I would recommend the OP watch this video on gerrymandering. Unfortunately, the links at the end don’t work, due to YouTube removing notifications. But you can still find the videos pretty easily on the guy’s channel. It’ll give you a full idea of what the problem is.
BTW, the independent council method isn’t necessarily the best, because it’s possible for the council to not be so independent. But it’s better than any bipartisan solution, which will result in keeping the incumbents in power. A better solution is using math with an open algorithm. (It may be off by accident, but it will only be off randomly, not in any one side’s favor. So it will statistically balance out.)
And the most accurate results are actually gathered through reverse gerrymandering. Just hire someone to gerrymander the districts so that they match the preferences of the voters at large. This works perfectly assuming you have perfect data on which side has the political data.
Or you can just get rid of first past the post voting and have ranked voting, using an instant runoff method. But he covers that in a different video.
I doubt it will be as full as the complete 538 series on the topic from a year or two ago, or the many articles I have read, which go into detail on the lawsuits in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the controversy over the independent commission in Arizona, the many decades that Thomas Hofeller spent refining his methods, etc., etc. Sorry, man: it’s just not a case of “if he just knows the information, he’ll see the light”. I know all about it, and I disagree with you. It happens!
ETA: I do like ranked choice voting, but not straight up IRV which has weird effects. No voting method is immune to perverse outcomes or gaming the system.
Politics definitely ain’t beanbag. So you ain’t-beanbag it in ways that take on the power of the other party. You don’t ain’t-beanbag it by taking aim at the voters themselves. And that’s what gerrymandering does.
I’m good with not-beanbagging politics in all sorts of ways. Impeachment. Killing the filibuster. Statehood for DC, and PR if its residents want it. Increasing the number of Justices. Passing voting rights laws that outlaw, in Congressional elections at least, all of the manifold tricks that Republicans use to exclude likely Dems from voting.
What all these not-beanbag things have in common is that none of them work to the detriment of the people themselves. To me, that’s a really important distinction. YMMV, and apparently does.
I’d prefer Democrats use a majority to make the system as genuinely representative as possible and then enact laws that prevent it from becoming unrepresentative again.
My first goal is to abolish gerrymandering on a national level for both national and state politics.
If that cannot be done, then I agree with OP. We democrats need to gerrymander the hell out of whatever we can.
One reason this is a good idea (aside from the obvious) is that it’ll motivate conservative politicians and conservative judges to abolish gerrymandering. If the democrats bring a knife to a gunfight, then conservative politicians and conservative judges will have no incentive to ban guns (as a metaphor). But if the democrats bring their own guns and conservatives start to suffer casualties then they’ll be more open to stopping that tactic.
Basically unless conservatives start to feel the pain of gerrymandering they will have no incentive to abolish it. As long as conservatives benefit from but never suffer from gerrymandering they’ll have no incentive to oppose it.
Yes, one often finds that politicians are all for systems that work out in their own favor regardless of whether it represents the overall will of the people. Thank you for providing another example of why gerrymandering is bad.
The anti-gerrymandering folk seem unaware of how difficult it is to “draw districts fairly.” Indeed the term has no clear meaning. One suggestion that’s been made at SDMB is for purely random districting, e.g. based on the last two digits of SocSec number! (This is the way to ensure that a state with 51% Red overall and ten districts will have all ten be Red districts.)
Here’s a specific example of why “fair districting” is an ambiguous term to start with:
The hypothetical state Trianglia is 60% Blue, 40% Red; it’s shaped like a Triangle, is entitled to three members of Congress. Exactly one-third of the population lives in Triangle City which is 90% Blue. The rest of the state is a fairly uniform mixture of small-towns, suburbs and rural and is 55% Red, 45% Blue.
How should this state be divided into three districts?
Residents of Triangle City have common concerns so it may seem logical to make it one district, and split the rest of the state into two ex-urban districts. This will lead to one blue Congressman and two Red Congressmen. In a state that’s 60% Blue.
OTOH, since Triangle City is at the center of the state, it would be easy to district so that each of three districts get 1/3 the City. Now there will be three Blue Congressmen, each winning comfortably 60-40.
Which is the “fair” way?
This is not just a “hypothetical” example. In fact the heavy concentration of Blue voters in Cities means the Reds get automatic gerrymandering for free! The Reds would still get more Congressional seats than their vote warrants even without “deliberate gerrymandering”!
The real solution is some system based on proportional representation. Lacking that, all we can hope is to pick the lesser of evils. Since, as shown in the example, the R’s have a naturally gerrymandered advantage even without explicit cheating, I would consider it un-American and unpatriotic for the D’s not to improve districting to offset such “natural gerrymandering” when they have the chance.
What’s natural or automatic about drawing district boundaries along urban/rural lines? That we’ve all been told that for most of our lives is evidence of how pervasive gerrymandering is, not that it’s natural or unavoidable. We could draw districts to be as geographically compact as possible (still with equal populations); make it as easy as possible to travel to your representative’s office or town hall meeting.
Yes, let’s be eager to end gerrymandering. Which side would benefit if we did? Americans.
Drawing districts to be as geographically compact as possible would, in fact, put the district boundaries along urban/rural lines. To use septimus’ example of Trianglia, the most compact districting possible would be to draw a circle around Triangle City, of whatever radius is needed to encompass exactly a third of the state’s population, with a line dividing the remainder into two parts.
Rather than nonpartisan commissions, I prefer semiarbitrary competition.
For example, you set up a way to score district maps. 50% of the score comes from an efficiency gap measure, and 50% of the score comes from a compactness measure. That’s the semi-arbitrary part.
The competitive part is this: the party that won the most votes in the most recent election submits a map to a judge, who scores the map according to this semi-arbitrary, transparent measure. The party than won the second-most votes has one month (or whatever) to submit an alternative map. If their map scores at least 10% higher than the map submitted by the dominant party, theirs is the map used. If it does not, the dominant party’s map is used.
I don’t think there’s any way to get venality out of the system. Nonpartisan map commissions are going to turn partisan over time. But a competitive system operating according to semi-arbitrary rules can turn that venality into a virtue, by encouraging people to create the best maps they can, out of fear that if they don’t, their opponents will.
That would give you one small district and two very large ones. Carving out one (or a few) districts by party (or urbanity, or whatever) and then saying “and we’ll just divide up whatever territory is left over” is pretty much the definition of gerrymandering.
One small district and two large ones is not compact. The large districts count, too.
If the city in Trianglia has a large enough population relative to the rural areas, while separating out the city and dividing the rest would give one geographically small area and two geographically large ones, it would also give one large population area and two small population areas. The one thing that’s relatively clear about the situation is that you can’t do that; districts need to be similar in population.
An additional issue is that the interests of the city may be genuinely different in some areas from the interests of the rural areas. The city, for instance, has an interest in spending money on public transportation within the city and very little interest in spending it on back roads in the rural areas, while the rural areas have an interest in keeping all those back roads in decent shape and, partly because in order to get to the city they probably have to drive anyway and partly because they may not go to the city often, little interest in paying for the city’s subway system. The city has little obvious interest in paying for health clinics in the far corners of rural areas, while those living in those corners have a strong interest in not having to travel all the way to the city for health care when they’re already feeling terrible, and in not having to travel all the way to the city to support an ill family member/friend who’s in need of such care. Et cetera. If districts each contain a chunk of city and a chunk of rural area, and the populations of each are relatively similar, then some attention will be paid to everyone’s issues because representatives will need to attract some of each group; if districts are separated by city and rural areas then there will be representatives of each set of interests in the legislative body; but if districts each contain a chunk of city and a chunk of rural area but in each or most cases the relative balance of city and rural residents in the district is strongly unbalanced in the same direction (say if each of three districts is 75% city dwellers and 25% rural dwellers), then one set of interests is likely to be ignored entirely.
So no, it’s not perfectly simple to draw the district lines. What is however entirely clear is that drawing them in order to strongly favor one political party goes against other reasons for drawing the lines in particular locations. Its entire intention is to have the result be that one set of interests can be ignored entirely.