[dragontamer]

So the question is if "Minimizing Efficiency Gap" is what we should be aiming for.

Its a solid proposal, but I guess its up to the courts to decide if "Efficiency Gap" is a good metric. I guess I'll be interested in hearing the arguments as they come up.

[bloaf]

I'm not sure I like the name "Efficiency Gap" but the metric of "require the overall district results be within a certain range of the popular results" seems pretty straightforward to me.

I've always thought they should just reverse the order of operations. Instead of having people draw the districts, then machines evaluate them, they should have machines draw a bunch of potential "low efficiency gap" districts, then let people pick the best ones.

[mathfan2]

The main takeaway from the article is that sometimes there is a trade-off between nice geometrical shapes and proportional district results.

If a machine gave you a crazy-shaped district map because that's the only way to get "low efficiency gap", would you agree to them?

[bloaf]

Why not? My issue with districts are that they are not representative, not that they look weird. The only "real" issue with crazy districts is that the administrative costs might be higher (i.e. they might require more polling places.)

[sova]

How often are districts able to be redrawn? The same crazy shaped map that is valid in 2020 may not be very good in 2025 or even 2021.

[dragontamer]

Districts are always redrawn every Census, as it has been for hundreds of years.

[sova]

I see. Thank you. Considering the Census: Voter distribution and Voter Mobility are probably socio-economically determinable factors (numerically speaking) since the state legislature or whatever body is responsible for redrawing the lines gets access to the census data [per obligation of their task] that is, "age and race" ... I'd like to point out to friends from around the world that the United States census questionnaire is rather unsightly when it comes to the section entitled "race" [0].

[0] https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/2010questionnaire.pdf Page 2 question #6.

[cousin_it]

It seems to me that a system with zero efficiency gap would be equivalent to one big election with proportional representation. If that's what people really want, why talk about voting districts at all?

[yxhuvud]

Something that you can do is something like we have here in Sweden - we have a district setup with some places for each district that is proportionally distributed.

But that create inefficiencies as that heavily favour some parties. So we have a chunk of undistricted delegates that are given out to even out the overall proportionality. This get you pretty good results as long as the amount of parties stay within reasonable boundaries[].

[] Which they of course haven't - we currently have 8 parties in the Riksdag.

[dragontamer]

Because certain issues are geographical in nature, especially at the local level.

Should a new highway replace the housing development over there? Well, people who live close to that housing development might care one way or the other (Noise complaints, Ecological issues, Traffic Issues). People who live very far away from that center probably don't care at all. And the people who live in the housing development (who will be forced to move out), especially renters who probably won't be properly compensated, will care the most.

The placement of schools, the budgets of police, the design of zoning regulations (in particular "Enterprise Zones" of lower taxes to encourage business development in some areas)... these all are innately local issues.

[bloaf]

If I had to guess, I would say that there is at least some benefit to having politics be local. That is, it may be better to ask people to choose between a small number of "local" candidates, rather than a large cohort of state-wide candidates.

[djrogers]

You're either thinking about this too broadly, or as a system filled with static entities. Within voting districts, politics is local - individuals can sway voters, voters can decide to show up/skip voting, etc.

Also, the concept of a 'blue/red' district can be very blurry - there are many examples of 'blue' districts (districts with democrat congress reps, and a history of voting blue) that voted red in the last presidential election, and vice-versa for previous elections.

Historically, Americans prefer to vote for people, not parties.

[rjsw]

Do people in the US have the same feeling for what area is 'local' as they did when districts were drawn up ?

[xr4ti]

>So the question is if "Minimizing Efficiency Gap" is what we should be aiming for.

100% agree. I think this can be further broken down into the questions:

(1) What are the problems caused by extreme gerrymandering?

(2) How will efficiency gap minimization alleviate these problems?

(3) What assumptions are we making in (2)? How likely are they to be true? And how robust is the solution to their falsification?

(4) How could this all go catastrophically wrong?

My intuition is that efficiency gap minimization is an incomplete solution and probably should be only one of several factors considered.