Are the voters in CA distributed in such a manner so as to make the impact of gerrymanding significant?
Each province has an independent commission draw up new riding boundaries every 10 years See the Elections Canada webisite for details.
There’s nothing really mechanically preventing ‘independent’ commissions from trying to gerrymander in favour of one party or another; its just part of our political culture that independent commissions are (mostly) independent and (mostly) non-partisan.
They’re involved because it’s not considered “cheating” in the circles where the districts are drawn. There’s a genuine view that it’s a completely legitimate perk of winning an election in xx10.
That’s why it’s so hard to change.
Just as a data point:
In Ohio in 1982-1990, Democratic candidates got 51% of the vote and garnered 51% of the seats in Congress.
In 2012, they got 48% of the vote, but only 25% of the seats. The four Democrats won easily (67.8%, 72.5%, 72.6%, 100%).
The main differences between the 1982 and 2012 maps are:
-The number of districts declined from 21 to 16.
-Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) used to have 2 districts to itself, and shared a 3rd. Now there’s a sliver of the obscene 9th District in Cuyahoga, which runs along the lake shore all the way to Toledo; the SW suburbs ended up in a new district that a Republican (who, to be fair, was an incumbent in an eliminated district) won with 52% of the vote, and the east suburbs to a district covering the NE corner of the state. Cleveland is in a district that stretches down into Akron.
-Western Cincy used to have its own district with 2/3 of Hamilton County. Now it’s split between two districts, each with extra rural counties pasted onto them.
-Columbus and Franklin County used to be split between 2 districts. Now the city proper is its own district, and the remaining portions of Franklin County are split between 2 large districts.
-Summit County (Akron) used to pretty much have its own district. Now it’s split between 4 districts, one of them the “Cleveland district,” and the other shared with Youngstown (both easily Democrat).
I don’t know what the best solution is, but the status quo seems pretty ridiculous to me.
Not denying that gerrymandering is effective, but it’s a mistake to assume that the number of seats won should be proportionate with vote count.
Romney got about 48% of the vote and 0% of the presidential positions.
In general, the victorious party gets a higher percentage of the seats than their vote percentage. (The same would be true of you looked at this year’s senate races.)
That’s a dumb argument.
Yeah, because of gerrymandering.
Huh?
It’s not a dumb argument and it’s not (all) because of gerrymandering, and if you calculated the total vote percentage won by Republicans in US Senate races this year, it would be higher than the percentage of seats that they won.
Think about it. Or if you’re math challenged, ask someone to help you.
Holy shit, really?
The Atlanta Falcons scored 47% of the points yesterday and got 0% of the win. Obviously, NFL games should be worth 4 wins so that Atlanta could have at least gotten one of them.
The same math applies to sports as well. For example, an NFL team that scores on average half as many points as their opponents will not win half as many games as they lose. No gerrymandering involved.
The idea that NFL games should be worth 4 wins etc., is silly, of course. But the interesting thing is that it’s actually consistent with your own posts, which are pushing the point of view that a party should have seats proportionate to their vote share. I’m the one saying the opposite.
So you not only don’t only understand the issue, but you don’t understand your own position.
A statewide election selecting one candidate is an entirely different thing than 16 separate races in different parts of a state with a heterogeneously distributed population. If the 16 districts had been drawn randomly in a state that’s roughly 50/50 in party affiliation, what do you think the odds are of a 12-4 result? I’m betting it’s pretty remote. But if one side draw the districts to their advantage? Now it makes more sense.
Seriously, you’re going to look at this map and tell me that a state that had only three competitive races at best didn’t have its results grossly skewed by gerrymandering, AND try to claim that “In general, the victorious party gets a higher percentage of the seats than their vote percentage” with nothing whatsoever to support your claim? Get that nonsense out of here.
The problem you’re missing is not that the percentages are different, it’s that they’re reversed.
I wholly agree getting 55% of the vote should not mean you get 55% of the seats; it’s a FPTP system. But in this case, the Republican Party did not just get a greater number of seats than their vote pecentage; they got a greater number than the party that got more votes. That’s a distinctly different phenomenon.
It is worth asking if this phenomenon is due to random chance, as it fact it could be (the sports analogy would be a team that gets a winning record despite being outscored over the course of the series or season, which does happen) or the result of the game being unfair. Since we know for a fact that gerrymandering happens, is it not worth questioning its effect?
Assuming you mean Canada, and not California… well, this question is still veryh ard to understand. I think what you’re asking is whether the voters in Canada are distributed in such a manner that gerrymandering COULD be significant, if it happened, which it does not.
The answer, at least in some places, is that of course it could be. Especially in Ontario, which has over 100 seats up for grabs, you could gerrymander the living hell out of the map if you wanted to and could doubtlessly get some very different results than what we’ve seen. That’s especially true in the heavily populated areas in the southern part of the province, where party preference can vary heavily from neighborhood to neighborhood and the three major parties have distinct areas of strength. It would have been quite possible for the provincial government, if it directly controlled riding boundaries, to dig up some more seats for its federal counterpart.
I find it incredible that an honest person with a reasonable command of Ohio’s geography could look at a district map of Ohio and not conclude the map is ridiculously gerrymandered, and organized in a fashion to ensure an unfair result. Conversely, a riding map of Ontario, if again you know the geography of the place, looks about as logical as it possibly could.
Neither. Both of those are based on the idea that “different groups” are the fundamental unit, and the question is how to distribute them (to the political advantage of the group controlling the districting). Both approaches are gerrymandering.
An example of something that could or could not be considered gerrymandering under our system, depending on how you look at it, is how Saskatoon and Regina’s federal ridings were divided up very recently (until the latest revision set to go into effect for the next election) - the cities were split up into “rurban” ridings that took a quarter of the city and then extended vast distances out into the prairie to make up the population requirement. For the last few elections, this virtually guaranteed a conservative (or Conservative) win, although the cities themselves were tilted heavily in favour of the NDP and Liberals - Ralph Goodale being the only person to break up this pattern.
Both cities could easily have supported two, two and a half completely urban ridings by themselves but the way these were drawn up shut out other parties. In the most recent boundary review, Saskatoon is getting three entirely urban ridings, and Regina two, plus one that’s mostly urban but stretches out into the south-east (if I’m not mistaken). I’m definitely not suggesting that the original boundaries were drawn for the benefit of the Conservatives (and I’ve voted for just about every party federally, so there’s been times when it’s been in my “favour” and times when it’s been not), but it was a curious way of drawing them, and it definitely had a major influence on who Saskatchewan sent to Parliament.
This. If I live on a city block with three potheads and a racist Mormon, it’s not like we all vote the same way or make a coherent voting block.
That is quite curious, inasmuch as here every effort is made to make urban areas their own riding without stretching them into rural areas. Almost any city in Ontario I can think of that is roughly the size of a federal riding is coterminous, or close to it, with its riding boundaries, incluidng:
Kingston and the Islands
Oakville
Burlington
Guelph
Saint Catharines
London, which is worth about 3 ridings, has 3 ridings, none of which spread very far. There’s very little “rurban” drawing that I can see, unless the town just doesn’t have enough people in it (A problem mostly in the north.) Ontario’s only real problem is that it’s underrepresented, as a result of which a lot of the urban riding in the GTA are crazily big; one in Brampton has over 200,000 people in it.
I would agree “rurban” districts are weird. The Tory MPs involved in the redistricting are unhappy. Well, too bad; urban/rural splits just seem to make sense. Regina and Saskatoon are distinct sociogeographical entities.
If you look at a map of Ohio… I mean, it’s fucking comical. There is no logic or sense of fairness at all. It’s insane. OH-11 is one of the most naked examples of outright election-rigging known to man.
So what do you feel the goal of districting should be then? You have to have some goal, otherwise every proposed plan is equally valid.
[emph. added]
This right here is the problem. “You have to group the voters somehow.” We “have to” have legislative districts.
Well, at the state (province) level, no, we don’t. We could in theory elect every state legislator at-large using proportional representation (PR). You want someone who represents your local community? Get yourself a local government that actually has to take responsibility for that community, leave the legislature to represent the whole state!
How’s this for a rule of thumb? Don’t draw some “district” designed merely to group voters together if you wouldn’t use it as a district for executive purposes. If it would be an inefficient police precinct, fire district, or municipality, don’t pretend it suddenly makes sense as a “district” for electing legislators.
Ideally, I’m not sure there should even be legislative districts that aren’t being used as practical districts for governing. And yes, I’m aware of Reynolds v. Sims. It doesn’t preclude electing representatives at-large through PR. With the argument that legislators represent people rather than landmarks, it practically argues for PR.
I don’t know, states with multiple Congressmen might still have to have Congressional districts, rather than using PR to select their Congressional delegations. But if you change the state legislature, you change the people who draw those lines.
No, I think it’s just you.
Why on earth would you want every single legislator to be of the majority party? Why not just elect one guy to be the “legislator general” then?
The former is usually impossible anyway, and just majority/plurality overrepresentation. Each legislator would actually represent a subset of his “constituents” and have a class interest in working to keep the unrepresented minority party down, probably through terror. Such a system tends to support domestic terror, secret police, and so forth.
So of the two, the latter.
How exactly do you propose to elect 30 or 60 or 200 (depending on the state) legislators at-large using proportional representation? Is it the top 200 vote-getters? That ballot is going to be fun to look at. What will be the vote count for the 200th legislator - 0.1%? Now THAT’s representation.
Apart from the fact that campaigning in the whole state is orders of magnitude more expensive, for each candidate, than campaigning in his small district.
I don’t think you understand what proportional representation is. You don’t vote for individuals. With straight PR (there are several systems that sometimes get lumped in as proportional representation, some accurately, some less so), you just cast one vote for a party, and each party has a ranked list of candidates. If there are 50 seats and a party gets 48% of the vote, candidates 1-24 on the party’s list are elected.