The House of Representatives didn’t get much attention on election night. It started out in Republican hands and stayed in Republican hands, with only a minor change in the number of seats held by each party. There actually was a much bigger story taking place that many people missed.
Many seats changed hands because of gerrymandering. The Republicans gained seats in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and several other states. This was partially cancelled out by Democrats gaining seats the same way in Illinois and Maryland. Because Republicans hold the redistricting power in many more states than Democrats, they get the biggest share of the benefits from gerrymandering. There’s no real difference in how outrageous the two parties are on this issue; both of them will grab the largest number of seats that they possibly can.
I personally find myself caring less and less about which party is distributing my tax money to its favorite corporations and interest groups. However, the prevalence of gerrymandering rubs me the wrong way because it makes every district in these states non-competitive. I believe that Congressmen will do their job better if they have at least a little fear of being defeated in the next election. The most spectacular instances of crime and corruption generally come from politicians who are certain of re-election, or at least think they are.
Several states (for example, Iowa and California) have given the power of redistricting to non-partisan committees. They’re not allowed to use party affiliation, race or religion (and maybe some other factors) when determining district lines. They do need to consider compactness and following existing lines (like county borders, city borders, etc).
Preventing the Census from collecting race information wouldn’t stop gerrymandering. The gerrymanderers use information from the Census, but can use information from other sources as well.
In states where the possibility exists, the voters should use ballot initiatives to take redistricting power away from the legislature and have it done either by committee or by computer algorithm. In other states there are not many options other than trying to pressure politicians. The Supreme Court more or less decided that the federal government won’t intervene to stop the process by allowing the redistricting of Texas to stand last decade.
What keeps these nonpartisan committees from being partisan? Who appoints the members, and how would we keep the members from simply doing what they feel is in their political interest?
Do states with these committees actually have less-gerrymandered districts? Is there a good way to measure this? (I hope the answer is “yes” to both!)
My (albeit limited) experience with use of computer algorithms for public purposes was counting votes for the Student Council for a state university, and … well …
Let’s just say the resulting algorithm was more political than any code I’ve ever seen, and ridiculously complex, probably to hide what was really going on. Software is bad enough; software coded by committee is the worst!
My slight brush with university politics proved that people cheat, even when there’s practically nothing at stake. And they don’t just cheat a little: they cheat emphatically and vigorously.
For California, their selection process is here. In summary, the pool of applications is reduced to 20 Republicans, 20 Democrats, and 20 others by a non-partisan committee of auditors. Then legislative (R and D) leaders get to throw out some of each group. Next, 3 Republicans are chosen at random, 3 Democrats, and 2 others. And those randomly chosen ones pick 2 more R, 2 more D and 2 more others.
The people (and their immediate families) cannot have held public office in some period of years. Presumably, the most partisan ones will have been rejected by the other party’s leaders. And, since the first 8 members as a group pick the last 6, there must be some degree of moderation.
As for how well it worked, the new legislature was just elected. Ask again in a year or two.
Ohio defeated an Issue to to bring redistricting to a committee. Pretty soundly so.
Modern mapping technology makes this process much more viable and it should be pursued.
I am going to guess both of Ohio’s legislative houses have recently been Republican-controlled,
along with the governorship, and that one house or the governorship still is.
That is because although Ohio is a 50-50 general election swing state if there ever was one,
72% of its Congressmen are Republicans. Some of that skew might be due to ticket-splitting.
However, I suspect gerrymandering as well.
This is somewhat similar to an idea I’d been playing around with. Except rather than having super districts, you’d just have the representatives represent the whole state and their vote in congress would be weighted based on the number of votes they get basically percentage of popular vote. So if your state has 3 representatives and the top candidates got 50% 30% and 20% (adjusted to either by normalizing to 100% or using instant run-off) then the top candidate gets 1.5 votes, the second 0.9 and the third 0.6. You’d probably need some kind of maximum (probably 2 or 3 total votes) to keep certain ones from getting too much power and defeating the purpose, so instant run-offs would help with adjusting where someone might reach that cap.
Another possibility, is a combination of these sorts of ideas. Let each county and/or city (might need more specificity for large cities like New York) act as a district. Have statewide elections for representatives, and use the same sort of method for weighting votes except do a winner-take-all approach at a county level.
With modern technology, I really think weighted votes, with some controls, would help a lot since it removes the need to create boundaries to try to get each district having the same number of people. It would probably also make it easier for third parties to get some representation, since winner-take-all favors a major party, but in a state with several representatives, particularly larger ones, it’s not unlikely they could gather enough votes to be in the top.
Hell, if we’re going to weight within the state, we could also weight the states themselves. This way all representation is exactly proportional. You can easily normalize it to any number of representatives (obviously, that’d be 435 if implemented today). There would need to be some common sense adjustments since likely some states would get odd proportions of votes and you’d need to allow for the idea that a state might only get 0.8 votes but obviously needs a whole person there even though his vote is only worth 0.8, and another state might have 10.4 votes and only get 10 people though they’re still weighted at 10.4 total.
I’ve not actually run any numbers on any of this stuff, but I suppose if people are interested I could to see if there’s any major issues that stick out. But if it could work, gerrymandering would be a thing of the past and the census would only be needed to determine how the states themselves should get their weights.
Blaster’s proposal sounds a little like the Dutch system, which I have found intriguing.
The most recent Maryland (my home state) apportionment looks more like the tracings of a money shot than of any coherent plan. I hope the authors had a good time drawing it up.
Could you clarify? How does one make a “political” algorithm that counts votes? I can see how you could make a fraudulent or buggy program for that purpose, but I can’t figure out how politics enter into addition.
After drawing the district, find the smallest quadrilateral that will cover it entirely. Take the ratio of the area of the district to the area of the quadrilateral that lies within the state (to account for cases where the smallest quadrilateral can only be drawn by overlapping with other states). If this ratio is less than a specific percentage, the district is unlawful.
Hell, I’d just get rid of districts and go to proportional representation, but that’s probably just me.