Yes.
OPs, however, do not.
Well, that was cool.
To make my original OP short, gerrymandering (which everyone thinks is a bad thing) arose because it was thought that legislative districts should reflect communities, with the lines drawn to match community boundaries as much as possible. That has long since been abused to create the bizarre districts we see now.
It would be a lot simpler, and would end the abuses, if district lines were drawn a geometric shapes (straight lines), that ignore community boundaries. But that would mean that communities are no longer represented.
Personally, I have no problem with that. Hell, it would probably be a good thing if legislators had a represent a divergent group of people.
But what do you think? Do communities have a right to representation?
Sua
Sua:
What happened to your OP?
I think I know what you’re getting at, though. Clearly States have a right, as per the Consititution, to representation at the federal level. Below that, I’m not aware of anything in the Constitution guaranteeing any other “group” of representation as a group.
It’s funny that you would post this, though, as I was thinking about it recently. If we assume that communities do not have a right representation, as a community, how does one go about drawing legislative districts objectively? I would look at city, town, or county lines. Although one might argue that those boundaries, especially county boundies, are not objectively drawn in the first place. And some cities are too large for only one district.
My thinking is that the boundaries have to pass the stink test. Does it look like a contiguous, roughly normally shaped area (ie, length and width not outrageously disproportionate)? Or does look like a stinking salamander? No offense to salamanders.
In California, it got so bad that some folks were proposing laws that districts had to be convex!
Trinopus
What do you mean by “communities”? I don’t have a problem with districts reflecting a community based on residence, even if the boundaries aren’t pefectly straight lines. All sorts of other government districts already have boundaries, most of which aren’t perfectly straight- police precincts, school zones, zip codes,
etc. Using some of those boundaries as district boundaries shouldn’t be a problem. A lot of things people expect from local legislators are local- for example, the firehouse nearest my house was supposed to be closed. The people expected the local politicians to help in trying to keep it open and they did. At least part of the reason for the peoples’ expectations was because those politicians represent this community. They don’t represent a long, thin district that stretches from one end of Queens to the other. Or a district that’s mostly in Brooklyn with a little piece of Queens thrown in because of the straight lines . So they’re not worried that the politicians will ignore our firehouse closing and instead focus on a problem way on the other side of the district. Or that they will pay more attention to the problems in the larger Brooklyn part of the district and ignore those in Queens.
It would also be pretty difficult to ensure the populations of all districts were roughly equal in number.
How would this be possible? If a district is convex, would not the neighboring district have to be concave?
Arbitrary boundaries (whether geographic or geomentric), drawn with a “blind eye” to community representation, would presumably be permanent: the features that dictate them–geography and geometry–don’t change. But communities do change, so I think the current system is best in the long run. Otherwise, you’d have to move the communities to reflect the representation, rather than moving the representation to reflect the communities.
Gerrymandering, so named for the politician Elbridge Gerry, began as a way to force additional candidates for their party (“Jeffersonian Republicans”–called “Democrats” today) to be elected in Massachussetts’s state senate. A political cartoon appeared in the Boston Gazette of March 16, 1812, outlining a “new kind of monster, the Gerrymander”.
Ever since, “gerrymander” is an insult. It refers to drawing political boundaries in order to unfairly and unethically ensure that a specific political party retains or gains a certain number of seats in an election.
As an aside, under an order from the Indiana Supreme Court, Indianapolis’s Common Council will have non-gerrymandered districts in 2004, for the first time since there ever was a Common Council.
The districts would be adjusted each census time, but the lines would remain straight.
Sua
But if you have to adjust the districts at all the question of how to adjust them will come into play (e.g., whether to move the north-south lines or the east-west lines, and how much to move either or both of them). Those with an interest in where the boundaries fall will still find a way to try to manipulate them to their advantage.
Convex means essentially ‘bulging outward, not inward.’ The mathematical definition is “a line drawn between any two points in the shape doesn’t go outside the shape.”
By these definitions a square is convex.
re convex, Shade caught it for me; thanks!
Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment… Let me argue that neighborhoods, by having something in common, will tend to vote in a particular way. You have a neighborhood that’s largely black, or Irish, or Jewish, or elderly, etc. You have people geographically close to one another, thus reachable in mass by broadcast advertisement. They are susceptible to persuasion by demogogues – preachers, talk-radio hosts, self-appointed special interest spokesmen, etc.
Both of these effects undermine the principle of “one person, one vote.” If I’m a Republican in a heavily Democratic neighborhood, my vote will never have any weight.
So why not assign everyone in the state to a district at random? This would absolutely guarantee that every vote is equal to every other vote. I would never know for sure that I’m in the minority, and I would be immune from persuasion aimed at my geographic vicinity.
Does a neighborhood have a right to representation? It doesn’t say so anywhere in the constitution!
Trinopus
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No, I don’t think communities have, or should have, a right to representation.
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It’s really the wrong question.
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The problem, IMHO, is that democracy is undermined when representatives choose their constituents. It’s supposed to be the other way around.
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I’m all for district lines being drawn by some arbitrary mathematical method.
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That said, I see nothing magical about straight lines, or convex shapes.
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The way to go, IMHO, is by maximizing the total compactness, if you will, of the districts. Let me go into detail:
You probably know that, after each Census, they calculate the USA’s population center. So far, so good?
For any proposed redistricting, you could calculate the center of population for each district in the same manner. Then you could calculate how far from the center of their district each person was*.
Then you’d choose the redistricting plan that minimized the sum of the squares of those distances, subject of course to the criterion of equal population in each district. That would give you your maximally compact districts.
*Actually, given how Census mapspotting works, the ‘location’ of each person would be the center of their Census block. At least until we start using GPS to locate households, which we ought to be doing in the next Census.
Some of the most hotly debated issues I’ve ever experienced in my local government career have been around election district maps. Not only are you supposed to examine population, but commonality of interest. No one is ever happy, and someone ends up losing their job. Every damn time.
Hard ball politics at its very hardest.
I want my local representatives to deal with local issues. If we have random districts the local representatives will be picked by people who don’t know much about him/her. I know about the people running in my local election. I don’t know much about the people running in the local election two towns let alone two districts away. The way to get around that would be by each person having a personalized ballot, so my district is random for state and national issues but my district is geographic for county and local issues. Speaking only from a concern for privacy this is a bad idea. I think that it violates the principle of the secret vote.
I used to live in the suburbs of Washington DC. My voting district was drawn there to match the roads, the population being dense enough that roads were a good delineator. I now live in upstate NY. My voting distinct looks like it was designed by sugar-high 4-year-old trying to draw an octopus. It’s done this way to handle the population non-density (so I’m told).
Let’s assume that you divided Congressional districts (for one example) by arbitrarily-drawn geometric shapes with approximately equal populations. You had no care for other, pre-existing boundaries or grouping. Show me a map of CT, or worse, NY, that manages to do that. Because of the very unequal population densities and strange shapes of the states, I doubt these would pass the “smell test” for most of us. They may look almost as bad as the gerrymandered districts we have now.
Also, many communities will have district lines running right through the middle of them. This gets directly to SuaSponte’s point. This is “bad” because why should my neighbor across the street have a different Congresscritter than I do? We likely share a number of concerns, which differ from the concerns of the folks on the other sides of our respective different districts. These (more-) local concerns are not going to be represented by our supposed Representative.
Just off the top of my head.
PR.
paperbackwriter, no matter how the districts are drawn, there are going to be a bunch of roads with district lines down the middle. If that’s the thing that bothers you the most, then you have to ask yourself what scheme for drawing district lines will minimize this.
Just a minor detail FWIW – fact rather than part of the argumentation.
Under SCOTUS guidelines as presently understood, districts for Congressmen (House members) must be as close to numerically equal as is possible – a good faith effort to accomplish a close approximation to numerical equality must be demonstrated. Districts for members of a state legislature must approach numerical equality under the “one man, one vote” doctrine, but may vary from each other by as much as 15% where the variance is based on following legitimate and traditional community lines. E.g., (using hypothetical numbers) if the Washington State Senate has X number of members, and the 2000 Census says that this means each member should ideally represent 136,280 citizens, the fact that Spokane County is about 7% under that figure and Pierce County is about 5% above that number is no bar to having a State Senate dictrict consisting of just that county in either case, since the obvious intent is to maintain the representation of a traditional political subdivision. But structuring a district including heavily Democratic precincts in Tacoma and Seattle and a one-township strip connecting them, with the idea of giving the Republicans a majority in the other seven districts from King and Pierce Counties, would be illegal gerrymandering.