On Gerrymandering - do communities have a right to representation?

Interestingly, we have already had an experiment to address this issue, in the U.S.

Originally all city councils were elected as representatives of wards into which the cities were divided. Tammany Hall, of course, became a watchword for political corruption with its control of the wards through the various bosses, but most cities had some difficulties with power games and setting ward boundaries.

In the middle of the 20th century, a number of cities chose to reform their politics by abolishing wards as political entities and electing all councilpersons “at large,” so that a general election was held and the top x vote getters became the city council, without repect to the districts or wards where they lived.

Whether this has actually resulted in fairer politics at the city level is, of course, a matter of debate. Some cities have returned to the ward system in order to restore representative government while other cities with wards continue to look at a change to the “at large” system, so there is no clear consensus among the body politic.

However, one aspect of the origins of the “at large” system is interesting to contemplate: the first great swell of cities abandoning the ward system occurred in the South at a time when it appeared that blacks would get the vote and use it to obtain representation on the councils. In cities with a 40 percent black minority, moving to the “at large” system allowed the 60% white voting population to provide enough votes across the city to ensure that few or no blacks got elected. (This backfired, later, of course, when enough white flight gave the majority votes to blacks, but I find the original intent interesting to consider.)

Hmmm.

I’ve thought about this question a couple of ways from time to time, and wondered about two conflicting solutions, given the level of sophistication of todays demographic databases and communications:

1 - Maybe we could define an algorithm that would objectively draw districts, using rules that everyone can agree are neutral WRT to the political interests involved. What I would have in mind would be somewaht more sophisticated than simply saying “geometric shapes”, but in essence reflects a similar philosophy.

The rub is that you probably just have to accept some of the oddities that would fall out of it, like you and your next door neighbor being in different districts because, well, that’s where the line wound up.

No matter how you try to “tune” a mechanistic technique, it’s going to draw some districts that seem silly by some criteria that the mechanistic technique did not take into account. Convincing people that the “silly” districts are a reasonable tradeoff to avoid manipulation of boundaries for political advantage might be a hard sell.

2 - Everybody elected at large, as alluded to above. This appeals to me, actually. Districting on the basis of geography in such a way as to place like communities or interest groups together seems to me to be naive in today’s world. Most people are members of SEVERAL interest groups. You may be of a particular race. You may be gay, straight, or consider your sexual orientation to be your private business, and a repugnant thing to politicize. You may be of a particular nationality. You may be of a particular religion or be vociferously anti-religous. You may have interests particular to your profession. None of these neccesarily map to geography.

It seems to me that if you have a large enough group of represenatives to be elected, it would be interesting to allow the candidates to DEFINE their constituencies. If enough farmers, gay people, Lithuanians, or whatever felt that it was of paramount importance that there be a represenative belonging to their group, and the bloc was large enough, some candidate would step forth saying “I will faithfully represent the interests of commercial fishermen”, or what have you, and the bloc could get the rep in. With a large number of reps, such a bloc does not have to be anywhere near a majority. Its members just have to consider that status important enough to unite with all the other members of the bloc.

Regarding “at large” experiments that have been tried - It seems to me that the outcomes of “at large” systems might be different now in a world with better communications, where it is much easier for the candidate’s message to reach the group it is intended to appeal to.

Heinlein once suggested a system of affirmative constituencies, where you “enrolled” for a given candidate that represents your views. This is somewhat akin to at-large voting, but instead of two partisan slates, it would be something of an every-man-for-himself program. If, say, Barney Frank chooses to represent the stance of liberal gay Democratic voters, then 450,000 liberal gay Democratic voters or so nationwide sign up to choose him as their congressman and be his constituents. If Tom DeLay opts for conservative Republicans with a taste for enforcing “family values,” 450,000 of them sign up to be his electorate. And so on. When a candidate gets his “quota” of voters, he’s deemed elected, and his candidacy closes. This way everybody has a congressman who represents his views. Partisan interests are still served – if you favor, say, John Smith, and so do 2,000,000 other voters, his party HQ can say, “well, OK, Smith’s quota’s complete, but look over the records of Frank Brown from South Dakota, who stands for pretty much the same things as Smith. If you approve of him, we’ll put you down as his constituent.”

There’s something to be said for community representation. But when districts start getting over 100 miles long and/or linking two major cities 80 miles apart, the principle of contiguity that attmpts to ensure that a constituency is somewhat homogenous has already been thrown to the winds. My own congressman now represents counties on three sides of Raleigh, but not the city itself – two other districts divide it and sprawl out from it in the remaining direction. Some new system is needed, and I’m not irreversibly wedded to any one system (though I like the one described in the previous paragraph).

The At Large only candidates are an interesting premise. I wonder how it would work with the purely local concerns across large distances.

I live outside a small village. In the village there is a pond, call Goose Pond because lots of Geese live on the pond. Some of the local businesses sell “Goose Pond” stuff (key chains, sun catchers, real goose down pillows, etc). Part of my local town tax goes to purifying the drinking water used by the village (but not all the surrounding people) from the various wastes – part of which are caused by multi-generations of geese who live in Goose Pond. I don’t use that water supply. However, the town wants to raise my town tax to increase water purification. Several of the people who live outside of town are saying: don’t raise the taxes, kill some of the geese instead. Several of the business in the village say killing too many of the geese will hurt what little tourist trade they get and they pay taxes too.

Getting to the on topic part of my post, I do not see how At Large candidates would address this kind of concern. This is a purely local issue. The people three town away has no stake at all in who is paying how much to purify water and how much tourist trade my village gets. Nor do I have a stake in weather a Wal-Mart will provide a good tax base and provide new job or put current local business people out of business.

Only using At Large candidates seem to be a good idea, or at least on worth looking at for cities and suburbs. I don’t think that it will work with the more rural communities that make up much of the US.

That’s interesting. I had assumed that gerrymandering arose for the good of politicians. I’d be interested in more detail on the history of gerrymandering.

Anyhow, today gerrymandering serves the political class more than it serves the community IMHO. I’d favor steps to reduce gerrymandering. Unfortunately, we are not likely to see reform Reform would have be be undertaken by the very politicians who set up the current system for their own benefit,

Couple more points I forgot to make with the “at large” thing:

1 - It doesn’t preclude a candidate from appealing to geographic constituency, if that’s what they want to do. A candidate for congress in CA, for instance, could run on the idea that they intend to place the interests of Lassen, Siskayou, Shasta and Modoc counties in the forefront. That might get them in, if they can convince most of the inhabitants of those counties to vote for them for that reason, in spite of the fact that it’s a small part of the population, and nobody outside the region will vote for them. It would probably be a popular strategy in the more rural areas which are likely to be convinced to vote on such a basis.

2 - For it to be workable, you would have to have some way of distributing your vote - “vote for no more than six”, say, perhaps with the right to cast multiple of your votes for a single candidate if you wished. Gives you some way of trying to obtain a balance of your interests in your representation. A gay voter from Carmel could, then, for instance cast one vote for the guy running on a strong gay rights platform, and one for the lady running primarily on a “Preserve the California Coastline” agenda.

Gerrymandering isn’t inevitable in the quest to represent commnities. Iowa has a non partisan redistricting commission that seems to work quite well for them. The link below describes its priorities and procedures.

http://www.legis.state.ia.us/Central/LSB/Guides/redist.htm

Quick summary:

After each census is conducted, a 5 member commission is establish to help in the preparation the new district maps. One member is chosen each by the majority and minority leaders of each house. The 5th appointed by the other four to act as chairman. they submit a map to the leg which they can only vote up or down on. if that vote fails, then the plan is sent back to the commission for another go. If the plan isn’t adopted by the third try, the leg is on its own. The leg is put in a position where it hurts to be really partisan so they often just go along. gives Iowa more competitive house races than ny, California and a couple others combined (I forget the complete list).

And you’re right. I even posted a link that described the origin of the term “gerrymander”. It seems to have been very conveniently ignored.

The reality of redistricting is that the majority political party fights like demons to “protect” their majority for the next ten years. Another practice is to carve areas up to “guarantee” that one party will get some areas and another will get other areas. Thus, what happens is that politicians cherry-pick the voters and voters get no choice.