[sheepleherd]

You (and everybody else) don't understand what I mean because you haven't thought about it as much as I have.

By what principle do you think districts should be drawn--they must be redrawn due to shifting population--so do you intend to draw exaggerated patterns to spread out minority opinions, or to clump them together? Or are you suggesting that you flip coins topologically? What if flipping coins results in a salamander of some sort, you want to use soap films to find the minimum enclosing surfaces? "Mathematically neutral" methods of drawing districts will result in some parts of the country randomly enhancing minority opinions while other parts of the country will randomly diffuse them, with results that will lead partisans to complain bitterly.

My point is, there IS NO RIGHT ANSWER. There is only your preference.

[JadeNB]

> You (and everybody else) don't understand what I mean because you haven't thought about it as much as I have.

Even if true, this is surely the least civil way, and one of the least convincing ways, to state the fact.

> My point is, there IS NO RIGHT ANSWER. There is only your preference.

That seems to be a different claim to:

> any creation of voting districts is a Gerrymander

(which you said above). Two reasons why:

1. As slavik points out, a gerrymander is, by definition, intentionally (not incidentally, accidentally, or unavoidably) unfair.

2. More importantly, "all district-drawing schemes are unfair", while probably true, does not mean that they are all equally unfair, or that we should give up on seeking fairness. It seems rather like http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm .

[newjersey]

I've presented a pretty terrible solution before and I'll say it again to illustrate a point.

Let's say we make the whole nation into a single constituent district. Now, every voter will cast one vote for one representative and the top N candidates with the most votes win.

This is a terrible solution but even this is better than what we have today which i hope goes far too show how bad the system we have today is...

Systems design should strive to make it resistant to corruption and try to not rely on the goodness of people making correct/impartial choices.

(I am fully aware of my hypocrisy when I claim to support democracy around the world except obviously {{}} can't be in government. I hope that this just shows that I can't even trust myself to be correct/consistent/impartial.)

Bottom line is that every vote within a jurisdiction should be equally equal regardless of geographical location. It might lead to people we don't like getting elected but that shouldn't dissuade us. However, I have to agree with President Obama in this -- the only way to effect any change here is to get people involved in very large numbers. Get people to move to these safe districts. I can't see how we can accomplish change here with the levels of apathy we have...

[sheepleherd]

The situation with supposed gerrymandering is more subtle than you give it credit for, and you therefore are either hopelessly naive about voting constituencies, or you would soon see on inspection that your "impartial system" would utterly fail.

To try to forge a simple example to illustrate it to you (and yes, this is spoonfeeding to an HN audience who refuses to do the work themselves when downvoting is so much simpler): people interact with their neighbors and they squabble with their neighbors and there are many more factions on a myriad of issues than even a multiparty system can allow for. But neighbors unite over many issues, like "we don't want a sewage treatment plant here", or "we need more parking".

If you have a "system" that does not give local people a loud voice on local issues, your system will be overturned in favor of one that does. For instance, the American Revolution and the Brexit are the same basic issue: people far away should not be deciding our local affairs.

So now that your system's been overturned, we have a system of local districts... but local districts are filled with people who do not agree on all issues...

It's all gerrymandering, there is no such thing as not gerrymandering, including in the mathematically degenerate cases of Athenian (or New England town meeting) democracies. Factorial of 0 has to be 1, because...because... "gerrymander"

[Aelinsaar]

Surely believing that you, of all other people (many billions of them!) only you have "thought about it" enough? That strikes me as a delusional belief to hold.

[sheepleherd]

first of all, oh come off it, when I said everybody else, I meant "everybody else here on HN who is downvoting me and not balanced by upvoters in my corner, and since anybody can upvote and only a small faction can downvote, we are talking a serious tilt". (In a microcosm of the larger gerrymander debate, your studied obtuseness on this issue is forcing me to spill a lot of words to explain a notion that should be obvious to you, but I apparently am the only one amongst you and me who is thinking about that.)

But to your point(less), considering the world population, I've looked, I've googled the gerrymander topic hard; and I've tried to engage the wikipedia "talk" community in hopes of finding birds of a feather, people actively interested in the issue. (You give it a try, I am the only one saying it... Oh wait, it's much easier for you to avoid learning anything and just to drop a tart comment.)

I am certain that many others (still a tiny minority of the planet) have noticed that when you draw district boundaries that you must inherently advantage some and disadvantage others; a subset of those notice more sophisticated political things about it, and a tiny subset probably notice that it is a deeper d(N-color geographic map projection onto a hyperdimensional Venn diagram problem)/dt.

But that notion does not filter out. The concept of a "gerrymander" is very dear to the hearts of relatively sophisticated people (unsophisticated people don't know the word). I imagine it's not taught properly in political science curricula.

My claim is, there is no way to draw legislative districts that is not a gerrymander (unless you adopt the non-standard definition that a gerrymander is any drawing that is not geometrically compact/convex)

The original Gerrymander political cartoon: it was a clever rhetorical point, I'm in favor of cleverness and rhetorical flourish.

Further noticing that all districting is political, ideological, or doomed to be rejected by an outraged populatce, I don't know how clever that is, but I can't find anybody other than me who has noticed it and stands up and says it.

[omginternets]

I think people are reacting to your tone. In terms of content you may well have a point: is the drawing of district lines sensible in the first place?

[sheepleherd]

False. My "most parent" comment attracted downvotes well before any of my other comments. I went to edit it to improve it but I think downvotes turn off the edit button or something (not much time had transpired). So what exactly did you find objectionable about my tone there? My guess is I "Socratically" challenged the firmly held beliefs of pinheads that they are politically and intellectually sophisticated when they are simply not; you should not defend the mob.

In terms of your suggestion about not drawing district lines at all, I can (seriously) see no merit to it at all. That could be because while you could have made an actual argument for your point, instead you simply stated it as I did in my post... I guess according to your comment calculus I should accuse you of not following the tone that we prefer and downvote you?