Districting has time and time again proven to be a cat and mouse endeavor. Someone is always going to be able to create models to game the system one way or another. The real solution is abandoning districting for proportional representation like a true democracy. This Vox opinion piece is a great explainer, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/11/16453512/...
Duverger's law isn't the whole picture. Normal FPTP assemblies the size of America's have third parties (see Canada, UK, India).
Some PR countries have strong two party systems (see most obviously Malta).
There is something additional in America that causes a two party system which may or may not continue past a switch to PR because we don't know what it is.
Also, it is good to specify your goals. You might want to make it easier for unconnected people to enter the assembly, or to make it easier to throw out the choice of the primary voters, or literally just a more fragmented assembly. It is easier to come up with useful compromises if you specify your specific objectives because not every system of PR will have any of those goals. Closed list PR with primaries is probably the antithesis of what you want, but it's an extremely common kind and what a lot of people hear when you say "PR".
I've mostly studied USA elections and legislatures. So am ill-equipped to compare, contrast. But being very political, and having run for office and done some policy work, I can comment on our elections.
Over simplistically:
#1 - Our FPTP elections leads to two major parties.
#2 - Our gerrymandered districts (local, state, congressional) has led to increased partisanship. As noted elsewhere, because contests are won during the low-turnout primaries where the motivated base participates.
#3 - Ever increasing campaign costs has led to concentrated influence (power law distribution of attention). Who ever controls the contributions controls the agenda.
#4 - We have city, district, county, state, federal elections. The party system starts at the bottom. Memories are long and defections are never forgiven (eg Nader & Green Party).
Having now done it... Everyone should run for office, at least once. Because most commentary, complaining isn't even wrong.
My goal, always, is to empower, enfranchise people. The various reforms I support increase voter choice and participation. At every level by various (sometimes non-intuitive) means.
While there are a few minor examples of Plurality Voting countries escaping duoploy, they are by far the exception. America's duopoly seems clearly a result of using it.
Proportional representation just shifts the coalition building from the electorate level to the legislative level. It's well known that such coalitions tend to be the smallest majority possible.
You may think for various reasons that it's better to form coalitions at one level of the voting process than the other, but let's not pretend PR avoids it.
The difference is that legislative coalitions don't have to be permanent, the way parties are. Various factions in the legislature can come together for a particular bill, or series of bills on some issue that's relevant to them all. But on something else, they might realign differently. Also, even when coalitions are more persistent, the terms are effectively renegotiated every election - party platforms are much more stable.
American parties aren't exactly permanent tho are they? How many bills have fallen this year because some republican senator wouldn't support it? And I certainly wouldn't describe Trump's Republican administration as pursuing the same platform as Bush II's. Certainly there's similarity but not the stability you imply.
I didn't say that they are permanent. But they change very slowly. More importantly, they mostly change by accrual; you rarely see old polices dropped hastily. Indeed, even for all the Trump rhetoric, the current administration (and legislature) is not doing anything that wouldn't be expected from a Republican government.
The reason why we have so many bills falling through is because of the razor thin margins in the Senate, so that a few dissenters can affect things. But if you look at how votes in legislature went down historically, we're pretty much at peak partisanship - it used to be a lot more common for congressmen to vote across party lines.
You're failing to draw the correct analogy in each case.
> The difference is that legislative coalitions don't have to be permanent, the way parties are.
Just like the parties that make up a legislative coalitions can change, the voters making up a political party can and do change.
> Various factions in the legislature can come together for a particular bill, or series of bills on some issue that's relevant to them all. But on something else, they might realign differently
This happens all the time on individual bills in a two-party systems as well. ("Crossing the aisle".) But the coalitions forming control of the legislative body rarely change except immediately following elections (in both PR and two-party systems).
> Also, even when coalitions are more persistent, the terms are effectively renegotiated every election - party platforms are much more stable.
The analog of a particular legislative coalitions in a two-party system is not a particular party but the party in power. And the platform of the party in power changes dramatically when power shifts from one party to another.
Former US Rep Henry Waxman explains in his book The Waxman Report how Congress used to work, where coalitions were often formed around issues, interests.
There are many other accounts, giving different perspectives, of course. The Politics of Attention and Unorthodox Lawmaking come to mind.
Among the many disadvantages of taking coalition building away from the legislative level (where it is in most democracies) is that it no longer takes more votes to win than to lose. With single-winner districts, a party getting more votes and fewer seats than another party and a majority government can rule with a minority of the votes.
"proportional representation" is a generic term for a wide variety of possible representational systems. And each system has their own advantages and disadvantages. Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but can mean quite a lot in very large states. Other solutions use districts, but have multiple representatives per district, and have a method for apportioning those representatives. These are still vulnerable to gerrymandering, though its effectiveness is less pronounced as the number of representatives per district increases. But apportionment can be complicated. Some of these methods change the way voting works so that you vote for a political party rather than a specific candidate, which comes with a bunch of advantages and disadvantages.
All to say that, while different methods for representation should absolutely be considered and discussed, it's important to remember that none of these are a panacea, and we should be upfront about the nuances and disadvantages of every option.
> Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs.
It's doubtful whether that still exists as anything more than a foil/justification though, given Congress's expansion was stopped a century back, and each Representatives now stands in for at least half a million people (RH has the lowest number of citizens per rep' at 530k) and up to a million (Montana, population 1042520, currently has a single rep'), with the average closing in on 740k (up from ~710 during the last census).
Can a rep' really vouch for the specific needs of 700000 people any more than a proportional delegation would?
It's unclear to me that the House of Commons manages to do that, and they've got 650 MPs for 65 million people (or ~100000 people per MP on average, though the average electorate is lower, and it has very extreme low ends, Na h-Eileanan an Iar has an electorate of under 22k).
The people in CA-8 (Mojave Desert) have very different needs and concerns from the people in CA-12 (San Francisco) even though they represent the same number of people.
Actually, under Open List PR, you could still have de facto local representatives. Someone could focus their attention on the needs of the Mojave Desert dwellers and get elected or not based on their popularity in the desert. PR doesn't prevent people from focusing their attention on geographic regions; it merely creates other alternatives.
> All to say that, while different methods for representation should absolutely be considered and discussed, it's important to remember that none of these are a panacea
Well, other than that more proportional results, by whatever means, seem consistently across modern democracies to provide government with which the people are more satisfied, and also provide a higher dimensionality to the range of political ideas and debate. (See Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy.)
Every options has positive and negative traits, but single-member FPTP districts are about the worst, on balance.
Well, worst would be that plus having districts that don't even try to have similar population, so that the results are even less proportional than you'd expect with FPTP in single-member districts.
The Thirty Thousand project aims to fix the problem gradually by scaling the number of representatives to the population:
> As shown above, in 1804 each Representative represented approximately 40 thousand people. Today, the average population of congressional districts is nearly 700 thousand and growing.
> In order to restore the House to the citizenry, our total number of federal Representatives will have to be increased substantially. Achieving this goal is essential to extending the ground of public confidence in our government and ensuring the beneficent ends of its institution.
> Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but can mean quite a lot in very large states.
The solution to that, however politically difficult, is to break the larger states into smaller ones. New York City, for example, shares very little politically or economically with the rest of New York. Similarly with the various regions of California -- Silicon Valley and Los Angeles are as different from each other as both are from the areas north of San Francisco.
Breaking up the big liberal states has been proposed by conservatives, because they want to get more conservative leg members. We'd need to break up conservative states too. There has been discussion of breaking Seattle off into it's own state or country. That would add a Republican Senate and House Rep, since the test of the state is more conservative, so you have to do a 3 way breakup of WA state. Anyway, these things are all hard to achieve and infeasible in practice. IMHO.
There is a similar issue with switching states away from 'winner takes all' in the electoral college.
If a liberal state does it, it costs liberals votes. If a conservative state does it, it costs conservatives votes. It seems pretty clear that such a system is fairer, and yet no-one wants to actually do it.
Twenty-three states have already passed the National Popular Vote bill, which will in effect switch all states from winner-takes-all when it covers a majority of the electoral college:
http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/state-status
The issue with that is demographics change over time, so any attempt to break states up into more politically/economically uniform pieces will become outdated over time (like if a large city expands beyond its current boundaries). So you'll have to change the state lines periodically, and then you've still got the issues of redistricting, only now on a national level instead of a state level.
The other solution is to have mixed representation where a portion of the seats represent districts and the rest are allocated to match the proportions voted for by the state. In this case each voter gets 2 votes: 1 for their district and 1 for a party.
Mixed-member proportional representation provides for geographic districts, while still ensuring that every party gets no more seats than its popular vote percentage.
You can hardly do MMP in America. Several states have only one or two seats, where MMP would be equivalent to FPTP or block vote - a significant step back.
You'd need to do it on the national level, not state. Our parties transcend state boundaries anyway, and House was always supposed to be representing people as a whole; the states have the Senate for their representation as entities.
I dunno, I'm just trying to play with the rules that exist. There's a dubious federal law designed to ensure minority representation which seems to prohibit proportional representation, but seeing as it so abjectly fails to achieve its goals it may have no grounds to stand on. A state which thought democracy was a good idea and might be useful trying in the US[] could unilaterally introduce a bill and it may succeed in the courts. But it's unthinkable that you could get enough states to pass an amendment to the constitution to abolish state-based districts without an experiment in proportional voting in the US first.
[]: I don't mean to say FPTP is undemocratic - Canada is plainly democratic - just that America isn't democratic in much the same way one says Russia isn't democratic. If the government is intent on not hearing the will of the people, it will find a way.
> Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs.
OT, but there's another really interesting, related problem at the intersection of mathematics and politics, which is apportionment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...). The US House of Representatives has a certain number of seats (currently 435) and, based on the results of the census, those seats are assigned to the 50 states according to their populations. But the proportions don't always divide evenly, and you can't give a state 7.35 representative seats, so you need a method for determining the fairest division of representatives. And it turns out there is no optimal solution in the general case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_paradox).
I point out this problem because it is one of the few times you will find Supreme Court cases and writings by the Founders on what algorithm to use. A bill changing the apportionment algorithm was subject to the very first presidential veto. The first proposed amendment to the Constitution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Am...) was on the subject of apportionment. When else will you find the highest levels of government debating the merits of algorithms and mathematics?
It's actually one topic I've grown to agree with my extremely conservative father on, that they should have never fixed the seats at 435. This was done long after the founding of the country (relative to the age of the country, that is), but if we had kept the original apportionment we'd have one of the largest legislatures in the world. It wouldn't solve the apportionment problem, but it would make the unfairness of any given solution much less consequential and also it would make gerrymandering harder (though still not impossible).
I think of it as a scale problem. A Representative's front office is basically a call center & triage operation. The embodiment of the Politics of Attention (squeaky wheel gets the grease).
What's the ideal size for a constituency? To maximize responsiveness, accountability, effectiveness? 100k? 200k? 400k?
The Republic of Ireland's constitution guarantees a member of the Dáil (Lower Parliamentary house; similar to the US House of Representatives) for every 20-30,000 people, and districts are redrawn and reapportioned frequently.
This seems to be a pretty ideal number to me - it's about the size of the township I grew up in. Many people in their district would have personal ties to their representative, as a further detriment to attempts at lobbying/corruption.
The US constitution used to have a similar provision, but this was abandoned by the ammendment process in the late 1920's.
Apparently largest assembly sizes are normally fall somewhere around the cube root of the population. Obviously you don't want so many electorates that the house becomes unmanageable, nor so few the voters can't make an effective choice. See some political scientist's thoughts here: https://fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com/category/electoral-rule...
I have no idea if that's the ideal rule or how you might determine that.
Around the founding of the country, there were arguments of some range between 30k to 40k. Obviously that wouldn't be practical nowadays, that would create 10k representatives and the ability of the government to respond to an urgent issue like war or economic depression would be severely diminished. It could also decrease public turnout because they feel like not just their vote, but their representative can't make a difference.
But yeah, I think at a few hundred thousand, though that would likely mean over one thousand representatives, could probably work.
Redistricting commissions should recruit go players.
There can be an amusing side-effect to aggressive gerrymandering. Let's say a state has a small majority of party A, but districts that are strongly partisan (let's say 80%) for A or B. You only need 50% to win your district -- that extra 30% is "wasted" and would be more valuable if those voters were pushed into one of B's districts.
Which is one of the things partisan redistricters do. Now they have more districts with a comfortable 55% margin and an assured lock on more districts, right? Umm, well, now they've made it easier for the other side to capture districts too...and it happens.
There's no magic way to avoid bizarre results (check out the wikipedia pages on the districting, and on voting methods, for some eye-opening problems), but something close to algorithmic probably ends up the least controversial and most comprehensible in the long run.
It's not just about party, an unusually disliked candidate can tank most districts. In the end it's a very complex optimization problem with benefits in the short term measured vs the risk of losing redistricting power in 10 years etc. Even a slight bias can let you shift resources to more competitive races etc.
PS: IMO it's really a scale problem. If districts give a ~3% advantage that's huge in aggregate, but races still feel competitive. However, we are currently in a situation where nobody bothers to run in many races and that does not promote democracy.
Article mentions the efficiency gap metric; here is another:
"Assessing significance in a Markov chain without mixing"
We present a new statistical test to detect that a presented state of a reversible Markov chain was not chosen from a stationary distribution... We illustrate the use of our test with a potential application to the rigorous detection of gerrymandering in Congressional districtings.
In an two-stage election system, rigging the districts to make the second stage irrelevant to the outcome, well, makes the first stage relevant to the outcome.
When the first stage elections are contested among isolated ideological subsets of the electorate their results tend to extreme positions.
What I'm saying is this: it is inevitable that the REDMAP project that yielded the kinds of district-level results shown in this article will continue to generate more and more extremist election results.
Ryan and McConnell, and the whole US federal house of representatives, have bought and paid for their dysfunction with this systematic gerrymandering. The situation isn't going to improve as long as this holds.
Pouring money into contesting the general elections in these districts is entirely a waste. It enriches nobody but robocall and television companies, and doesn't affect the outcome.
It's still necessary to contest every race. Because of down ballot races. Moving the needle 5 points in a statewide race can mean winning a lot of local elections. Ditto putting initiatives on the ballot, which motivate your base to turn out.
I very much agree with this. What gerrymandering (and partisan voter suppression) does, is reduce the number of competitive districts in the country. Next year, the expected number of competitive House districts is 23 to 38 - out of 450! So, in over 400 districts, primaries are the only thing that matters.
On the other hand, primaries attract more motivated voters than the general. And those motivated voters tend to be motivated by their ideological positions - in other words, they're more extremist. From the perspective of candidates in the primary, they have to pander to those more extreme voters to get to the general - but they have no incentive to pander to the center, because even the more centrist members of their own party will vote for them over the opposition candidate anyway.
This also sets up a positive feedback loop, where even less ideologically radical voters, forced to vote for more and more extreme candidates of their party in the general, adopt at least some of the positions of those extreme candidates over time (making it easier to cast such a vote). Which in turn makes primaries more extreme, and shifts the overall party platform in that same direction.
We've already seen Republicans walk down that road, and where it got them. Now Democrats are going through the same process (Indivisible etc). It looks like we're undergoing the last political realignment possible in the current system, and at the end of it, we'll have two "ideologically pure" parties, with most voters going for straight party ticket, and with most legislative votes going down party lines. At which point the system is going to deadlock, because it pretty much requires some compromise to function properly.
The problem is that this process drags aside the two parties to the point where moderate voters in each are further away from each other than they are from extremists in their own party. More specifically, the other party becomes less acceptable - e.g. most people who voted for Moore in Alabama didn't really like him, but they couldn't fathom voting for his opponent, because of his position on one or the other wedge issue (e.g. abortion).
While I'm as angry as anyone about the way that districts have been gerrymandered in the US, it also bugs me when I see critiques about gerrymandering that try to provoke outrage by showing the shapes of the districts and implying that districts should be square or otherwise simplistically shaped when viewed aerially. Humans don't fly, so the aerial view seems irrelevant and disingenuous to me.
It reminds me somewhat of a program on The History Channel called "How the States Got Their Shapes." And one of the really interesting parts was how states in the eastern part of the country had their lines drawn before the railroads and most in the west after the railroads. And so you see many more rivers, mountains and other natural features affecting state borders back east and a lot more straight border lines in the west. There's a very good reason (the Potomac) why Maryland's border looks the way it does, but if you just showed people the shape and told them it was a congressional district, it wouldn't be hard to convince them it was the result of gerrymandering.
I wonder whether there's a better way to visualize voting districts, perhaps using Google Maps transit data to visualize public transport/drive times to polling stations. There would still be the issue of deciding where to place polling stations, but it seems like once that's been decided, a district's shape should be derived from including all addresses that are most easily able to travel to those polling places. This would naturally create odd shapes, especially along freeways, bus/train lines and such. But making it as easy as possible for people to vote seems, to me, more important than having a simple shape.
For some more content on gerrymandering, I suggest FiveThirtyEight's "The Gerrymandering Project". Episode 1 goes through the two major ways gerrymandering gets applied, and also discusses that just because a district has a weird shape doesn't necessarily mean it is gerrymandered.
And because I've never seen a social media post about gerrymandering favoring democrats, I'd like to add the efficiency gap chart from [2]. 8/26 states listed on the efficiency gap chart here are listed as favoring democrats. I fully recognize right now gerrymandering favors republicans significantly, however I'd like to note in some areas democrats are favored.
Gerrymandering is a problem because we have a poor voting system. I'm not sure if a single transferrable vote (STV) is the best system, but it would significantly reduce the benefit of gerrymandering (and probably result in better candidates from both parties).
FWIW, I now advocate Approval Voting because a) superior election integrity prospects and b) nearly ideal fairness.
Score Voting and Instant Runoff Voting are a bit more fair than Approval Voting, but much more difficult to implement, execute, audit, describe / educate, etc.
Approval voting and score voting are problematic for reasons standard analyses overlook; there's no obvious mapping from actual preferences to ballot markings. Ranked preference ballots don't have this problem (well, unforced ranking that allows ties doesn't, forced rankings do, but to the degree that approval and score voting do.)
Both scores and approvals are ambiguous in meaning and different people with the exact same preferences would map ballot papers differently. (In situations other than standard public elections, this may not be the case: approval is great for voting on group activities where either “approve” is a binding commitment to participate if the choice is chosen, or “disapprove” is a binding opt-out if the option is chosen.)
I supported instant runoff voting until I figured out that it's difficult to explain, implement, audit. Pretty much all the reasons election administrators dislike it.
Approval Voting seems like the best compromise between fairness and simplicity (to better ensure election integrity).
Proportional voting is the only way to eliminate gerrymandering. Approval voting is great but single winner elections are always going to have gerrymandering issues.
I don't think STV presents any function that would really prevent gerrymandering. The only thing it might do is allow entry of third parties, but even that's not guaranteed. But a party could still design districts that they'd always have a shot at the second round in every district while other parties don't.
What could potentially help is to have a legislative body not determined by geography, possibly some kind of proportional party system (the downside being you need to make parties a formal part of the system, but they'll always be present anyways), that must ratify redistricting proposals and can challenge currently drawn districts.
> I don't think STV presents any function that would really prevent gerrymandering.
STV with multimember districts (not the degenerate single-member district form also known as IRV) limits the degree of distortion that you can get through how district lines are drawn (whether intentional gerrymandering or otherwise.)
"STV" actually refers to at least two related systems. You seem to be commenting on the single-winner form (also called "Instant Runoff Voting" in the United States). The multi-winner form is a form of proportional representation and as such would provide substantial protection from gerrymandering. The Australian terms "majority-preferential" and "quota-preferential" help make the difference (and the connection) clear.
I think the concern is that you could still, in principle, draw districts that gave you lots of seats, because they're relatively small. STV isn't proportional by design. You want as many of their votes as possible to wind up in the fourth of three quotas, and as many of yours as possible to end up in the three quotas that win seats. For instance, it may be that Us in some state just suddenly start winning two out of three seats in most districts. Make sure the two seat districts go in areas where They have a bit more than fifty percent but not a full two quotas so they split one apiece. The goal is still to waste as many of Their votes as possible to get fifty percent plus one seats.
PR is no panacea. To avoid gerrymandering, you need an adequately high district magnitude. After all, majority-preferential is just quota-preferential with a magnitude of 1. And FPTP is just List PR with a magnitude of 1.
You make many important points, but I don't agree that "STV isn't proportional by design". STV-PR provides voters with representatives elected by equal numbers of votes, and that's pretty close to the definition of proportionality. Given enough seats per constituency, STV-PR provides proportionality not only by party, but by any factors voters choose.
Anyway, I was responding to this:
>>> I don't think STV presents any function that would really prevent gerrymandering.
I still believe that STV-PR resists gerrymandering as much as List PR does.
> PR is no panacea. To avoid gerrymandering, you need an adequately high district magnitude.
I agree, but I expect any form of PR would deal a substantial blow to gerrymandering, even if it isn't a panacea. Perhaps the only way to eliminate gerrymandering is to elect all representatives from a single multi-member constituency. (I expect any other system with enough compensatory List PR seats would be practically as resistant to gerrymandering.) Of course, the sticking point for STV-PR is that a ballot paper for STV435 wouldn't be very user friendly :) .
What do you think of STV+ as a compromise? Under STV+ most representatives are elected under STV-PR and a minority are elected through compensatory List PR to increase the precision of party proportionality.
STV itself merely refers to the voting system. If by "multi-winner" you mean multimember districts, that's still very susceptible to gerrymandering. Anything involving districting is, you can still split up populations so they have weaker representation, even under proportional systems, by making their representation much weaker in many districts and overly strong in a few.
I think Germany has a good solution where there's single-winner districts along with a proportional list. I also think giving authority of redistricting to an authority that can't directly benefit from it could also work.
> If by "multi-winner" you mean multimember districts
That is what I mean. (In theory you could have an election with one enormous constituency under STV, but I accept that it wouldn't be very practical at government level, even if it works well for electing the boards of non-profit organisations.)
> Anything involving districting is, you can still split up populations so they have weaker representation, even under proportional systems, by making their representation much weaker in many districts and overly strong in a few.
True, but if I understand correctly that's about unequal district population, rather than gerrymandering. Proportional systems with a single constituency or compensatory List PR largely avoid concerns about districting.
> I think Germany has a good solution where there's single-winner districts along with a proportional list.
Germany does indeed have a good system, but I'd prefer it without the single-winner districts and with most representatives elected by STV (ie, the STV+ system described in the last paragraph of my other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15970289 ).
> If by "multi-winner" you mean multimember districts, that's still very susceptible to gerrymandering.
No, it's not. With any proportional system (including STV), the more members per district, the less distortion is theoretically possible through differences in how district lines are drawn.
Dammit. For some years now I have been pointing out to people who would listen that what we need are policy solutions rooted in mathematical analysis, my go to case being gerrymandering. It seemed quite obvious that we could use geometric smoothing to set district boundaries based on census data to remove people from the process and therefore gerrymandering. Guess I had an untested assumption which wasn’t true, which is humbling.
Removing people from the process doesn't remove gerrymandering, it means that the gerrymandering will be done by analyzing the short and long-term (based on demographic trends) effects of different mathematical criteria, with partisan actors legislating the most advantageous criteria.
You eliminate gerrymandering by eliminating single-member FPTP legislative districts in favor of multimeter districts with a system producing proportional results (Single Transferrable Vote or some similar candidate-centered method, or a party-list method, though I prefer the former.)
You don't eliminate gerrymandering in that way. You limit it.
STV works best in limited magnitude districts (three or five seems to be preferred) or else the number of options becomes too difficult for humans to express a coherent useful and accurate set of preferences. Once you limit magnitude, you can draw your districts to benefit you. For instance, perhaps you'll discover a preference for two or four seaters in reasonably strong Democrat areas and three seaters in reasonably strong Republican areas. You need fifty percent plus one to get a majority of seats in an odd numbered district, but fifty percent plus one only gets you fifty percent of the seats in an even numbered district. I can imagine Americans spending huge amounts of political capital for years getting STV in, only to discover that one party still has a manufactured majority because they wasted votes efficiently.
Its true that gerrymanders per se become harder and harder the higher the magnitude, but if your problem is you have a political system that is opposed to hearing the will of the people they're going to find a way to stuff their ears no matter what voting system you pick.
(Aside: Open list PR is both candidate centred and party-list. You vote for Fred Nurk of the Purple Party. That helps the Purple Party win more seats, and it moves Fred Nurk up in the list. It seems to be the only tick-a-box election system which doesn't devolve into FPTP in a district magnitude of 1 so it might be appealing in the US, where several states only elect a single representative. e.g. You vote for Gregory Hsien of the Maroon Party, who stands in a group with Josephine Yusuf of the Red Party. The Red-Maroon group win one more vote than the Blue-Cyan group even though the Blue party got more votes than the Red party. Reds win because you voted for their ally, the Maroons.)
I'm reading the paper, but the example on the webpage is pretty contrived. Yes, the resulting "nice looking" districts are mathematically simple to specify, but narrow triangle-shaped wedges won't pass the smell test for most people. Or any triangles!
The world underneath is full of other facts on the ground, like municipal boundaries, county lines, and the like. Districts that deviate too far from these other entities -- entities that are already being used for governance and administration -- then clearly some trickery is going on to deliberately cherry-pick people for some reason.
Tying districts to more closely resemble existing administration boundaries won't magically solve this issue -- packing, cracking, nonsensical groupings are still a danger -- but it's a sensible baseline expectation that can be used to build on. When applied together with nonpartisan redistricting, perceived compactness, and efficiency gap metric, as the article notes, it can produce reasonable results.
That's true, but the point of the demonstration is simply that the snaky, salamander-looking shapes are not necessary.
There's every reason to believe that you can achieve stunning examples of partisan gerrymandering under various "nice shape" criteria. You are correct that the "n-1 split lines" is simply very easy to state mathematically.
Michigan Radio reported this morning[0] that some group turned in a petition with more than 400,000 signatures for getting how in-state districts are drawn revampted.
I've been wanting to play with code for awhile to see how effective a "huddle" algorithm might be. The idea being that people with similar interests tend to huddle together into areas of a large city or regions of the state they feel match their lifestyle.
I'm not sure exactly how it would work but I imagine some kind of flood fill where you start with a population center and grow outward from it. Those should fill up quickly and by the end you should have large rural districts to finish off the state.
Huddle? Like the phyles in Stephenson's Diamond Age?
I'm very political, partisan. I'm seeing first hand the rise of interest group organizing as the political parties continue to decline. This sea change is making me very optimistic.
I have been thinking on a "simple rule" that could mitigate gerrymandering:
1. No congressional district can span more than 1 partial city and/or county.
This will force districts to be drawn to cover whole cities/counties and would stop ridiculous districts such as the Texas 34th which covers parts of at least 8 counties from the gulf coast up to San Antonio
> No congressional district can span more than 1 partial city and/or county.
State legislatures control the definition of administrative subdivisions of the state just as much as they do Congressional districts, so that rule does nothing. A state that is really committed to gerrymandering will just move city and county lines when it redistricts.
A smarter but still corrupt state legislature that wants to gerrymander without disrupting functional local government will make “city” and “county” names of ceremonial subdivisions used for limited purposes, so that redrawing their lines doesn't have much practical effect, and adopt a different set of subdivisions with overlapping lines for most functional local government purposes (“urbanizations” and “parishes”, perhaps.)
This sounds like a good idea at first, but I'm sure you would run into issues of large disparity in the importance of each vote. Not that it doesn't happen right now, but this would exacerbate the problem by introducing a force granularity level (beside the state level).
I agree with others on this thread that the only solution to gerrymandering is some form of PR. PLACE voting is interesting because it doesn't require a change in the ballot and retains the notion of geographic districts.
Not requiring a change of ballots when you are doing very different things with them is, IMO, a negative traits because it creates a false familiarity.
When you are changing how ballots work, this should be unavoidably obvious, even to people who spent the time the change was being debated in a coma or Antarctic research expedition.
Also, STV in small (~5 member) districts gets much improved proportionality from the status quo, keeps geographic districts, and increases the proportion of people with someone representing both their ideology and district simultaneously.
> Not requiring a change of ballots when you are doing very different things with them is, IMO, a negative traits because it creates a false familiarity.
I don't think that's something you can really do with voting systems, though. Lots of voting systems are based around the same input assumptions, i.e., people are submitting a rank-order of preferences. And nothing's saying you'd have to switch to PLACE from STV rather than from FPTP. Regardless I think it doesn't make a lot of sense to associate ordinal ballots with STV specifically rather than just, well, what they are, which is a rank-order of preferences, that will get used somehow.
> I don't think that's something you can really do with voting systems
You can sometimes, you can't others.
> Lots of voting systems are based around the same input assumptions, i.e., people are submitting a rank-order of preferences
But FPTP is not based on that input, so changing from FPTP to a more proportional system (many of which rely on that kind of input) provided a clear opportunity to have a clean break without false familiarity.
> And nothing's saying you'd have to switch to PLACE from STV rather than from FPTP.
Ah! I misunderstood. You're talking about the possibility of "check one, go by that candidate's endorsed ballot". (Something that could really be added to just about any voting system; I hadn't really considered it as essential to PLACE in particular.) Yeah, that's an interesting point against that feature, then. Hadn't considered that.
Sadly it is a bit out of date (requires Flash), but there is a neat game/simulation where you can test out different redistricting strategies SimCity style: http://www.redistrictinggame.org/
There are no easy answers. I believe the game makers advocate for independent non-partisan commissions who are restricted in how they're allowed to create maps.
Interesting idea. It has a some troubling flaws, though.
First, in order to make the lockout in #5 work it would seem that the votes need to be tallied in real time as they are cast.
This could be addressed in a couple of ways.
(A) Allow votes of the form:
Vote for candidate C1
If C1 is locked out, vote for C2
If C2 is locked out, vote for C3
...
That would allow processing votes in batches, ordered by time stamp.
(B) Instead of a lockout, allow a candidate to receive more votes than the #voters/#congresspeople threshold. Each voter starts with a weighted vote with weight 1, and provides a list of alternative candidates similar to from (A).
If C1 gets a total weighted vote above the election threshold, choose t such that if each voters weight is multiplied by t the total for C1 will exactly equal the threshold.
For each C1 voter, split their vote giving t of it to C1, and 1-t of it to their C2.
Iterate through this until it converges. (I think it must converge, but offhand do not have a proof).
Second, you need to know the number of voters in advance to set the threshold. Note that you need the actual number of people who will vote, not just the number of eligible voters, because if you use the later you will be setting the threshold too high.
Third, if the number of people running is large, it is quite possible nobody reaches the election threshold. You need a procedure to whittle down the number of candidates.
Congratulations, you've just devised the single transferable vote used in Ireland, Malta and Australia. Assuming that "the procedure to whittle down the number of candidates" is "exclude the worst-performing candidate and continue to their C2".
Could a person have their vote assigned to more than one person if none of them have won yet? (Probably with some sort of ranking to resolve any ambiguities as to who their vote goes to)
I'm not sure if that would be the optimal threshold for number of votes needed.
Here is an idea for a small modification:
First, have all the voters vote on the number of congresspeople to have, and then pick the median (if there is an even number of votes, and the middle two are different, pick between the two at random).
Then, after the result of the first vote has been decided, have everyone vote on the vote threshold (making sure that they are informed of what the voters/seats number), and again, take the median of the votes (and again, if a tie between 2 values, pick between the two at random. Don't average them.).
Then do what you said, with the chosen number of seats and the chosen vote threshold.
There are no doubt some downsides to this method. I don't yet have enough understanding of them to fully recommend it, but it seems worth looking into!
you've essentially described the first steps of an STV election ....
In an STV election people make a list, at step 4 above the highest vote on your list that's still viable accrues to someone, if they get more votes that required the portion of your vote that's needed to elect the person stays with them and the rest of your vote moves down your list ... whenever the process gets stuck the person with the least number of votes is removed from contention and their voters get to try the next person on their list
We desperately need to get away from the hyper-partisan, two party system. An Either-Or system was not what the framers had in mind and is damaging. While not the most popular position, I ALWAYS vote for the 3rd party candidate with reasonable policies for the sake of our country.
I used to think the same way about 3rd party, but now I'm beginning to view the 2 party system including the primary as just a 2 round playoff. If you really have enough support to contend as a third party, you can easily win the primary of one of the major parties.
Your most important vote is in the primaries (especially in areas dominated by a single party), and I think the country as a whole is beginning to realize it.
We shouldn't have to go through one of the 2 major parties to contend as a third party candidate. One way to solve this could be putting caps on campaign financing which would level the playing field for smaller 3rd parties. But that would never happen because the major 2 parties make the rules and that would hurt their dominance. By voting for either party we are essentially enabling the either-or system to continue
>By voting for either party we are essentially enabling the either-or system to continue
I used to agree, but the parties have no ideology attached to them. Their names are just generic terms regarding democracy and you can see how much their platforms have changed and moved over the last century. At this point they are just the Urban and Rural divisions of our election playoff.
They are just the ideology of the people elected. If you change the candidates of the party, you have changed the ideology of the party. Trump figured this out and instead of sticking with the Reform party, he just took over the Republican nomination.
I disagree, I think there are some clear ideologies. Support for women choosing whether to have abortions is in one camp, support for so called unborn children is in the other. Diversity is in the dems of course, the Republicans want to protect and emphasize the "traditional white american culture". I'm trying not to be pejorative to either side. There are negative influences that lead to them to have similar views, like the influence of say wall street money has both sides supporting big banks, I think this is what you are really getting at imho when you say there is no ideological differences.
Even with only two real parties if things were drawn to maximize competitiveness then at least the parties would be forced to play towards the center instead of their more extreme bases.
Not ideal but much better than what has been going on since the 2000s.
I don't see how it maximizes competitiveness. Even in a perfectly split district, the primary generally has to play towards the base, and it's easier to get more members of your base to vote than to convert someone from the other party. The bipartisan attempt to neutralize other parties helps with that, it's easier for a Republican to turn a Libertarian voter to their side than a Democrat voter.
> it's easier for a Republican to turn a Libertarian voter to their side than a Democrat voter.
Maybe in the Reagan years, but it's become more difficult since then. Orwell said "The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." Both Republicans and Democrats have grown increasingly more authoritarian over the past 20 years.
Reagan wasn't any more in line with Libertarian ideas than the current Republicans, and I'd still be surprised if more members of the Libertarian party voted Democrat than Republican.
Competitiveness forces candidates to balance playing to the base with not alienating the other side, lest they turn out against you.
In the current system the question is who can be the most conservative/liberal. There is little downside to pushing further because there are more votes there but few people you’ll drive away.
The check to that is more parties, where the most conservative/liberal has actual competition on being the most extreme.
Your change to gerrymandering doesn't make pushing for the extremes a worse strategy. Even in a perfectly split district, roughly 25% vote Democrat, 25% Republican, and 50% don't vote. That 50% is a better target than any voters on the fence.
An either-or system was not what Washington had in mind, but I am very sure there were a number of framers who did indeed seek this out and formed parties almost immediately after the Revolution ended.
Does anyone know why gerrymandering only includes Democrat and Republican parties? Surely some states like New Mexico who, at the time, had a third party Governor must have had districts that voted in majority for third party candidates.
The framers of the US constitution were remarkably prescient about a number of things, but my guess is that they did not anticipate gerrymandering, or at least its effectiveness. I would be very interested to hear otherwise.
Gerrymandering is a very old idea. The term itself was coined in 1810, and was in practice well before then. The 1788 election in Virginia was gerrymandered, the same year the Constitution was ratified. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-lea...
There's a significant difference in the modern era in that gerrymandering can be much more precise. The 2010 districts the Republicans drew in several states are very sophisticated works of statistics, GIS, and political science. I fear what machine learning techniques are going to do in 2020.
Actually one of the attendees at the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry was partially responsible for the first Gerrymandered voting districts and the concept is named for him (and the fact that one of the districts was depicted shaped like a Salamander in a cartoon.)
More likely, they did not anticipate that the country would be almost completely dominated by a (hyper)partisan, two-party system. Not only were established parties not in existence at the drafting, but the presidential election system immediately broke down under a two-party system.
They did not anticipate parties. Or rather they did, but they really didn't like them, and assumed that they would be able to prevent the political system from being dominated by them. And it takes parties to gerrymander.
Also, I think it's partly because at the country's founding, most hot political issues had a clear large-scale geographic distribution, and so geographic districts were considered an adequate way to capture the overall mood.
And if you're right (which I also suspect), I'd be curious what they would have tried to do to prevent it. Not because it's necessarily useful to solve today's problem, but because it'd be interesting to see.