# US House - solutions to gerrymandering **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 31, 2016, 5:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546 "2016-08-31T05:39:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 8:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/21 "2016-09-01T08:57:18Z")
> [@Itself](#): > > Come to think of it, I actually like the idea above about grouping people by their social security numbers (or some similar arbitrary criterion). It’s as defensible a grouping as any other, and it would make gerrymandering impossible. Ouch! That’s the way to ensure, in a state where one Party has a 52-48 overall advantage, that _the majority Party wins **every single** seat_. Refer to the previous thread on gerrymandering, or the one before that, or the one before that. The more one considers the drawbacks of various district-drawing schemes, the more one prefers a proportional representation scheme. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/22 "2016-09-01T17:29:56Z")
One solution is to do away with districts entirely. There’s no particular reason why my political priorities should be similar to the priorities of someone who lives near me. Statewide runoff voting where a representative is elected once he gets X votes, and additional votes waterfall down to the next candidate (you’d need a mechanism to decide whose votes get counted first, but there are plenty of fair ones to choose from) would do away with gerrymandering _and_ would result in the vast majority of people actually being represented by someone they voted for, rather than the current system where slightly less than half of voters are represented by someone they didn’t want elected. ---
**Author:** ![Itself](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/d07c76/32.png) [@Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Itself)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/23 "2016-09-01T19:57:58Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > Ouch! That’s the way to ensure, in a state where one Party has a 52-48 overall advantage, that _the majority Party wins **every single** seat_. Refer to the previous thread on gerrymandering, or the one before that, or the one before that. Right: It would effectively mean that we choose Congressional delegations at the state level, mostly from the same party but weighted according to the population of the states. It’s certainly not great— it has same effect of concentrating representation in a single party as gerrymandering— but at least it’s fair. > [@septimus](#): > > The more one considers the drawbacks of various district-drawing schemes, the more one prefers a proportional representation scheme. Yeah. If the goal is, as in your example, to have a 52-48 split in the electorate reflected in (the closest equivalent to) a 52-48 split in the delegation, there’s really no way to do that beyond a proportional representation scheme. What exactly is the point of Congressional districts, if not to try to enforce proportional representation in a clumsy and easily subverted manner? ---
**Author:** ![Itself](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/d07c76/32.png) [@Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Itself)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/24 "2016-09-01T19:59:00Z")
> [@UDS](#): > > If the group has nothing in common, though, where is the value in grouping them at all? Once you get to that point any objection to multi-member districts or even one huge multi-member district basically evaporates. Yeah, and that’s why I think the proportional representation is a much better system. But we’re stuck with this one, unfortunately. ---
**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/25 "2016-09-02T01:38:01Z")
> [@Itself](#): > > Yeah, and that’s why I think the proportional representation is a much better system. But we’re stuck with this one, unfortunately. Just as a matter of interest, and speaking as an ignorant non-USonian, why are you stuck with it? Is there a constitutional requirement for first-past-the-post single-member districts? Or is it just so Hallowed By Tradition that more rational alternatives are simply beyond the pale? ---
**Author:** ![DagNation](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ee7513/32.png) [@DagNation](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DagNation)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 6:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/26 "2016-09-02T06:21:17Z")
> [@UDS](#): > > Just as a matter of interest, and speaking as an ignorant non-USonian, why are you stuck with it? Is there a constitutional requirement for first-past-the-post single-member districts? Or is it just so Hallowed By Tradition that more rational alternatives are simply beyond the pale? A little from column A, a little from column B… I think another huge component is entrenched interests, specifically the 2 big parties. The 2 big parties benefit a lot from not having much competition except each other. Our federal-state system also produces other types of entrenched interests. In the presidential race, at the electoral college vote allocation level, if states were to change from winner take all to proportional electoral votes, it could be bad for the individual state and it’s residents. Splitting the electoral vote might dilute a swing states voters relative importance. For a large “solid” red or blue state splitting the Electoral vote could cause an unfair disadvantage for the states majority party. For instance, if CA were to split it’s reliably blue 55 EC votes, that would give around 25 to republicans. If Texas were to do the same thing, the effect would be reversed. If every state does it, that might be a good thing, but it is generally not a good thing for an individual state to change from a winner take all to a proportional system unilaterally. There are lots of other ways entrenched interests resist change, and other places where coordination among different groups would be required to make the change, and it is difficult to get all those parties on the same page at any one time. I am not an authority, and I don’t want to make stuff up. So,I’m sure someone else can tell you what parts are in the Constitution and what parts are fed vs state law, and what is tradition. It is a mixed bag for sure! ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/27 "2016-09-02T06:53:03Z")
It’s not entirely tradition. It’s control. If an unfair system got the present bunch in power, why would they change the unfair system? ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/28 "2016-09-02T15:20:57Z")
Federal law requires single member districts. However, that does not bar a state from using something like runoffs or a single transferable vote to elect those single members, instead of FPTP. ---
**Author:** ![boffking](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/858c86/32.png) [@boffking](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/boffking)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/29 "2016-09-02T15:23:44Z")
> [@Itself](#): > > You certainly can’t divide an arbitrary connected state into a bounded number of convex districts; take _n_ line segments meeting at a single point, for example. > > I’m not quite sure what the grouping criterion is supposed to be for districts. If it’s having similar political opinions, then we might as well group a hypothetical 60% Republican and 40% Democratic state into three 100% Republican districts and two 100% Democratic districts. If it’s having similar political interests, then geography isn’t a good proxy for that; it’s hard to claim that a single 20-year-old working a minimum wage job and a married 50-year-old business executive with kids in college have similar interests just because they live in the same town. > > Come to think of it, I actually like the idea above about grouping people by their social security numbers (or some similar arbitrary criterion). It’s as defensible a grouping as any other, and it would make gerrymandering impossible. Please tell me how a “single 20-year-old working a minimum wage job and a married 50-year-old business executive with kids in college” would have suddenly have similar interests if they both had the same pattern in their social security numbers? Your plan would still lump unsimilar people together, but now they wouldn’t even have the commonality of living in the same town. ---
**Author:** ![Flyer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/flyer/32/7298_2.png) [@Flyer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flyer)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2016, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/30 "2016-09-03T00:36:25Z")
> [@Itself](#): > > This is a political problem, not a technical one. Dividing voters into districts fairly is not inherently difficult. There are all sorts of clustering algorithms out there that will impartially solve the problem without making overly large districts. More simply, you can take a north-south line, start at the western edge of the state, and sweep eastward until you reach enough voters. Repeat the process and you get vertical slices of the state, all with the same number of voters, determined perfectly impartially. If you insist on having a commission redistrict the state by hand, you can at least insist that they be reasonably compact with respect to some objective metric, e.g., diameter (i.e., the largest distance between two points in the district). As **Trinopus** said above, you can require that districts be convex: the straight line between any two points in the district also lies in the district. This is a beautiful example of why redistricting is such a complex problem, and why simple solutions are sometimes very bad. Colorado, for example, is roughly 275 miles from north to south. So each district would be 275 miles long. That’s not exactly compact. And along the Front Range, which is where the majority of the state’s population is, I’m guessing that a district would be maybe 7 miles wide. That’s a result that’s very nearly as absurd as the worst example of gerrymandering. ---
**Author:** ![Some\_Call\_Me.Tim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@Some\_Call\_Me.Tim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Some_Call_Me.Tim)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2016, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/31 "2016-09-03T05:31:10Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > _There is a simple solution that requires no constitutional amendment or such, just the will of Congress:_ Base seniority on how much of the vote a Representative gets. The committee member with 68% vote will get the Chairmanship, not the one who got 52%. This creates a specific _disincentive_ to typical Gerrymandering. How is this a disincentive? If some states gerrymander and some do not, the representatives with the highest % would typically be someone with a ‘packed’ district. So, with typical gerrymandering under that system, committee chairs would be mostly from those states that gerrymander (though selected from the minority party.) So it would come down to a choice between not gerrymandering and getting no committee chairs at all and typical gerrymandering and getting committee chairs chosen from your state, albeit of the ‘wrong’ party. I expect that most states would prefer the second option. So that looks to me like a positive incentive to gerrymander. ---
**Author:** ![Itself](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/d07c76/32.png) [@Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Itself)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2016, 6:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/32 "2016-09-03T06:27:51Z")
> [@boffking](#): > > Please tell me how a “single 20-year-old working a minimum wage job and a married 50-year-old business executive with kids in college” would have suddenly have similar interests if they both had the same pattern in their social security numbers? Your plan would still lump unsimilar people together, but now they wouldn’t even have the commonality of living in the same town. That’s my point: If we’re going to have districts determined by something as useless as geographical proximity, we might as well make it completely arbitrary and random. It’s just a ineffective at solving the problem of mimicking proportional representation, but at least it’d be impossible to game the system. ---
**Author:** ![Itself](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/d07c76/32.png) [@Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Itself)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2016, 6:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/33 "2016-09-03T06:30:01Z")
> [@Flyer](#): > > This is a beautiful example of why redistricting is such a complex problem, and why simple solutions are sometimes very bad. Colorado, for example, is roughly 275 miles from north to south. So each district would be 275 miles long. That’s not exactly compact. And along the Front Range, which is where the majority of the state’s population is, I’m guessing that a district would be maybe 7 miles wide. That’s a result that’s very nearly as absurd as the worst example of gerrymandering. Why is having a 275 mile long district inherently problematic? (We could mitigate the problem by choosing a different direction to travel along, but that’s not really the point we’re talking about.) It’s not like there’s a single polling station for the entire district. I don’t care about whether the districts are geographically compact per se; I care about whether politicans are deliberately drawing them to rig the vote. ---
**Author:** ![DagNation](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ee7513/32.png) [@DagNation](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DagNation)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2016, 7:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/34 "2016-09-03T07:19:42Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > Federal law requires single member districts. However, that does not bar a state from using something like runoffs or a single transferable vote to elect those single members, instead of FPTP. I wonder if overlapping districts are allowed - I have read about “at large” districts in some states where re-apportionment gave them an extra seat, but the new districts were not approved yet. _I think_. In those cases the “at large” seat is a state wide election. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2016, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/35 "2016-09-04T04:06:34Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > There is no such thing as non-partisanship in the US. Such a committee might believe itself to be non-partisan, but at least one party will insist it is not, and it probably isn’t. We don’t believe in draws, only winners and losers. And when we lose we insist it’s because the other side had an unfair advantage. I’ve heard the assertion that there’s no such thing as non-partisan many time on these boards from US posters, but somehow other countries manage to build the assumption of non-partisanship into their governments. It’s an interesting example of a major political-cultural difference. For instance, in Canada federal elections are under the authority of the Chief Electoral Officer, a non-partisan position. The current Chief Electoral Officer was chosen by the unanimous vote of the House of Commons, which contained four or five parties at the time of the vote. He was clearly seen as non-partisan by all parties. ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2016, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/36 "2016-09-04T15:49:50Z")
Likewise in the UK. These are the sort of people we have to supervise the process: [http://boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/about-us/the-commissioners/](http://boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/about-us/the-commissioners/) Would they have no equivalents in the US? ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2016, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/37 "2016-09-04T16:47:00Z")
Regarding “non-partisan” commissions: In the olden days, voters/citizens fit roughly a bell-shaped curve. There were many near the middle who might feel no particularly close allegiance to either Party. Even if they were nominally (D), they might have a friend with very similar views who was ®. Nowadays, American politicians and commentators occupy a sharp bimodal curve — the middle has been eviscerated. Is this polarization true of citizens in general? It seems that way. A careful study of the correlations and other details in a political survey might answer that question. Does the Pew survey make its raw results public? ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2016, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/38 "2016-09-04T17:24:07Z")
> [@PatrickLondon](#): > > Likewise in the UK. > > These are the sort of people we have to supervise the process: > [The Commissioners | Boundary Commission for England](http://boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/about-us/the-commissioners/) > > Would they have no equivalents in the US? Whim would one or could one trust with such a responsibility? ---
**Author:** ![penultima\_thule](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penultima_thule/32/3833_2.png) [@penultima\_thule](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/penultima_thule)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2016, 5:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/39 "2016-09-05T05:52:44Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > Whim (sic) would one or could one trust with such a responsibility? So all these much vaunted “checks & balances” are really blocks & obstructions? As with our cousins in UK & Canada, Australia seems to manage quite OK with an independent commission, in this case the [Australian Electoral Commission](http://www.aec.gov.au/Electorates/Redistributions/)proposing electoral boundary changes (termed redistributions) > [@](#): > > A redistribution is required when: > •the number of members in the House of Representatives to which a state or territory is entitled has changed (population change) > •the number of electors in more than one third of the electoral divisions in a state (or one of the electoral divisions in the ACT or the Northern Territory) deviates from the average divisional enrolment by over ten per cent for a period of more than two months, or > •a period of seven years has elapsed since the last redistribution. ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2016, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546/40 "2016-09-05T06:53:02Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > Whim would one or could one trust with such a responsibility? You’ve got to trust someone. Define the job and the performance standards properly, and it’s not that difficult to develop professional capabilities that become self-reinforcing (assuming they don’t already exist in public service), and whose application is sufficiently transparent to make any malfeasance obvious. You presumably have professional civil servants, at some level. You have strong academic institutions producing geographers, sociologists, historians and judges: those skills can all be applied to this sort of task. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-house-solutions-to-gerrymandering/764546.md?page=3)