Some of the more unusually-shaped U.S. electoral districts involve linking enclaves of Native American tribal lands, for instance.
If you’re a rare fellow proponent of “I cut, you choose,” howdy . I’ve loved this idea for several years.
But like so many other potential improvements to our election systems, I fear that the powers that be will look at it and say what an old boss once said in response to a similar proposal presented to him: “This is really fair. I hate it.”
Once you’ve got a numerical measure of badness, you can go to my method (another sort of variant on “you cut, I choose”): Each member of the legislature, in order of increasing seniority, gets to propose a map. Then the next legislator proposes another map, presumably one which scores better, and so on. In the end, whichever map gets the best score is adopted.
Personally, the method I figured out to score the maps is the total length of all of the border lines (with a discount factor for where the border lines follow existing municipality or county lines, or geographical features like rivers): The lowest total length wins.
Yes, the chief problem is that currently the Republican party doesn’t want anything to do with a fair democratic system, because then they wouldn’t be able to have disproportionate power, and they’d be forced to try to formulate policy that’s actually in the interests of their constituents
Her random walks through the space can produce as many non-bad maps as you like. You can then choose from those however you like.
It could also simply mean keeping Upper Buttfug and Lower Buttfug in the same district if possible. Or keeping one county in the same district instead of splitting it up over several.
If anyone is interested in Dr. Duchin’s work, she gave a talk last fall aimed at a general audience that covers her work in broad strokes. There’s also some links to her relevant papers for the more mathematically literate.
Parsons Lecture - Gerrymandering, Mathematics and Fairness - Dr. Moon Duchin
That’s pretty good and kind of aligns with my thinking on the subject.
That is why I find the idea of proportional representation anathema -
First, the list is the problem. This encourages that politicians (who do too much internal politicking already) are more inclined to suck up to the head office party hacks than to the constituents they should represent, so as to end up higher on the list.
Second - who’s your daddy? If there’s a country-wide or province-wide party with 25 members in parliament, for example - who represents your district and cares about local issues? Or do you lobby all 300 members in 5 parties to try and get someone to care? Going down to smaller districts kind of defeats the purpose of proportional representation.
Third - prop-rep is a formula for instability. The poster children for instability - Israel (undergoing it’s third election in two years) and Italy (finally stable when it ditched some of the prop-rep) demonstrate the problem. Every single-issue party can probably find enough votes to get a member; so then you set the threshold level too high which disenfranchises a large number of the electorate, which was what prop-rep was supposed to fix. (Most notably Israel did this to lock out the 4 small Arab parties - which the Arabs defeated by amalgamating, making Israeli politics even more complex). Imagine prop-rep in North America - don’t you think there would be an anti-abortion party? How many voters care enough about that as the overriding issue to vote for such a party? Then, as Israel has found with fundamentalist parties, those handful of representatives hold the entire government hostage to their single-issue demands.
Congress has plenary authority over congressional districts and all other aspects of congressional elections (with the exception that states have sole authority, diminished by the various democracy amendments, to decide who can vote). It’s only a political tradition/norm that it not exercise that authority fully. It would be entirely constitutional for it to set up a federal commission to make all congressional districts, and states would have to obey. (States would still control their own legislative districts, though Congress might be able to exercise some more muscle via the 14th Amendment. Good luck with the current Supreme Court though.)
The problem that Italy had for many years (has it been fixed?) was that, no matter who was “in power”, it was the same people. They’d lose a few people at the edges, and add a few people at the edges, and “government would fall”, and they’d get a “new government”, but the bulk remained the same: there was never an effective change like when a Republican President is replaced by a Democrat President, or when the Republicans loose control of the Senate.
Sort of like “whoever you vote for, a politician wins”, only much worse. It’s the reason it was so corrupt, and the reason nothing was ever achieved. AKA “nothing ever changes”.
Rather than trying to prescribe the method, in a top-down way, wouldn’t it make more sense to define fair districting as an outcome? “Districts shall be drawn in such a way that the election of representatives conforms to the proportion of votes cast by the overall population to within margin X,” or some such.
This allows the states to continue setting the specific rules by which the elections are conducted, without any federal dictation. It also avoids a descent into the weeds of choosing one statistical method or another when establishing the initial rules; the states would have to hash this out, but they’d be on the clock in order to comply with the higher-level rule, rather than the open-ended process of deciding on a specific method in the federal law. It’s also adaptable, both over time (as demographics evolve) and by location (as different methods may be more appropriate for different geographies).
Yes, there would necessarily be a drawn-out adversarial process as citizen lawsuits bash away at unfair districting, so it wouldn’t be an overnight solution, but it has a lot of advantages otherwise.
There are ways of managing this. Germany has a fabulously complicated electoral system that is designed to combine single-member districting with proportional representation based on party lists. Common wisdom in Germany has it that this system combines the advantages of both and eliminates the disadvantages, but if that sounds too good to be true, then it probably isn’t. In my view, the proportional representation element clearly dominates.
Germany also tries to avoid the fragmentation problem inherent in proportional representation by having a minimum threshold to be allocated any seats. Parties that get less than five per cent of votes do not get any seats at all, even if the pure proportional representation formula would entitle them to some. That keeps tiny parties out of the system, which is supposed to provide stability. The disadvantage is that it effectively provides bonuses to the major parties, sets up obstacles for newly founded parties and leads to a sort of “closed club” nature of the political system - not in absolute terms, as there have been successful new-party foundations in the past, but it certainly becomes more difficult. Obviously single-member districts have a frequently lamented tendency to entrench a two-party system, but I think they still offer a reasonable chance for locally popular politicians to run and win as independents in their home area.
Israel’s system certainly has its share of problems, but how is that all that different than the anti abortionists holding the whole Republican party hostage? In Israel, when a coalition that had to rely on the RW religious nutjobs is in power, said RW nutjobs hold everyone hostage. In the US, when the party that relies of RW nutjobs is in power, they hold everyone hostage. (So they don’t ban abortion on paper, but they make them essentially impossible to get in Republican dominated states…)
So far Single Transferable Vote sounds most promising to me; but honestly things like the way the Senate is not representative of populations do far more harm to American democracy then gerrymandering
[Moderating]
I think at this point, that a move to Politics is in order.
And that was a direct result of Italy’s proportional representation system. No party ever achieved a majority, so there was never a complete housecleaning. The Christian Democrats, for example, were part of every government coalition from the end of WWII to the mid-80s, when Italy began to change their system.
That doesn’t mean that every p.r. system is equally flawed of course, as countries like Australia, Germany and Ireland demonstrate. However, it does illustrate a potential flaw in how a p.r system gets designed.
This is one of the strengths of first past the post in a parliamentary system. The old government is out, completely, and an entirely new party comes in. That is a strong anti-corruption measure.
This is a naive understanding of what fair districting would produce and a law such as this would make it impossible to draw districts in some circumstances.
Here’s a transcript of interview (you can listen to it at the link as well) from Quanta Magazine with (surprise surprise) Dr. Moon Duchin.
Moon Duchin on Fair Voting and Random Walks
Duchin: Yeah, my group did an analysis of our home state of Massachusetts, and what we found is that particularly in the 2000 to 2010 census cycle, there was actually no way. So even though Republicans get a third of the votes and more here in Massachusetts, even though there are nine seats, your heart may desire a third of the votes to produce a third of the seats, what we found is it’s not only difficult to get a third of the seats to go Republican. It is impossible to get even one.
Duchin: That is a long run of futility. And so at a first level of analysis, your gut feeling that that sure sounds like a Democratic-favoring gerrymander. And when we went to look at that, we were able to prove that it isn’t, that not only is the neutral tendency to get no Republican seats. It’s actually literally impossible. Even, it turns out, if you drop contiguity and you just grab precincts from all over the state greedily for Republicans, you will not find a single Republican district for those voting patterns that I was talking about.
I sound like a broken record, but I strongly urge anyone who is interested in this topic to look into Dr. Duchin’s and the MGGG’s work. Trying to satisfy a gut level sense of fairness without really understanding the problem leads many people, not just @Cervaise, to suggest ‘solutions’ that not only do not solve the problem but also are literally impossible to implement.
You, and many others, seem to take for granted that this is a necessary and good thing now and forever, regardless of how many problems it causes. I am interested to know why. Why do I care if the people across the street have a different US or state representative than I do?
I’m not sure if I’m understanding your proposal, but if you’re arguing that the mapping system should produce certain proportions of members of particular parties, it would lock-in the current partisan distribution by giving perpetual advantages to certain parties in certain areas. My view is that that the mapping system has to be neutral as to parties or outcomes, to ensure that there can be swings in partisan results as the people change their voting patterns. No party should be guaranteed a certain number of seats by the map.
If I’ve misunderstood your proposal, please correct me.