossible to change the rules and yet also maintain the status quo.
So… the formula to prevent gerrymandering is just more gerrymandering.
How about virtual districts with self-selected populations? New York, for example, has twenty-seven Congressional Districts. Instead of dividing up the state by geography and assigning people to the district they reside it, create twenty-seven virtual districts and let everyone join whichever district they want to. People would tend to join the district they feel is most compatible to their political views - a conservative, for example, wouldn’t want to join a liberal district where he’d be outvoted and represented by a Congressman he’d didn’t like. So you’ve got the benefit that almost everyone feels that they have a Congressman that they support and agree with - if they don’t, they can just switch to another district. And small groups like libertarians or greens or socialists might be able to gather together and control a district and elect people to Congress because they wouldn’t be dispersed by geography.
This is just a general principle and it’s needs some detail work - you’re probably going to want to have some method of equalizing populations and limiting district jumping. But I’m throwing it out there as a suggestion.
Then jumpers would want to be the voter who is 50% + 1 in order to win the district for their party.
Here is the best I can come up with: All districts would be equally portioned on a strict North/South basis with no exceptions.
So if NY has 27 districts the 1st would be the Northernmost 1/27th of the population and so on.
I have no clue how practical it is, but it is pretty simple to feed a computer a program with some basic guidelines - total population, population density, wealth, race, religion, whatever, and have it generate N districts that fit your criteria, which may include keeping districts reasonably compact (no splitting Austin, TX into 4 districts, one of which extends to Mexico and another to Houston, for example) and maintains some kind of overall diversity guidelines.
After that, give a bipartisan committee of equal numbers of both parties (include 3rd parties if they meet some kind of population cutoff) a straight up or down vote. Everybody agrees to it or the program is seeded again to generate a new map. It’s important this committee only gets a yes/no vote and no power to individually change the district map in any way.
Of course, that means everybody has to agree with the initial criteria and has to sign off, which may be a problem.
I still see value in keeping representation local, rather than self-selecting. Some issues are still local. For example, Houston is big on NASA. I can see that being a big issue for locals but not so much for the rest of the Texas. That’s what Senators should be for, anyway.
Single-member districts are inherently unfair, and that is why they remain popular with the parties that benefit from their unfairness. Those parties that benefit from them are:
(1) Parties with a majority (or plurality) spread over most of the country/state, or who get such a majority/plurality from time to time (like the two major parties in the U.S.). They get this at the expense of wide-spread minority parties (like the Greens and the Libertarians in the U.S.).
(2) Minority parties with support concentrated in a small area (like the Bloc Québécois in Canada, the Scottish Nationalists in the U.K., and the National Party in Australia).
As an example of minority parties being geographically concentrated versus spread out, look at the last federal election in Australia. The National Party of Australia got 3.43% of the national vote and 6 seats; the Greens got 11.76% of the vote and just 1 seat. That happens because the Nationals are concentrated in rural regions, and also have an agreement with the Liberals that neither party will run against a sitting member of the other party. The Green vote, on the other hand, is spread across the whole country, though it tends to be stronger in inner-city regions, which is why it could win the seat of Melbourne.
Enough of this talk of ‘bipartisanship’! You need to get the political parties out of the district-creation process altogether. Elections should be run by independent bodies with access to population stats and other demographic and geographic information.
However, if the parties do get a voice in the process, all political parties should have a voice, not just the big ones. If it’s a registered party, let it in. (This is a problem in Canada–the broadcaster consortium that aired the debates for the federal election made an arbitrary rule that only parties with elected members got a seat at the debate table. All the other registered parties were left out. And a new party gained a seat for the first time in that election.)
And an organized political party could game this, by telling their members which virtual districts to choose – ask just enough party members to join a district to get 51% in as many as possible.
We did this in Minnesota precinct caucuses, to win more delegates for Gene McCarthy then our raw numbers would have entitled us to. The Lyndon Johnson supporters were quite annoyed at this outcome.
…This makes the assumptions that 1) all members of a minority group would want to vote the same way, and 2) there is someone out there who knows who these representatives “of their choice” are. There are some worthy suggestions on that list, but this one is really problematical.
:: looks at Australian election results ::
Wait. You guys have a Sex Party? Okay, that’s it, I’m moving to Australia.
Um, just a minute. Are they for or against sex?
The Australian Sex Party was formed by the the Eros Association, so they are in favour of sex. They only got 0.09% in the last House of Representatives election, so (in the lower position 
) 99.91% of Australians are more interested in normal politics than in sex. However, in the last Senate election they got 2.04% of the vote – minor parties do better in the Senate because, with proportional representation, they have a much better chance of winning a seat. It would not be surprising if they won a Senate seat later this year.
It’s never going to happen. If a process has political implications, then it will inevitably become politicized.
Should all parties get an equal voice? Does a party with a hundred members get the same voice as a party with a million members?
The problem is that people aren’t binary. If all you had were two groups, you could divide them easily. But you have a voter who’s a rich rural college-educated Black Catholic straight female liberal - which district do you put her in?
That’s why I suggested my system. It lets people self-identify what group they feel they most belong in.
Probably impossible, but Canada does well enough by leaving the redistricting to panels of career civil servants with some public input.
Unfortunately, these aren’t just suggestions, they are the law of the State of California. The reason that the Voting Rights Act compliance section was included is that it is Federal Law. If it hadn’t been included in the California proposition, then the whole thing might have been thrown out. Of course, the Voting Rights Act is currently being challenged, but as long as it stands, then any system for determining districts will have to ensure that it doesn’t revive historical discrimination against certain groups of voters.
I personally think that this new California system is a great idea, I voted for it, and I’m eager to see how well it works in practice. Hey, now we’ve got a chiropractor (among others) determining our district lines.