Brad Ideas - Anti-gerrymandering formulae - Comments

But it's likely the parties...

Gordon Mohr — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 20:17:05 -0800

...have to sign off on any reform, so giving them formal recognition in the process may be a feature not a bug.

The parties aren't *strictly* for incumbency: they're for 'safe party seats', which just happens to work out that way once any old crook gets elected to a safe seat for his party. The incumbents are of course for incumbency. So perhaps the teams that play the pie-cutting game are made up of *former* party officeholders as a slight countermeasure. (We may actually want people who are party loyalists rather than officeholder suckups for best game results.)

The degenerate two-district case is interesting, but if one party has even a slight advantage, their desire for a chance at winning two seats may sometimes outweigh their desire for one safe seat and one guaranteed loss. It would seem to depend on other governance choices -- how much of a premium is a governing majority versus a seat at the table?

Pie cutting

brad — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:42:02 -0800

Unfortunately an 1842 law requires single member districting. (Very little of the districting rules are in the constitution, in fact prior to this many states did send their reps via total state vote.)

The pie system I think gives too much recognition to the parties. Of course the parties are in total control under the current system, so it's an improvement, but I would rather remove all party control. Party control pushes for incumbency.

Indeed, I like a mathematical algorithm because it doesn't encourage incumbency. My system tries to limit it, but not completely -- that's a flaw balanced by the fact that I think you could get there from here.

A nice little essay I read showed the dangers of even convexity under party choice. Imagine a state with 2 districts which is mostly red on the north and blue on the south. If you divide it with a horizontal line, north from south, you get two safe districts. If you divide it with a vertical line, east from west, you get 2 volatile districts which swing with the undecided and independent voters. Quite a difference from a fairly aribtrary choice.

The house is the place where minority views are supposed to be a bit stronger, at least in states with 4 or more reps. If a highly environmentalist area wants to elect a lone green, it can happen -- and does happen in many countries. If the 2 dominant parties control it, this won't happen.

Other ideas...

Gordon Mohr — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 02:25:21 -0800

The straight-line algorithm certainly creates plausible and impressive-looking results for such a simple rule.

Another idea, that might wind up in practice being a little like multi-member districts: don't define district boundaries, but rather 'home points' for each seat. Let any voter vote in their choice of one of the N closest-homed seats. This needs more modelling, but my hunch is even if you let partisans place the points as aggressively as possible, simple planar geometry would prevent them from contriving many safe seats from arbitrary placement. (Also, the placing of 'home points' might be very amenable to an automated process.)

Fair pie-cutting algorithms might also help; perhaps something like: If N districts are needed, the dominant party gets free rein to create 3*N equal districts; then the minority party chooses which groupings of 3 become the real districts. Again, more modelling necessary but shenanigans in creating unbalanced phase 1 mini-districts might tend to strengthen the hand of the minority party in phase 2.

Baby steps

brad — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 10:38:49 -0800

Sure, there are deeper problems, but you can't get there from here. Change in the system has to come in baby steps that the public will buy, ideally state by state.

States with public initiatives, and states with state governments who feel they lose through gerrymandering can vote for a better system, and start the trend. Then they can move on to the next thing, a prefferential ballot or similar.

Of course, this ignores the real problem

Phillip Helbig — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 03:51:42 -0800

Gerrymandering is an embarrassment for any country which calls itself democratic.
If, say, Milosovic had suggested such a system in the former Yugoslavia, the
collective consciousness of the world would have cried "whom are you trying to
fool". The real problem is the myth that those elected somehow "represent their
district". Except in cases of pork-barrelling (which also should be eliminated),
that's probably no longer true. It might have been true back in the old days, but
it's not today. And what about the people who didn't vote for the person who got
elected? Who represents them?

The only truly democratic system is proportional representation. A party gets x
percent of the vote and they get x percent of the seats in the parliament or
whatever. It never ceases to amaze me that people deem any other system democratic.
(Of course, proportional representation must deal with rounding errors and perhaps
a threshold, but these are small problems compared to the problems of a
first-past-the-post system, only one of which is gerrymandering.)

Anti-gerrymandering formulae

brad — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 14:05:43 -0800

A well known curse of many representative democracies is gerrymandering. People in power draw the districts to assure they will stay in power. There are some particularly ridiculous cases in the USA.

I was recently pointed to a paper on a simple, linear system which tries to divide up a state into districts using the shortest straight line that properly divides the population. I have been doing some thinking of my own in this area so I thought I would share it. The short-line algorithm has the important attribute that it’s fixed and fairly deterministic. It chooses one solution, regardless of politics. It can’t be gamed. That is good, but it has flaws. Its district boundaries pay no attention to any geopolitical features except state borders. Lakes, rivers, mountains, highways, cities are all irrelevant to it. That’s not a bad feature in my book, though it does mean, as they recognize, that sometimes people may have a slightly unusual trek to their polling station.