That would be SNTV (single non-transferable vote). And for some states, that would be better than what they have now.
Well, it might not work in California. We could do party-list, maybe. (Not that California should even be a single state now. It’s a legacy of the Spanish Empire and the Gold Rush, and its present boundaries are not derived from anything in present demography.)
So go back to the principle that districts should reflect something on the ground. If that’s a self-selected group of ideological believers voting party-list, fine. If that’s a racial tribe organized by race-conscious rulers, well, maybe that’s not constitutionally fine in this polity (so why have “majority-minority districts”?). If that’s an administrative district that has to be governed as one, that’s fine too.
But throwing me, my three pothead neighbors, and racist Mormon dude down the street together, and saying, “Pick a representative of y’all,” certainly doesn’t represent each of us as thinking persons. Any purely arbitrary grouping for partisan advantage is just a party picking its district; that’s backwards.
I do understand what that means, in fact I lived in the country where that was the electoral system. But that goes so completely against the US system of voting for individuals, not parties, that I didn’t realize that’s what was being proposed.
At least 48 states already have people vote for parties represented by individuals (he said smugly from one that doesn’t).
But PR or whatever wouldn’t have to, officially, have parties; it only has to have slates. Obviously in practice it would be a slate of Democrats versus a slate of Republicans, but that doesn’t have to be enshrined in law.
That’s a false equivalence. Things like police and firefighting services are based on geography - they have to deal with things like patrol radii and response times that are non-issues in political representation.
In my opinion, it would be a worse system than we have now. Instead of having the voters chose legislators, you’d have political parties choosing them. Which would mean legislators would place the interests of their party above the interests of the electorate.
What difference would there be between a slate and a party? They’re both just a group of people with a common political platform. The fundamental divide is whether the electorate gets to directly choose its representatives or whether those representatives are chosen by party/slates.
Neither. Political considerations should be entirely irrelevant to redistricting, as they are by law in Iowa.
The goal of redistricting should be to maximize district compactness and contiguity and to respect pre-existing city and county political boundaries. These goals are amenable to precise mathematical measure and bring secondary benefits to the political process.
For example, suppose you are relatively unknown and want to mount a grassroots political run for Congress in the grotestquely shaped Illinois 17th district. It includes a long string of Mississippi River counties, a few suburbs of St. Louis, a narrow strip of inland farm country, some parts of Springfield, and some random bits to the south that I don’t know Illinois well enough to recognize. Where do you go? What do you do? Want to get out and meet some voters? Well, you’d better like driving or flying, because you’re going to do a lot of it. Want to do some media buys? You’ll need to cover a lot of markets, and most of your money will be wasted, because most people in (for example) Springfield don’t live in your district. But enough do so that you have to advertise there. Gee, this will make campaigning awfully expensive. How nice for incumbents!
As a byproduct, compact districts will usually be more competitive than grotesquely shaped districts drawn to protect incumbents and maximize partisan advantage. But that is a byproduct, not the goal.
Well, not just them. If you’ve got 50 seats to fill, then a party only needs to get 2% (or less, depending on how you round) to get representation, so you’d probably see a huge surge of third parties.
And Ohio had a measure on the ballot this year to create an “independent” and “bi-partisan” commission to redraw the maps, but one of the constraints they would have been under was that no district was allowed to have a partisan lean of more than 5%. Which would have required crazy “rurban” districts, and would have turned any small majority into a large majority. Thankfully, it failed, though I suspect most of the people voting against it did so for silly reasons.
I gave an example of one election because I thought it would be an extreme example that illustrated the dynamics, not realizing that you would dig in against the plain facts. But the same fundamental issue applies with any number of seats.
Suppose there are 300 seats at stake and 2 parties. Party A wins 200 seats, with an average 60-40 margin. Party B wins the remaining 100 seats, also with the same average 60-40 margin. When you add up the totals, Party A got 53.3% of the total vote, and 66.7% of the seats.
To the extent that the average margin is closer than 60-40 the disparity becomes even more pronounced.
I am not claiming that no gerrymandering has been at work there, and it’s clear that gerrymandering in general can be very effective. That’s not open to discussion.
But the point - and pay close attention here - is that not all the disparity in outcomes can necessarily be attributed to gerrymandering, since a good portion is frequently due to the nature of winner-take-all voting districts.
I agree with all this, and have not been discussing any case in which the percentages are reversed.
You really don’t understand gerrymandering if you think it has anything to do with geography like you’re describing. The purpose of gerrymandering isn’t to create big twisty districts so candidates have to travel a lot - quite frankly, that’s a silly idea. The purpose is to either gather together or split up groups of political partisans. The boundaries of Illinois’ 17th district weren’t drawn so somebody would have to drive further - they were drawn so pockets of Democratic voters in Decatur and Sterling could be added to the Democratic voters in Rock Island, Moline, and Quincy.
Oh, I see. You want to acknowledge that gerrymandering is effective, while simultaneously handwaving it away because it’s just IMPOSSIBLE to tell what effect gerrymandering had.
A good portion, eh? Frequently, you say? Are you going to back that claim up in the context of House results, or is it simply your assumption?
Duh. My point is that the evils of gerrymandering go above and beyond distorting the partisan balance. If a state is 55-45 D, I can draw some horribly cockeyed maps that preserve that balance, and they would still suck. Requiring those who draw districts to focus on compactness and boundary integrity provides an independent benchmark and an alternate focus to partisan balance.
Also, while partisan advantage is the primary driver of gerrymandering, incumbent protection is often a strong secondary consideration, especially when one party doesn’t control the governorship and both houses and bipartisan “compromise” is required.
In fact, in the overall 2012 election, the Democratic Party received the majority of the votes in House elections, but a minority of the seats in the House of Representratives.
This is an extraordinarily unusual occurrence. It had not happened in a biennial House election since the 1996 election (and that was a very, very close election.) If it happened before 1996 it was a very long time ago.
The fact that it was so lopsided does say that there is most likely something going on with gerrymandering, but what were the turnouts in safe GOP states? There were a lot more completely safe GOP states than blue ones, at least that was the perception even though that wasn’t the reality. It could be that those who thought the “Swing” states were highly contested turned out in greater numbers than in the completely safe states, thus making the Democratic Congressional vote appear bigger, since the so-called swing states voted pretty darn blue, and with a large turnout (AFAIK).
Just what I said, no more and no less. My first words on this subject were:
That is all.
My post followed a post by you in which you commented on the situation in Ohio in 2012, in which the Republicans got 52% of the vote and 75% of the seats. And my observation was and is that while gerrymandering can be a factor, it’s a mistake to automatically attribute any and all imbalances of this sort to gerrymandering, and that other factors can also be in play.
No.
I’m not. It follows mathematically, as I’ve repeatedly demonstrated.
Sounds like gerrymandering was probably a factor. I was not commenting about the 2012 house races in aggregate, and was unaware of the facts you mention. I think there’s no reason to doubt that the Republicans in the House gained by gerrymandering, since they controlled most of the state governments in the aftermath of the new census.
As above, I was making a general comment, which was triggered by a circumstance described by Moidalize in which the majority party won an even bigger majority of seats.
That said, there’s another factor that could (also) explain part of the congressional discrepancy, that being a disparity in turnout due to GOTV efforts. Suppose the Obama campaign had a very superior GOTV process (as many have claimed) then he could have produced a much higher Democratic turnout for non-competitive congressional races (with the primary goal of producing presidential votes) than the Republicans did in their own non-competitive congressional districts.
But again, there’s no reason to assume that there was not gerrymandering at work. Gerrymandering goes back to the origin of this country. Everyone plays the same game.
[OT: I remember a comment from a political analyst during the Bush-Gore post-election battle. At that time, the Republican-controlled FL legislature signalled that if the court-ordered recounts produced a Gore victory, they would simply vote to disregard the popular vote and send their own slate of (Bush) electors (this is within their rights, to the surprise of many). And this analyst said that the Republicans in FL had been held down by gerrymander for a very long time, and this engendered a lot of bitterness on their part, and they were thus inclined to take a hard line once they finally gained control.]
