How were congressional districts allocated originally in the first election(s)?
Was Elbridge Gerry a dick?
Was he a brilliant strategist?
What would a fair system look like?
Get rid of districts and move to proportional representation.
Your title contains two independent questions: can we make a fair system, and can we do away with gerrymandering?
The second question is clearly true–there have been many proposals for algorithmic selection of districts. Here is just one example of many (the “shortest splitline” algorithm). You plug some basic parameters into a program and it gives you the boundaries.
Is it fair? Well, it is certainly resistant to tampering, since anyone will get the same result from the same input. But the Voting Rights Act has a goal of preventing minority voters from being a split in a way that denies them political power. An algorithm probably isn’t going to take these factors into account, and through sheer bad luck may end up splitting cohesive groups. That’s not particularly fair, and certainly illegal.
That said, an algorithmic approach would probably be a net win, and perhaps one could make a system that avoided the problem with minority groups, or reverted to an independent commission if there were a problem.
There is no simple solution. Note that one proposal — assigning voters to districts based on a random criterion like SocSec number — would just ensure that a state with 54% Decmocrat voters would have 100% of its Representatives be Democrat.
Assigning districts by geography made more sense when geography was more important. But these days a couple that lives in District 7 might commute to Districts 8 (husband) and 9 (wife) while their children attend a private school in District 10. At work, the man spends most his time dealing, via Internet, with a client or agency in District 13.
I’ve thought representation by “guilds” might have merit — a representative for doctors, another for teachers, farmers, and so on. Obviously that won’t happen.
I think an individual state could do this, if it so chose, under existing law. Or is there an Amendment or Federal Law which dictates dividing a state into districts?
The constitution is mum on how representatives are chosen from a state, as long as they actually live in the state, been a citizen for seven years, and are over the age of 25.
[QUOTE=US Constitution, Article 1, Clause 2]
No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.
[/QUOTE]
It just happens that every state has gone with districts and First Past The Post voting. Nothing in the constitution requires it. Now, there is a lot of caselaw around how those districts can be drawn, but as far as I can tell (I am not a constitutional scholar) nothing prevents a state from going to a proportional representation system legally. Politically the two parties involved probably like the system just the way it is.
This really belongs in IMHO, but only proportional representation has a reasonable chance of being fair. My original home state of Pennsylvania has 18 representatives and in 2014 elected 13 Republicans and 5 Democrats despite the fact that the Dem candidates won more votes overall than the Reps. This is partly due to Gerrymandering, but really the main reason is that the Dems win huge majorities in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and cannot win suburban and rural areas.
PR would likely result in the rise of third parties (Greens, anyone, maybe Bernie type Social Democrats) and that might not be so bad.
One doesn’t need much mathematical intuition to guess that a 13-5 split against the majority party is very strong evidence of deliberate gerrymandering.
Perhaps you’ve never looked at the actual districting map. Here in red is Pennsylvania’s 7th District. Does that look “compact” to you? An analysis found it the least compact Congressional district in the nation. And yes, it snakes through territory that logically could be assigned to the 1st, 2nd, and 13th districts, yanking away some GOP voters.
[Pennsylvanaia has] 13 Republicans and 5 Democrats despite the fact that the Dem candidates won more votes overall than the Reps. Think about it.
Maybe we could create virtual districts. Just declare there are 435 districts and then let everyone decide which district they wanted to be in when they register to vote.
The advantage of this system is that any political faction which gets up to around 350,000 voters should be able to organize itself into a congressional district. And everyone in that district would be there by choice. Nobody gets gerrymandered and nobody gets stuck with a Congressman they didn’t vote for.
May not be a perfect, easy answer, but things could be considerably MORE fair. Simply require that districts be as compactly drawn as possible, with possible adjustments to reflect clear governmental entities - such as a town/county border. Rare exceptions might be appropriate to protect minority groups - with a proviso that no deviation from compactness must defended as NOT primarily for party affiliation.
I think PR would be fairer except for the chance to vote for a specific person. Under virtual districts, a group with more than enough votes to take one district could try to self-gerrymander and take 60% of several districts instead of %100 or one or two.
Would this be first-come first-served? If I were the organizer for Party X, I’d allocate my voters 360,000(*) each to a select list of districts and urge them to register very quickly. (With phones ready for countermeasures as the Party Y organizers pick their districts.)
(ETA: * - or rather 360,000 * (1-A) where A is a voter apathy parameter — we don’t need to “over-stuff” the district since most voters will sluggishly take whatever’s left weeks later. The parameter A is rather large.)
One way you could handle that issue is to not initially limit the size of the district, and then once everyone’s chosen a district, have a several month grace period where you are allowed to move your district if you’re in a large district, but only to ones that are below the threshold, which will then be electronically monitored in real time to make sure it doesn’t go over by too much. If you’re in a small district you can’t move until the next election cycle. If you’re in a large district you can choose to remain if you want to even though your vote is diluted.
How does that work? What’s the law vs the goal of the law? Do courts get to decide?
There are several problems with proportional representation that make current first-past-the-post look amazing by comparison.
First, most PR processes start (obviously) with a party publishing a list. The higher you are on the list, the more likely you get elected, no matter how badly your party does. So the key effort of the politician is to suck up to the party brass, not his constituents. Your major players in the legislature will be the politico nerds that were annoying in university student union.
Second, it encourages splintering and many small political parties with singular focus. If PR became the method, you can bet there would be an anti-abortion party, a pro-gun arty and an anti-gun party, and a “build a wall and send them all back” party. Each of these would be garnering about 5% to 10% of the vote from voters across the state who placed that particular issue top of their priority list… Plus, possibly, ethnic or religious parties. a Libertarian faction in congress and a Texas independence party. The classic example of these is Israel, with Italy a close second. IIRC Italy went to partly first-past-the-post elections because of this problem…
Which brings us to the third problem. If you think the stalemate in Washington is bad now, wait until you have 15 parties arguing over details. And of course, half these parties are focused on one issue, and will trade almost anything else to get progress on their pet issue. For example, there is no bus service at all in Jerusalem on the Sabbath, even though the vast majority of Israelis don’t care that strongly about the Sabbath - why? Because the price of the support of those last 10 or 15 Knesset members is strict enforcement of adherence to Jewish law. (Mind you, it’s a bonanza for the Arab taxi drivers that day…)
The logical and ideal way to apportion districts is to start by seeing which areas/groups/towns/neighbourhoods should be considered one unit. Start with grouping those, then adjust boundaries back and forth until populations roughly balance. adopt some simple rules, such as “no thin peninsulas, no islands”; You should not have a situation where a quarter of East Podunk votes with Smallville 30 miles away, and the rest is its own district. Basically, just common sense.
The problem with this approach, of course, is allowing discretion depends on the altruism of the deciders. Computerized matching will result in some split communities.
Moved to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I think that whatever Iowa is doing looks like a good place to start:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2013/08/gerrymandering_jigsaw_puzzle_game_put_the_congressional_districts_back_together.html
Maybe because it has so few districts, it is not as complex as other states. Still, it looks a lot better that any of the states that follow.
What about uncapping the 435 congressperson limit and instead just adding districts for every new 600k people (or whatever the smallest state pop is)? That would certainly make states like PA more representative of the voter pop.
This is a problem with Closed List, not PR itself.
If there are enough voters for whom these are the top priorities, to elect members, why shouldn’t they have a voice?
Can math and geometry be used? How about, to start with, every state is divided up geometrically into about 100 or 1000 (or any number, really, provided it’s sufficiently large enough) equal area segments, and those segments are clumped together to provide roughly equal-population districts. So urban areas have just a few dense segments for its district(s), while rural areas have great big chunks of dozens of this mini-segments together, with some algorithm providing some unbiased randomness to smooth out the edges. Or something like this.
Districts with lines and borders will always be skewed. Population moves, geography changes, and people are dicks. I agree with a proportional representation.