How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising
demodexio.substack.com
demodexio.substack.com
There are all kinds of geographical and legal boundaries in a country, with varying levels of affinity to them. Defining gerrymandering precisely isn't possible, it isn't even a know it when you see it thing, and in practice it's a Russell conjugation: they gerrymander, and we redistrict so that people get proper representation.
However, social problems can be solved with maths, law could require something like this to be performed after every census:
https://sites.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/uw_1034.pdf
I think this has considerable advantages, the biggest being that it's objective, the next being that just looking at a Voronoi diagram makes it clear what's going on.
This essentially removes human factors from redistricting, and says you get the Congressional district you get when the population heatmap is relaxed in the simplest way it can be into the appropriate number of partitions.
Remember there's nothing about this which is 'fair', except for the part where people could perhaps be persuaded to abide by the results.
As long as that holds true, theoretical solutions don't really matter when those using them will pry any model into their favor. Not that a mathematical solution even makes sense for a district map that accounts of cultural ties for local representation (short of going for proportional elections, which I think is desirable with some form of local representation).
In Canada, and I presume most countries of the G7, it's an independent entity[1], which one would think goes without saying. That's not incorruptible of course, but I wager it's held it's own for over 60 years here, modern district maps are quite reasonable.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP
1: https://www.vox.com/2014/4/15/5604284/us-elections-are-rigge...
Most countries have a proportional system, not a winner takes it all system.
With a proportional system where X% of the votes results in X% of the seats (corrected by 3% or 5% barrier and rounding effects) gerrymandering in some cases can effect who exactly is the MP for a region, but party association matches the vote.
In France two weeks ago they elected the president and the guy who in the second round got most votes nation-wide got the job. No counting per state/depardement/region. No electoral college, simple summing up.
In Germany there is an interesting system that a each electoral district has a candidate elected and then parliament is filled up to match proportion. Some gerrymandering there can lead to some party benefiting from direct mandates, but that has little effect in the end. (There is some weirdness as direct mandates are supposed to be 50% of seats, but if a party gets a lot more direct mandates than proportional weight the compensation is weird)
Generally the issue with giving districting away is that such commission have no democratic legislation, so if citizens are unhappy they have no way to vote them out. The University of Manitoba president is "unreachable" by the electorate. These core issues of core elements of the state (similar to rules for parliamentarians, election of supreme court justices, ...) are always problematic and rely on responsible individuals ...
You actually just proved the article’s point that gerrymandering exists in any political system that uses geographic districts. Given that fact, maybe SCOTUS wasn’t so dumb in kicking that futile exercise to the states
That doesn't logically follow. Even "perfectly" distributed districts, you can win an election like this without having the most popular votes; all you need is for the districts that vote the 2nd/losing party to overwhelmingly vote that party, while the districts they lose be more narrow.
Gerrymandering is a separate issue, and will arrive pretty much any time encumbants can affect district boundaries, as there is an incentive to either create "safe"districts, or to dilute the effect of areas unlikely to vote for you.
For example in England an independent Boundary Commission draws these lines. But, they only exist because the government allows them to exist, Parliament can (and often does) ignore what the Commission says, indeed it's perfectly normal for a party who expect to lose seats to complain that it's unfair, and if that party happens to be in government they will stall boundary reforms. In practice the Commission acts as some sort of bulwark against gerrymandering overall, but it's for local stuff that this is more important, because local government just can't seize that power for themselves. That's where the US approach is crazy.
The extra crazy thing in the US is that its sovereign government acts as though it is permanently beholden to dusty old documents (a written "Constitution"), or rather, to the very modern interpretation of those documents by partisan hacks in its "Supreme Court". This makes no sense, and Americans shouldn't put up with it.
The commission is made up of:
> 4 Republicans, 4 Democrats, and 5 members who identify with neither party; no member can be a partisan officeholder, an employee of such an officeholder, or a lobbyist
> Citizens can apply, and the Secretary of State picks 200 at random, with party and geographic diversity. Republican and Democratic leaders in the Michigan House and Senate can each reject five names, up to 20 in total. Then the Secretary of State picks the 13 members at random. The commission will have final say over the entire process of redistricting.
It seems beyond odd to me to think "eh, this paper is dusty; let's just do what we want".
They arguably have. The voting rights act took away redistricting power from... Bad acting districts. Some (certainly not all) of those districts have arguably made reasonable amends and are at low risk of 'stealing votes from minorities' but are stuck having the feds draw their lines due to a shitty history and no desire of the feds to give it back, while arguably racist northern districts get away with some bullshit Scott free because they aren't southern.
> The extra crazy thing in the US is that its sovereign government acts as though it is permanently beholden to dusty old documents (a written "Constitution"), or rather, to the very modern interpretation of those documents by partisan hacks in its "Supreme Court". This makes no sense, and Americans shouldn't put up with it.
I’d lecture you about the concept of “laws” but let me try a different tack. A bunch of Americans are flipping out right now because the Supreme Court refuses to invoke those “dusty old documents” to overturn a validly enacted law from a duly elected legislature. Who are the “partisan hacks” here?
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/thesis-1-there-is-one-corre...
Judges don't strike me as particularly nonpartisan these days...
Most everyone has a political opinion. Only those loyal to a party are going to be in a position to make decisions.
Expecting those people to be neutral is absurd. Best you can hope for is appearance of neutrality.
Remaining options is for one side to try and be perfectly neutral usually the weaker side. The other side will definitely take advantage of this.
Or both sides will try and get as much as they can without it being too blatant.
In a tug of war game. It’s all of nothing.
Proportional representation solves this, but if you still value the notion that local communities should be able to have their collective power represented, then you need a solution that combines the two.
As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, multi-member districts with proportional representation are a good way to do this without needing to change the Constitution. The gist is, split states into a smaller number of larger districts, each of which gets multiple representatives. The representatives are allocated proportionally to the vote in each large district. So if the district has 5 representatives, party X gets 63% of the vote, and party Y gets 37% of the vote, then party X gets 3 members and party Y gets 2 members.
Political scientist Lee Drutman is actively promoting this approach, and recently founded Fix Our House (https://www.fixourhouse.org).
If I could rewrite the Constitution, I'd get rid of the rounding error by weighting the votes of individual members of Congress. E.g., if there were only two candidates in a district, candidate X got 60% of the vote, and candidate Y got 40% of the vote, send them both to Congress, with X getting 0.6 of a vote and Y getting 0.4 of a vote.
Of course all of this is better when combined with instant runoffs (aka ranked choice).
Your town assembly can take care of the concerns of your town.
Your regional assembly can take care of the concerns of your region.
Your National Assembly can take care of the concerns of your nation.
We can get rid of gerrymandering and still have different levels of government, each devoted to a particular level of localism.
Indeed, having one level of localism interfere in the affairs of another level of localism seems like a violation of encapsulation, in the sense that a software developer would understand the concept.
Another thought I’ve had for a long time: why not just lift the limit on Congress? My understanding is that Congress set a law to cap it (as opposed to the constitution specifying it) Which made sense 100 or even 50 years ago when members of Congress needed to be physically present to vote in DC.
But today in a world of the internet, video conferencing, etc. it seems like that limitation is arbitrary. Much smaller districts would exists. Making gerrymandering harder. Making a the house look a lot different than the senate. It would make the House more like … a mayor who writes and votes on laws in DC instead of locally.
Congress could easily double the size of the House, and should. That and a law requiring that districts have maximum compactness/population density would I think solve many of our problems with running a democracy.
There's a certain appeal to that too however. As long as the advantage/disadvantage isn't overwhelming anyway. Perhaps it would help to encourage more diverse communities or give a disadvantage to political groups that isolate themselves while giving an advantage to groups who demonstrate they're both willing and capable of living and working in diverse environments. It might even help to reduce the amount of political and cultural divide.
Note that in order for this approach to be coherent at all, you need to abandon the idea that it's possible for a voter to vote for a candidate for office. The only kind of vote this system acknowledges is a vote for a political party.
Just increasing the number of representatives would have some impact on gerrymandering.
I'm glad you said this. One of the more infamous gerrymanders in the US is in Chicago --- the notorious "earmuffs". You can just look at it and see that something's hinky.
But what's really happening there is that there are in fact very well-defined Latino neighborhoods in Chicago, and the earmuffs capture a bunch of them neatly: Pilsen, Little Village, Cicero, Belmont-Cragin. If you know Chicago, you know these places, and you also know what the boundary between, say, Belmont-Cragin and North Austin is like; however artificial it looks on a map, it is a real border. That these communities are where they are is also not purely happenstance: a lot of very unfortunate social engineering took place in the early-mid-20th century to put those neighborhoods (and all the other neighborhoods) where they are now.
That's not to defend gerrymandering writ large, or even necessarily the earmuffs, but just to second your point about the complexity of the problem.
We could solve the problem by moving to a proportional system with much larger or no districts. The more proportional representatives you have per district, the less value you get for gerrymandering it as it gets harder to ignore voters.
But what would also be needed is to increase the total numbers of representatives by a whole factor at least. USA is one of the least represented democracies in the world (only India is worse). Even China has more representatives per capita.
This also extends to local elections where cities as big as Seattle or San Francisco only have 9 and 11 members in their respective city counsels. There is no way to represent such big and diverse cities with this few seats. In comparison Oslo has 59 seats in their city council.
To the first part, while Norway have pretty large districts, the method used to allocate levelling seats to achieve reasonable proportionality (it's not maximally proportional, as there is a lower threshold of 4% to be eligible for levelling seats) maintains a regional link by sorting the parties in descending order of wasted votes (votes that failed to get them a direct mandate) nationally. Then you pick the party with the most wasted votes, then you pick the district with a free levelling seats where that party had the most "unused" wasted votes, and allocate it. You then remove the requisite number of wasted votes, and repeat the process until all the levelling seats are allocated. This means the representatives are all drawn from the regional lists, and are the closest possible match.
The higher the ratio of direct mandates to levelling seats are, the more likely the levelling seats will go to a party that matches the preferences of the population of that region, but even with one mandate and one levelling seat, most places will elect someone via the direct mandate that is withing normal expectations, and so will rarely be any worse off.
Another lesson to draw from Norway is that part of the problem of the US and UK systems is that the local link largely matters because of confusing political and largely apolitical local matters. In Norway, a lot of the issues people in the UK at least write to their MPs about are things you in Norway would write to the County Governor about (there are only 10 of them, for a population of 5m, scale accordingly). The role of County Governor is one often given to former politicians (e.g. about half of the current ones are former cabinet ministers, almost all are former MPs), who knows the system and have connections to get things done, but it's not party political, and they have a civil service staff to assist. When I moved to the UK the notion that writing to an MP was a thing was bizarre - it felt to me like an abject failure of government if you have to write to the legislative about non-political local stuff. You can certainly talk to them in Norway to. When I highschool I just called up parliament for a school project to talk to an MP for my region. But it feels like there is much less need to do so, because you have other avenues and if it's a political issue, the proportionality means it's more likely there's an MP advocating for your view already.
If we want better local representation, we can strengthen local government, or create governments smaller than a city. We can eliminate geographic districts, as units that elect representatives to some higher level of government, but we can still have excellent local government.
If we want cultural representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular culture, and then vote for members of that culture.
If we want religious representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular religion, and then vote for members of that religion.
If we want racial representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular race, and then vote for members of that race.
If we want language representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as speaking a particular language, and then vote for members who also claim to speak that language.
Again, the same rule we apply to software architecture should apply here. Whatever kind of representation we regard as important, we should approach the matter directly, and not try to achieve the effect accidentally, as the side effect of some other architectural decision.
Indeed, many of the problems we see in our political system are exactly because too many goals are being overloaded on too few institutions. If this was a legacy software app, and I was brought in as a consultant to clean it up, I would immediately suggest that a dramatic increase in both encapsulation and polymorphism was needed, and could only be achieved by introducing new branches of government.
To a limited extent, I implied as much when I wrote about the division of labor and the need for highly specialized committees:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-have-politics-in-the-us...
Drastically increasing the number of representatives sounds like a good solution.
Why is that? How much of a connection does a rich white socialite in New York have with a poor custodian from an immigrant family? Sure, their representative may be trying to bring money into their district, but beyond that is it really possibly to represent both of their interests?
What if representatives could represent based on other factors, like sex or wealth or race? What would that do to the idea of representational government?
Or what if, in the online age, you could simply decide which representative represented you, no matter where they were from? Each representative could have no more than [US pop./num. districts] constituents, but they'd hail from anywhere, in some complex series of elections?
Thought experiments, of course.
In fact in many democracies with proportional representation so often had special women‘s parties which were voted into the national assembly when women were fighting for equal representation back in the 60s-80s
But I agree with your point about groupings on other dimensions. I call that demotmimata. The USA used it wisely during the land reform the military forced on Japan 1946-1949. I’m working on an essay about that.
If we want cultural representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular culture, and then vote for members of that culture.
If we want religious representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular religion, and then vote for members of that religion.
If we want racial representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular race, and then vote for members of that race.
If we want language representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as speaking a particular language, and then vote for members who also claim to speak that language.
Again, the same rule we apply to software architecture should apply here. Whatever kind of representation we regard as important, we should approach the matter directly, and not try to achieve the effect accidentally, as the side effect of some other architectural decision.
Indeed, many of the problems we see in our political system are exactly because too many goals are being overloaded on too few institutions. If this was a legacy software app, and I was brought in as a consultant to clean it up, I would immediately suggest that a dramatic increase in both encapsulation and polymorphism was needed, and could only be achieved by introducing new branches of government.
Both of those vote Democrat. The middle class vote Republican.
"Among voters earning less than $100,000 (78 percent of voters), 55 percent said they voted Democratic, 43 percent Republican. Among those earning $100,000 or more, 47 percent voted Democratic and 52 percent Republican."[0]
It's possible that the specific threshold chosen creates two artificial groupings which happen to have different partisan ratios, but if a similar trick can be done by splitting the population into three groupings then I'd be interested to see those numbers.
[0] https://www.minnpost.com/health/2007/11/party-rich-democrats...
Even taking the modern political reality, we have primary systems where one can choose, for example, a candidate that believes that Biden is an illegal president that belongs in jail and Democrats have a secret cabal of child-killers, vs one who merely thinks corporations should have lower taxes.
My point was that a single district can only be represented by one of these very different people.
Having a district system will tend to reduce the number of viable parties to two. The article doesn't even question the fact that there's only a blue and a violet party in the example. In reality, lots of people feel badly represented by even the best of those two parties. For as long as I've talked to Americans about politics, they've complained about voting for the lesser evil. Why not vote for a party you actually agree with? Because it's not viable in a two-party system.
If you've got 3 parties: Green, Yellow and Pink. 40% of the people vote Green, 30% vote yellow and 30% vote Pink. However, Green is supported all over the country, whereas Yellow and Pink are more regional, so in every district, Green gets 40% of the vote, whereas one of Yellow and Pink gets the other 60%, while the other gets none. Despite being the largest party, Green gets no votes.
Or let's say Green and Yellow each gets 40% of the vote and Pink gets 20%. All votes are distributed reasonably evenly, so about half of the districts are won by Green and half are won by Yellow. This sounds reasonable, until you realise that the Pink voters get no representation at all. It's possible to have a system where even a majority of voters wouldn't be represented, as long as the two largest parties manage to keep the smaller parties divided.
And in the US, that situation has devolved to the point that many voters don't even bother to vote for the smaller parties anymore, because they'd be throwing away their vote. And instead, they vote for candidates they disagree with because the only other viable candidate would be even worse.
Just use proportional representation. That's the only way to ensure that all political opinions get represented. It's not perfect, because nothing ever is, but at least the system is flexible, and voters can vote for completely new parties if they disagree with all existing parties, and those new parties can actually win seats.
It isn't possible to get fair by drawing lines around people which are smaller than the actual sovereign boundary under discussion. You can hand that power to the government, an 'independent commission' (the government with extra steps), or an algorithm run by the government, those are your options. All outcomes will fail fairness, this has been extensively studied.
Pretending that larger population centers will make better electoral decisions and that those decisions will not ignore the legitimate needs of more rural areas reeks of unjustified superiority and is unbecoming.
"You can easily get rid of gerrymandering simply by proscribing an algorithmic process for districting."
There were several people who said this, here and on Reddit and on Hacker News. I believe they are defining gerrymandering as a deliberate and intentional act. By contrast, I was using the word "gerrymandering" to refer to the fact that any geographic boundary will establish a gap between the will of the voters and the final result of voting. So even if an algorithmic process is followed, and the damage done is accidental and unintentional, I am still referring to that as "gerrymandering." Indeed, the whole point of my essay is that if one group does its best to be fair when drawing lines on the map, and another group is evil and immoral and corrupt, and does its worst when drawing lines on a map, the damage done by both groups will be about the same, over the long-term.
Sometimes you get different outcomes if you divide state in half north-south vs. east-west, depending on how the cluster is divided between districts.
It also doesn't remove the human factors from redistricting; humans would have to choose and approve this method. It's just laundering the gerrymandering through an algorithm to give it credibility.
But if you're the party that stands to benefit from changing redistricting laws, then the system loses credibility because you picked this method.
And if you're the party that stands to lose from changing these laws, then you're unlikely to self-sabotage yourself by doing so.
I don't respect your attempt to make objective mean something it doesn't.
1. Existing independent of or external to the mind;
2. actual or real. Based on observable phenomena; empirical.
3. Uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices: synonym: fair.
For an example, I write an algorithm to use different seeds and distance functions for the Voronoi diagram to find the one that benefits Republicans the most. It would be deterministic and maybe objective in definition 1 and 2 but it would not fit definition 3. I would say it is heavily influenced by personal prejudice, just one step removed because it is the coders prejudice not the algorithms.
One way to define the problem is to maximize the number of competitive elections.
-------------------------
Hmm, okay, so what would be fair? Perhaps we want to give each party a fighting chance in each election? Isn't that fair?
2 districts each hold 100,000 blues
8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets
So now the violets have a 50% chance of winning 8 districts. The blues are granted two districts automatically, but that is fair, since they are more popular than the violets. Each party has some chance of winning.
However, in this model, if 1 blue voter in each district changes their mind, then the violets end up with 80% of the legislature. We’ve engineered a system that is very unstable! If Katechon is like the nation of Hungary, where a 2/3rds majority can amend the constitution, then Katechon is now vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover, much like what happened in Hungary after 2010. And that's because 8 people out of a 1,000,000 changed their vote.
Imagine you have a 650-350 voter lead in a state with 10 districts. The way you maximize the number of competitive election is by packing 3 districts 100-0. The party with 650 voters now has the same number of voters remaining as the party with 350, for the next 7 districts.
Mathematically this works out perfectly because the party with 650 voters has an overall seat expectation of (3 + 7 * 0.5) = 6.5, but if you run the math further here's how it looks. The party with 35% of the representation gets (assuming a 50% outcome per competitive election):
===============
0 seats = 1%
1 seats = 6%
2 seats = 16%
3 seats = 27%
4 seats = 27%
5 seats = 16%
6 seats = 6%
7 seats = 1%
===============
Would it produce good governance do you think? I think, perhaps, the opposite.
With a kid on the way, I’ve been looking for a succinct explanation of life and politics. Thank you
There are absolutely situations where it is obvious, most notably when those drawing the maps say they're motivated by partisan power. The situations at issue in Rucho v. Common Cause, for example, were not ambiguous in the least.
-------------------------
Hmm, okay, so what would be fair? Perhaps we want to give each party a fighting chance in each election? Isn't that fair?
2 districts each hold 100,000 blues
8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets
So now the violets have a 50% chance of winning 8 districts. The blues are granted two districts automatically, but that is fair, since they are more popular than the violets. Each party has some chance of winning.
However, in this model, if 1 blue voter in each district changes their mind, then the violets end up with 80% of the legislature. We’ve engineered a system that is very unstable! If Katechon is like the nation of Hungary, where a 2/3rds majority can amend the constitution, then Katechon is now vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover, much like what happened in Hungary after 2010. And that's because 8 people out of a 1,000,000 changed their vote.
Ideally we'd do away with this bullshit electoral system entirely and make each vote matter by having it be proportional representation.
Until then: Maximum instability = maximum Government accountability.
If the voters are 70:30 on a macro scale, it wouldn't matter if you create a bunch of purple districts, because they all can't be purple when you have exhausted the 30% of that ratio.
Conversely, if you were to create fixed color districts, you could hide a larger majority as "loser" voters on a macro scale by stuffing them to a few of that color on a micro scale.
But to be clear, I don't think artificially creating purple districts for that express reason is a good idea, I just think it would be less of a problem than the current gerrymandering, when optimizing for democracy.
Nope, it's "stupid broken laws" problem. Nothing else.
It’s a good thing. You want the representatives drawing the districts because they are closest to their constituents. You also don’t want random district allocation, you want the representatives to match with your constituents in a 90/10 split, not a 50/50 split where nothing gets done.
The barrels of ink used to slander redistricting is being supplied by very powerful money interests. They do this because it’s one of the last impediments to the NWO globalist government that is incrementally being setup.
The removal of representative redistricting, along with the installation of the horribly complex rank choice voting system the media elites are pushing everywhere effectively ends the American democratic experiment.
Open primaries with ranked choice voting.
Top two to general.
Done.
The current model, in a "safe" dem seat (45% R / 55% D) whoever wins D primary wins everything. This means the D primary (with 20% of voters - most activist) are deciding things. Same on the right.
With open primaries, you will get 2 D's potentially in general, but now the R vote actually matters. This drives towards the middle.
Additionally RCV in the primary (ie pick 3 in order) also allows votes for less well known folks without as much wasted voting.
Another method is RCV with a multi-seat election. So you rate 5 candidates and their are 5 winners in the larger geo area. This tends to give even groups with let's say 20% makeup of voter pool a seat at the table. Traditional winner takes all does not.
This is a very good goal if you want to replace duopoly which alienates a large number of people with monopoly which alienates a larger number of people.
What we need is almost the opposite: a system that, to the extent possible without compromising things like manageable legislature size and personal electoral accountability, provides proportional representation so that governing compromises are forced out in the open between parties in government, rather than done behind the scenes within parties so as to attempt to attain a minimal winning coalition leveraging limited substantive choices in the general election.
(Using Single Transferrable Vote, or a similar system, in small multimember districts, say 5 members per district, would do this quite well.)
Giving every candidate 1-5 or 1-10 points like Amazon reviews is by far the best system.
Even simpler option: implement STV. Then primaries are optional as you can essentially bake the primary candidates into the main election if you like.
I think it’s quite repugnant to offer Republicans the choice of two Democrats to vote for. (I’m not a Republican). Top-2 admits that FPTP with party primaries is broken, but declines to actually fix the problem beyond a band-aid.
You shouldn't be using single-member districts at all. It's basically impossible to represent people fairly with them. You should either have proportional election of entire legislatures (or state delegations to federal ones), or at least proportional election of a smaller number of multi-member districts.
I don't get the idea of open primaries - why should someone who is not a member of a party get to vote on who the party wants to represent them?
Imagine there was a Women's Equality Party party (there is in the UK.) Should a large number of men, with no interests in women's equality, be able to come along and tell the Women's Equality Party who will represent them in an election?
The WEP can put whoever they wish up to represent them, selected however they wish, in a process funded by their party resources.
Then the primary is a voting population wide decision to winnow the field to a reasonable final competition.
A state funded primary that is locked to a party selection process is an interesting use of public funds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Lou_Hamer
Civil Rights leaders wondered why ultra-racist white men got to represent the Democratic Party in Mississippi, when someone like Fanny Lou Hamer seemed to have broad based support in her district. Why were ultra-racist Democrats able to make a backroom deal and nominate some staunch segregationist, instead of allowing someone to stand for the Democrats, chosen democratically?
The goal of the primaries was to weaken the political parties, which is why you might find them confusing. At the time, a number of scholars pointed out that weakening the parties would increase the influence of money, and also allow untested demagogues to step forward and become the leaders of the weakened parties. These concerns seem to have been borne out by events.
Also you can't really in keep people from registering for a given party, so enforcing a non open primary isn't feasible in practice.
1 - Most voters are not a Republican or Democrat. So they're stuck choosing between what those at political extremes want at election time.
2 - Some cities/states will always vote R or D, pretty reliably. Choosing someone you dislike less has its advantages in such areas.
So you could just have 3 people from the WEP run and then voters decide.
If the party has enough power over its member to force only 1 candidate, then they can do that. However once parties get larger enforcing that is difficult and other people will just run.
It does make an aggregate difference because few people vote in primaries anyways, and even fewer will change their party affiliation every year, making raiding much harder.
Presumably only if they'll have you? People often get ejected from political parties in the UK if they for some reason are being destructive (in someone's opinion.)
If you are gone change the voting system, why not just go for the much better score voting, or Star vote.
RCV leads to incredibly very strange and non-intuitive outcomes in some situations. Score voting beats it in pretty much every way while also being far, far simpler for people to actually use.
In general you need to eliminate all per-elections and make districts larger as well.
Then you are starting to approach something actually good.
I like this commenters suggestion of ranked voting. Would lead to more centrist candidates.
For example, i believe that’s what we saw play out in France, essentially. Center-left Macron got most votes. Far-right Le Pen got second most votes. And far-left candidate got third most votes. Once it was down to the top 2, Macron handily won.
> “Center-left Macron”
That media / framing is exactly why the election method doesn’t work as well as banning affiliation. Le Pen is not really “far right” by most standards, but media labels her in that position and can get away with it due to name and party recognition.
You can still do both, change the election method and ban affiliation. Probably would be the best of both worlds.
Primaries aren't part of the official voting process though. They're entirely defined by parties and in fact parties can completely do away with them if they want. Primaries aren't actual elections and election laws don't really apply so there is no mechanism to force them to be open.
The solution it would seem, is to do away with political parties completely. Just like George Washington suggested from day one.
To start, you remove party designations from the ballot and any other official voting material. Then you block local governments from being able to assist political parties with primaries/caucuses/conventions - no governmental support for any of the party infrastructure.
People want to have informal parties (ie Tea Party, The Squad, Freedom Coalition, Congressional Black Caucus etc), you can't stop that without infringing on free speech. But government isn't required to support all of the party infrastructure outside of the general election ballot access rules. And with no political party designation on ballot, anybody who meets requirements could gain access, which means no need to fall in line with a party platform. People can vote their conscience.
At that point we might as well just skip the entire election process to save money and let the parties work out a power sharing agreement where it alternates every so many years.
Just the opposite, the top two candidates, regardless of what party they're from will appear on the ballot, this would allow people to vote for a 3rd party candidate in the primary without worrying about "wasting" their vote. If the 3rd party candidate is one of the top two they'll appear in the general, if not that voter can still pick the lesser of two evils in the general.
There is no way such a system would ever be allowed to produce a ballot without a Republican and Democrat on it. If you're not on the ballot, you don't get elected. Full stop. There would be all sorts of bizarre measures and "tests" added to such a system before it was ever in place to make sure that only the existing parties would ever be on the ballot.
If anything, I would expect this model to reduce duopoly. An unpopular republican might be overtaken by a candidate from the libertarians in the first round, giving them a shot at victory which they could hardly get if the ghost of "wasted votes" on third-parties was haunting them.
As long as 3rd parties are not electable, we're stuck with some right wing, corporate-backed politician regardless of who wins.
All the talk of gerrymandering is just a partisan distraction.
And calling all politicians "right wing" is pretty unclear on the concept.
Perhaps they are when compared to your opinions, but if you can't see daylight between your options you have been manipulated to extreme cynicism by corporate forces that benefit from your disengagement.
And having more representatives (districts) will help immensely as well. The current limit is capped by statute and can be changed, this would especially help counter the over-representation of unpopulated states.
If we believe that the appropriate compromise is no one's first choice, the first thing IRV does is throw away any "appropriate compromise".
interestingly, IRV is not even monotonic! It's easy to construct a situation where converting people to have the same ranking as you causes you to get a candidate you like less. (The concave parts of the voronoi diagrams describe areas where this happens.) If you're curious about this, a few years back some friends and I tried to make a video describing this phenomenon: [0]. (Our editing and presentation skills are nothing to write home about but I think the video is interesting.)
If a moderate of their party runs, it'd be easy for their own members to vote for the moderate as #1 ahead then #2 the more extreme person, and not for the awful evil other party person. The opposition can also vote for the moderate of the dominant party, #1, their candidate #2, and not for the aweful extremist.
The winner in RCV will always be someone's first choice.
In instant runoff it is certainly true that the winner is always someone's first choice, and that was my point - sometimes the winner the method selects should not be the winner.
Madison said the same thing, but we didn't have contemporary communication tools. My company's Slack has over 5,000 people and works just fine. Why is it unrealistic to repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 and increase membership in the House by an order of magnitude?
It would almost certainly end political parties. Lead to good ideas being debated openly by people who have no chance of hanging together long enough to force a direction.
My god man what are you thinking !
(/s)
Do you have examples of any ideas at all being debated openly by 5000 people?
If you are literally one in a million, certain perks come with the trrritory.
I think we might get better results if we see our elective representatives as "cattle not pets"
IMO we should just drop this notation altogether and just let angry people get angry, and ignore 'em. Sarcasm is better when it doesn't have to be labeled.
Which is why nobody ever uses a different tone of voice when speaking sarcastically.
The hallmarks of sarcasm are subtle, and come in a few forms - sometimes it’s intentional emphasis on a particular word, sometimes it’s a quizzical look or raised eyebrow, etc.
But at least in my experience, I can usually tell when someone is being sarcastic in person, but it gets harder and harder to tell on the Internet.
Interesting, I didn't know that. I looked it up, and I really liked this Madison quote:
> In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.
Probably true. But I would hope that argument could be deflated easily, since it was the senate that was supposed to give smaller states a disproportionate amount of influence.
Flux[1] was a step in the right direction, but unfortunately seems to be recently disbanded. The idea of everyone voting for issues they care about, where leaders are subject matter experts, is a sound one. It's ludicrous to think that a single person can politically represent thousands or millions of people on all matters. Modern politics is a reality show where charismatic and unscrupulous power-hungry egomaniacs compete for the top celebrity spot.
Because people are capricious, easily manipulated by emotion and generally refuse to acknowledge their ignorance on matters in which they insist on having opinions about.
Using the Twitter/Reddit voting model to run the world is absurd.
Right. So you'd rather have them vote for a single candidate who sells them hopes and dreams that they'll make the right decisions to solve all their problems 4 years at a time, instead of voting for solutions to specific issues they're interested in where subject matter experts can actually improve things?
Corruption and greed are inescapable. At least by not giving a single person and party absolute power over everything, the damage can be contained to specific areas of government.
> Using the Twitter/Reddit voting model to run the world is absurd.
What's absurd is the current absolutist model that is easily corrupted via social media (Cambridge Analytica, etc.).
How to correctly mobilized the talents of subject matter experts is a complex issue, and no one is certain of the correct answer:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-have-politics-in-the-us...
So are a huge number of politicians.
It's also a slippery slope- where is the line drawn? We allow everyone to elect the government, but you don't trust them to vote on a referendum?
Perhaps one solution would be for those 5,000 people to be entrusted with the job of picking (for each bill being considered) 100 "second-level representatives" to go forward and do the hard work of debating and evaluating proposals and reaching consensus.
These SLRs could be a mixture of subject matter experts and people good at political logrolling, so that the legislation which passed would reflect the priorities of the 5,000 representatives (and their voters) while still allowing a meaningful discussion to take place and shape the result.
A more interesting question would be how to build incentives in a winner-takes-all election system towards reducing gerrymandering, and to discuss what it would take to change away from a winner-takes-all geographical election system.
In terms of the math, increasing the number of representatives from each district is the same as making the districts smaller. As the essay said:
"As the districts get smaller, then the size of the shift needed (to punish the previous majority party) describes the asymptote of the tangent, converging towards the reality of what the public actually wants."
Increasing the number of representatives from each district is the same thing, as the number increases, the shift needed (to punish the previous majority party) describes the asymptote of the tangent, converging towards the reality of what the public actually wants.
But there remains some distortion, however small. You eventually get into infinitesimals that have no practical impact, but it is still there. If you have districts that only have 1,000 people each, and each district elects 1,000 representatives (everyone in the district) then the distortion disappears, but if you have districts with 1,000 people, and they only elect 999 representatives, the distortion reappears, however small that might be.
Also, from the essay:
---------------------
Some nations have fine-grained representation of land but course-grained representation of ideas
Some nations have fine-grained representation of ideas but course-grained representation of land
You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.)
You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.)
Many of the difficulties are simply wiped out by the fact that we have computers to count votes, and the ability to record and stream multiple debates at the same time. And of course nothing says that any given representative needs to vote on smaller issues that don't affect their district/etc, and it becomes harder to have country wide parties because local ideals are allowed to express themselves.
Basically everything suddenly has the option to become finer grained, and the difficulties that presents are mostly actual advantages.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-democracy-empowe...
Of course, to iron out a deal, typically some leadership needs to meet, so I make the assumption that there will be some smaller, higher level assembly that allows the leadership to move quickly, especially when facing an emergency. Parliamentary systems have the distinction between the assembly and the Cabinet. But I think having a mass assembly, as an intermediate structure between the general public and the higher levels, is a great idea.
Despite the author namedropping some other places, the whole piece is struggling to gain the validity it seeks due to pretending the US is the only country on earth and no one else could have figured out some solutions.
Also, the wrong use of "gerrymandering" makes me wonder how much the author actually knows about the topic.
E.g. instead of having 100 districts selecting 1 representative using the winner-takes-all principle, which are very sensitive with respect to gerrymandering, make 10 districts where each one sends 10 representatives, where the distribution of representatives approximates the distribution of the submitted votes.
This should decrease the problem a lot.
Some nations have fine-grained representation of land but course-grained representation of ideas
Some nations have fine-grained representation of ideas but course-grained representation of land
You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.)
The party chooses the list candidates. The problem is that the two major parties get to choose some of our members of parliament, because they are at the top of the party list. We get members of parliament that have zero franchise and that you effectively cannot vote out.
Personally I think it's a really fucked system. Although even with all its suckiness, it is way way better than a two-party system like in the USA. We get some kooky third parties, but somehow the third parties seem to keep everything honest.
Blues and Violets each get a single vote. On election day, everyone puts their vote into a big hat, and one of the ballots is pulled out. Whoever is on that ballot, gets a unilateral victory. This system has numerous good properties:
1. Power never falls into a state where the majority party can stay in control. Gerrymandering is a non-issue.
2. Every vote counts. Instead of a single, tie breaking vote changing the outcome of the election, each additional vote increases the odds. If there are 40% violets and 60% blues, the likelihood of a violet leader is still 40%.
3. Extreme minority votes still matter. If 99% of the population is blue, and 1% of the population is violet, violet supporters still feel their voice can be heard.
4. (edit) Political spending is massively reduced, since there is a diminishing return to spending ever more money trying to tip the 49% into being 51%.
This would make the extreme outlier results less likely, but still maintain most of the properties you said. For example, if there are 40% violets and 60% blues, then chance of a violet winner becomes only 35.2%. If there are 10% violets, their chance of winning is only 2.8%.
Depending on how risky you want to be, you can replace 3 with 5, 11, 31, or 101. For example with 11 ballots, 40% violet in the population, their chance of winning is 24.6%; with 10% violets, their winning chance is only 0.03%.
Luckily a single election isn't enough to make a dictatorship, in the US.
There is never a guarantee that a government will stand forever.
1. No spoiler effect. If you really want Green to win, but you think Blue is the lesser of two evils, voting Green and Blue at the same time is strictly better than voting only for Blue.
2. It's about as easy to understand as FPTP. No funny business where politicians mislead people about how the voting system actually works. Approval voting has a few downsides, but they are obvious downsides, so everyone is on equal footing.
3. You can still use those nice scantrons and hole punches.
4. No weird questions about "should I give the candidate I want most a 1, or should I give the candidate I want most the 10?"
5. It's a majority rules system and not a dictatorship.
Approval voting requires the voter to decide whether or not to approve the lesser of two evils. It seems to me that this isn't a simple question it depends on the odds of different outcomes, level of preference between two evils, etc. To me that seems like it would make voting harder for most people, and politicians would absolutely be trying to mislead people about the appropriate strategies for who to approve and not approve.
That usually only happens when power gained by elections is used to change the system, often outside of the formal rules of change. Obviously, no election system can safeguard against this, since it is an effect outside of the electoral system.
> Every vote counts.
Only one vote counts. This is literally the textbook example of a system than fails the non-dictatorship criterion.
> Extreme minority votes still matter
Well, again, since only one vote matters, it's only an extreme minority of votes that matters, but it's extremely unlikely to be one from an extreme minority position.
This depends on how you state the non-dictatorship criterion. Wikipedia's discussion refers to a "single pre-determined person's preferences." But since the dictator is selected randomly, they aren't pre-determined.
Further, every vote counts in the sense that every additional vote for a candidate increases the odds of them winning the election. The candidate has an incentive to get additional votes no matter how many votes they currently have. You don't have the situation where its futile to vote because the outcome isn't going to be close.
Why do they feel this?
This way districts still have a representative, but there is no insentive for gerrymandering.
This is a commonly known as Overhang seats in MMP: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhang_seat
Germany, New Zealand and devolved legislatures of Scotland and Wales use a different sort of system where the party lists are used to achieve proportionality. In a system like that, Fidesz wouldn't get a lot of seats from the party listes because they are way overrepresented already in the single-member districts.
Also, this is probably an unpopular opinion, but I actually kinda like gerrymandering. In the sense that I like the fact that it exposes the absurdity of counting votes and claiming that it somehow represents the voice of the people.
The outcome is clearly very dependent on what voting method is used, how the districts maps are drawn, who is eligible to vote, etc. It's all just vanity of vanities.
I actually 100% disagree with this sentence. I do not, honestly, believe it exposes that. My experience with people who vote is that they harangue about the "other side" gerrymandering, but when their preferred candidate wins their district, it's because voting works.
I genuinely believe people are either (a) willfully ignorant, or (b) pants-on-head idiotic when it comes to this issue.
Republican candidates winning Staten Island sometimes is not gerrymandering.
The Republican National Committee hiring gerrymandering consultant Thomas Hofeller in 2009 to draw them maps of Wisconsin and North Carolina that will give them absolute supermajorities even if they lose the popular vote by a wide margin, and then using those supermajorities to strip incoming Democratic governors of all of their powers thus instituting permanent one-party rule forever, that's gerrymandering.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-2022-maps...
Are those findings somewhere else? That particular page does not clearly support that claim.
From Wikipedia:
> A distinct set of definitions of the term "republic" evolved in the United States, where the term is often equated with "representative democracy."
The term "representative democracy" is typical in poli-sci circles and basically everywhere that's not the US, but I don't think that's actually the distinction the poster was looking for—some kind of constitution or other super-law that's relatively hard to change, plus strong rule of law (which is more about practices and norms than about what's written on some paper), seem much more important for preserving minority interests.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfchronicle.com%2F...
Then again this would allow third parties to actually gain foothold and the corrupt duopoly can't allow that.
Also this whole electoral college thing. Why is there this idiotic winner takes all method? Why not also maybe have lists. So electors would be chosen in order of list and voters could pick a list endorsing certain candidate pair?
To some extent, I feel like Germany's system (where the legislature is elected based on local districts, but then members are added from party lists to achieve proportional balance) could be the solution that incentivizes the least political gerrymandering, but I don't have a finger on the pulse of Germany's political problems to see the drawbacks.
> Why is there this idiotic winner takes all method?
So that slave states could count their slaves as 60% members of their populations for the purposes of gaining electoral votes without having to let their slaves vote.
Not if the smaller districts are gerrymandered and/or you have a winner takes all system.
Then make the districts bigger to compensate for this effect.
The House also has representation issues: since the total number of representatives in the House hasn't increased over time as population has increased, there's a "floor" on the number of per-state representatives that causes smaller states to have outsized representation.
The article doesn't really deal with any of this, though: it assumes each "district" has the same number of people in it, which isn't the case for House or Senate seats when you consider the entire country. The article is more about considering the representation within a single US state, based on its division into districts.
Currently, arguably, democrats in power in the senate had fewer popular votes than republicans. (48 dem + 2 independent popular vote was about 1.5 million less than the 50 republican senators, with VP deciding ties... well it's just not so clean cut a minority-in-power situation)
(I blame most of the current situation on democrats being bad at politics and not having the guts to do things they should have.)
There's no way to be completely fair, the current setup is there in order to prevent several kinds of runaway power processes and really it has worked quite well for a very long time (unless you expect people to just be angels then go pick a dictator you think will be good).
> It is divided up into 10 districts, each of which sends one representative to the national legislature, which consists of 10 people.
They take this as a given and try to come up with convoluted ways to 'fix' the problem, when just fixing this axiom would solve it much easier.
We already have the bundled-population representation in a senator, the House uses a different strategy explicitly because it's different for the benefits of competing means of representation to even out power.
There are many separate interests in a large country and thinking the only morally correct government is strictly majority rule is definitely a matter of debate.
The founders made it the way it is to prevent tyranny of the majority which was a major topic in political philosophy. You likewise wouldn't want to live in a place absolutely controlled by the 50% +1.
Geographic areas with lower population densities getting higher representation makes sense, interests aren't equally distributed nor are they distributed just to areas of high density. If you don't do this you risk power concentrations where people have to leave lower density places for higher density places if they don't go along with the majority opinion because they don't get representation and get disadvantaged by the majority.
People tend to like this when it benefits them and hate it when it doesn't, but there is good sense in it, especially when nationally the party split is nearly always very close to even.
Australian five-member STV districts beg to differ. As does MMP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repre...
And DMP:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-member_proportional_rep...
And PR-OAC:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2778867
One of the biggest problems we run into is not that there are no options, but there are so many possibilities that people who study the problem in detail end up arguing with each other rather than forming a coalition for a single reform! I also designed a system based on a simplified CPO-STV, but I keep putting off writing it up.
Before putting this on a pedestal, it's worth noting that Israel:
1. Has smaller some power blocs which have non-proportional power at the parliament due to being the "swing vote".
2. Had other smaller political parties completely eliminated (voter desertion) due to ineffectiveness.
3. Had 4 elections in 2 years due to inability to form a ruling government with more than 50% of the parliament approval.
4. Had a government average run-time of 2.5 years since 1999 due to "no confidence" votes that force re-election.
There's still electorate MPs (members of parliament), but there's also MPs determined by their party's percentage of the party vote.
So at election time, you vote for your preferred local representative, and then you vote for your preferred party.
All the Nordic countries also use a proportional system with multi-member districts and measures to make the overall party representation in parliament align with their national share of the votes.
Maybe the problems with Israel are just problems with Israel rather than their particular system of voting.
As a result, Dutch parliament currently has 16 parties, and the senate 13. And although governments do fall, and sometimes have trouble forming a new government, the system is very stable. Every government is a coalition, a compromise between enough parties to hold 50%+1 seat in parliament, and that means you generally see the same big parties in government. Sometimes one of the big parties loses popularity and thus seats, and doesn't govern. Other, possibly fairly new, parties can take their place. Parties that most other parties think are terrible (like the racist parties) still won't be able to form a government even if they're large, because nobody wants to work with them.
EDIT: I'm thinking of the Efficiency Gap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote#Efficiency_gap
Some people (especially the ones profiting from the current system) do not want to change the fundamentals though. In those cases shortening the feedback loop by cutting the cycles could also mitigate the problem. Also reducing the obscene amounts of power we put in a selected few hands could help.
Suppose in the hypothetical country, the total number of votes cast for Blue is some number "B", and the total for Violet is "V". Further suppose that the number of seats won by Blue is "C" and the seats for Violet is "W". A non-gerrymandered map would be one where B:V is approximately C:W (or at least there is no possible change to the seats result that would make C:W any closer to B:V).
My proposed reform, therefore, is that after an election, if those ratios are not as close as possible, the electoral officers would go down the list of seats that were lost by the under-represented party (from best performance to worst) and flip the result so that the under-represented party gains representation, until the ratio can't be improved any more.
Obviously this would feel hugely unfair to the voters in the districts where the result was flipped, but they should blame the people who drew the unfair map in the first place. Indeed, the incentive would be on both parties to draw districts which were most likely to produce a balanced result that doesn't need any flipping. This method has the added bonus that it would encourage parties to appeal to voters in "safe seats" just as much as "swing seats", since everyone's vote would count towards the B:V ratio.
The maths gets a little more complicated when dealing with more than 2 parties, and with independent candidates who don't belong to any party, but I don't believe these are insurmountable obstacles. Solving the problem of gerrymandering, unrepresentative legislatures, and voter apathy with this one weird trick (that doesn't involve changing the ballot papers or counting process) seems like such a big win that the cost of a few flipped seats has to be an acceptable price to pay.
This seems like an implementation that would harm the trust in the system. If you're going to bother having representation by geography in a democratic system, it should be based purely on geography, not based on demographics within the geography.
I agree with the author of the post that the geographic element itself is the source of the issue and that there are perhaps other better ways of dealing with the "tyranny of the majority" issue that the founding fathers intended to handle via republicanism.
You're right, though, that if voters were prepared to sacrifice some of that familiarity, they could do much better than the system I proposed (which was somewhat inspired by the multi-member system I mentioned in another comment).
But mostly, political party matters much more than ever before. The electorate is more ideological and the candidates for office are much more loyal to the party platform. In an era where political party mattered less than, say, geography, then partisan gerrymandering was less of a national problem.
Of course, there are several types of gerrymandering and this is just one of them. The best summary of possible solutions and their limitations I've seen was done by 538 as part of a larger gerrymandering project: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-probably-not-possib...
I'm afraid too many people would be ok with this. There is a strong desire for "democracy" over "republic" (not a combination of the two), meaning 51% of your average voters can do whatever they want to the remaining 49%. Fundamentally, including a "republic" in the formulation means that some people get a prioritized say. I think a strong case can be made for that, but the idea itself is deeply unpopular.
This is not how I used the word, so please don't speak for me.
I guess in the USA, because of your history, you don't have a lot of debates around the pros and cons of monarchy and so the other meaning of "republican" is probably less common on your side of the ocean.
This is the dumbest argument for first past the post, how is this better than "35% of your average voters can do whatever they want to the remaining 65%"? No matter how you count the votes you will have a winner, and that winner can abuse the loser. 51% winning just means you get the fewest number of losers, and any other protections you can get with first past the post can also be gotten in a popularity vote system. The only thing you now miss is that some votes become worth much more than other votes, instead you just have 1 person 1 vote, which I thought was the standard of modern democracy.
That's the wrong thing to optimize for.
My best guess solution is a two part legislature, one house of small local districts, one house elected in at-large Proportional Representation.
Your provincial assembly can take care of the concerns of your province.
Your National Assembly can take care of the concerns of your nation.
We can get rid of gerrymandering and still have different levels of government, each devoted to a particular level of localism.
Indeed, having one level of localism interfere in the affairs of a higher level seems like a violation of encapsulation, in the sense that a software developer would understand the concept.
Theres no perfect way to solve it but the ultimate problem is social: one party is willing to gerrymander to win and the other doesn’t because they don’t have to but would if they actually saw any gain in it.
And while I agree there are tradeoffs involved in having geographic representation, these bizarrely shaped districts don't really provide that. They don't align with any administrative or cultural borders.
Not everything is first past the poll, vote for your candidate, etc.
At least with parties, the members of the party get to choose the boundaries of their concerns. E.g. the working families party in NY is a powerful presence in the state democratic party, and that is in a FPTP system.
If you vote for parties based on platforms, and then parties coordinate with one another to build coalitions, then you might just end up optimizing for governance.
Not perfect, but less flawed.
Would mean that winners would first be the most popular and the extra votes would still go towards the party. And the unpopular in terms of votes received candidates of party wouldn't get elected.
You can gerrymander to make your party's representatives' seats more secure, or you can gerrymander to have more seats for your party. In the former case your overall majority will be smaller when you win all the elections you expect to win, while in the latter case your overall majority will be bigger, though in each district the popular vote majority will be smaller. Either way your party can lose badly in the event of a wave election, either because few seats need flipping (in the first case), or because popular preferences change enough to swamp your large majority of small majority districts (second case).
We've had one anomalous period of 62 years of no wave elections in the past 100 years in the U.S.: 1932-1994. Since then we've had these wave election years that flipped the House or greatly enhanced the majority party's majority: 1994, 2006, 2008, 2010. That's... quite a few wave elections. That's in spite of the democrats having had 62 years to gerrymander before 1994, and despite the mid-cycle gerrymandering of the 00s. We can expect more wave elections.
Gerrymandering is self-limiting.
In the real world:
* Rural vs. Urban produces a very strong polarization in party/policy support. So you simply cannot get the result described where you have one party winning all districts.
* There are many candidates both within a party and between them that would receive approval from a given voter beyond their first choice.
* Currently because of the structure of the system there can only be two serious parties. (A serious third party splits the vote and prevents either from being successful). But if you had more parties you’d probably get better representation.
Basically, I think this model is both oversimplifying to the point where it is useless for making claims about what would happen in our current system if we eliminated gerrymandering, and also not interesting as a model for other voting systems.
For what it’s worth I think Single Transferrable Vote and Approval Voting are both interesting options that get round most of the problems in our current system.
Worked for Athens.
"Estimates of the population of ancient Athens vary. During the 4th century BC, there might well have been some 250,000–300,000 people in Attica.[4] Citizen families could have amounted to 100,000 people and out of these some 30,000 would have been the adult male citizens entitled to vote in the assembly."
"There were three political bodies where citizens gathered in numbers running into the hundreds or thousands. These are the assembly (in some cases with a quorum of 6,000), the council of 500 (boule), and the courts (a minimum of 200 people, on some occasions up to 6,000)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy
Athenian eligible voters to boule ratio: 60-to-1
US eligible voters (233M) to 5000 representatives ratio: 46,600-to-1
US eligible voters to House + Senate (435+100) ratio: 435,514-to-1
Let's not discount the possibility.
Populations make great quantitative judgements, but not qualitative. It seems that selecting at random would be best to get voices of folks experiencing homelessness and poverty. Rich folks would still get a couple of seats.
My guess is less war, more money for anti-poverty and education programs.
I really do think it is the only way. Everything else gets distorted.
People say, well, most people are stupid. But I'm not so sure. Juries are a sort of pseudo-sortition, and they actually fare pretty well (far better, I would argue, than legislative or even judicial bodies).
I think many positions would be admirably served by random appointment.
I mean, bless their hearts, but they just seem so completely naive. No policy will ever be pursued by the US government that gives more political or economic power to the poor and middle classes. Not ever.
Nah. I’m “encouraging” nothing. Just pointing out historical — and contemporary — reality.
Such an argument would carry weight today.
I think that ultimately, the best solution wrt. fair elections is to enable free movement across regions and countries. Then people can choose to live in their own communities of like-minded people. Nobody has to be a minority at least in the issue they care about most, they can just move. Also, even if you do gerrymander, if the oppressed 30% blue just move to the 90% blue regions it becomes ineffective.
Unfortunately free movement has its own problems re: the migrant crisis, housing prices, etc.
This is solved by better legislated states rights not by creating a less undemocratic voting system. There is no reason why the fed should be allowed to ban something like air conditioning or showerheads. But now they did, people in low water states complained that saving water is important since they lack water, so now even in very water rich states it is illegal to sell high throughput showerheads. So the current system doesn't protect against such shenanigans at all.
This sounds good but you just get the people with the means to do so constantly migrating away from the fallout of their bad policy every decade or so.
Some ability to flee is definitely a good thing but on the other hand if you make your bed you should sleep in it.
This system allows for parties to be created and destroyed very easily, we had 2 new parties in the last 10 years that at some point got 15-20% of the votes
But this article seems to imply that this metric can't exist.
Ok so now I wonder about the corollary: use an algorithm to generate the boundaries. If the article has a proof that all boundary assignments are unfair, then presumably an algorithmic boundary generator can be made to be randomly unfair one way or the other, balancing out the unfairness overall.
This is trying to solve gerrymandering with (more, different) gerrymandering. That's not the way it should work.
Districts should represent something from the real world, outside of political affiliation.
It's natural for the political "color" of a district to change over time, because people move, and sometimes get older and change their mind. This should not result in a change of the shape of the district.
Gerrymandering made a single party run Queensland for 19 years. it was very real in Australia, but the downside of democratising the election method was dis-enfranchising the rural voter. Multi Member would fix this.
No matter what, I think the vast majority of people here agree the US system is particularly bent out of shape in many respects.
This is not true. It totally discounts independents (38% of American are independent), and districts obviously evolve and the popularity of the party in power tends to wane as that party either fails to fulfill its promises or abuses its authority in some way. It is no coincidence that in modern times whenever a party has control over all three houses in the U.S., they lose that control in the very next election.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Basically we should reduce the importance of districts and give the popular vote more weight. In my view everything else doesn’t have a chance to solve the real issues.
Keeping a geographic based house is necessary because sometimes people of a wide variety of values still having needs in common due to shared local geography. Both rich and poor are impacted if the dam above their town breaks and a flood doesn't care about your race, gender, sexual preference or anything else. House of Values wouldn't even need to be based on each state but rather could be something like "One representative for every 250,000 votes the group receives nationwide". Maybe even allow people to split their vote between groups. Perhaps under this arrangement the Senate could go back to being appointed by governors and state legislatures as the earlier issues with corruption would not necessarily apply (depending on how laws get passed between the three houses).
The above of course would require near universal support from the public as it would be a change to the basic working of our representative democracy. Not sure if we're capable of getting that level of agreement on pretty much anything anymore.
Is it ignorance? Racism? Some "stuck in the 60s" notion that third world countries are run by dictators?
Due to the dynamics it creates "winner takes it all" is fundamentally undemocratic.
Through that would be a fundamental change in US politics on all levels, so it's a bit too much to ask for.
And a bit tricky wrt. the president.
The normal complaint with this is that it typically involves having closed lists of candidates who get a free ticket into parliament without any local accountability, and this is only slightly improved by having an open list system (although that requires teaching voters to mark extra ballot papers in unfamiliar ways).
Fortunately a better solution has been found and actually implemented in Baden-Württemberg, and they call it the Zweitmandat system. Basically, the "proportional seats are filled by losing candidates who won the highest proportion of votes".
I know TFA is not addressing this point intentionally, that's ok. You can choose what you want to focus on.
But does anybody have a logically sound argument that supports this assertion?
1,000,000 people that can vote
600K : blue & 400K : violet
4 districts hold 400K : blue
6 districts hold 33.3K : blue & 66.6K : violet
if that's all of the districts... then isn't that only 500k?
why is it not realistic?
The US Democratic party has a national policy of non-gerrymandering at all levels of government. Maryland had a Democratic gerrymander in the 00s, but it was exchanged for a fair map in 2011.
The US Republican party, on the other hand, has a national policy of gerrymandering as much as possible. The national committee hired gerrymandering consultant Thomas Hofeller to draw Republican-maximizing maps for every state in 2009, and used those maps as the backbone of their REDMAP plan to seize permanent control of every state through extreme gerrymandering.
I think the solution is really, really easy. Treat politicians like kids.
One gets to draw the lines, but they have to draw several different versions, that are at least XX% different, in terms of voter groupings. Then the other gets to pick which one gets used.
And when they can't get along, I get to send them to the naughty step.
> 2 districts each hold 100,000 blues
> 8 districts hold 50,000 blues and a 50,000 violets
In this situation, the government is considered to be unstable, since a small number of people changing their minds in the eight swing districts can decide elections.
This is an example that closely matches reality in which some regions tend to be "strongholds" while others have swing ridings. The strongholds always vote for the same party, so their parties are motivated to to ignore their interests and, instead, pour all their efforts into competing in the regions with swing ridings.
Why don't neglected regions gradually turn into swing regions? Sometimes they do, but sometimes the parties involved make region a part of politics. Say that, in the above example, the 2 districts with 100,000 blue supporters were in a regionally distinct part of the country. The violets discover that there is an undercurrent of mistrust about that region in the 8 other districts, and demonize the blues by claiming they have a secret agenda from the blue region.
This gives the violets an edge when it comes to winning in the 8 swing-vote districts, but it also frees up the blues to almost completely ignore the interests of their stronghold. Sure, citizens in the stronghold are free to vote for the violets, but if the violets actively demonize them in elections, why would they?
Instead, they might become disaffected from politics entirely, since elections are decided entirely in the other 8 districts according to the concerns of those districts, and not theirs. Even though the blues are more numerous overall in the country, there will frequently be governments with strong violet majorities in which the blue strongholds are completely neglected. It's easy to see how this can lead to alienation and even separatist sentiments.
If this seems far-fetched, take a look at "Western alienation" in Canada. Most Western provinces tend to vote overwhelmingly CPC on a consistent basis. The LPC has won majorities and now controls a coalition minority government with a smaller share of the popular vote because the East is dominated by swing ridings. In the past, they have smeared CPC leaders by saying they have "hidden Western agendas". The result today is disaffection from federal politics in the West, alienation, and, yes, some separatism.
Hence, getting rid of geographic representation might actually help reduce geographic alienation. Of course, in the case of Canada, why would people in swing-ridings, who currently control the outcome of elections, ever vote for candidates who are actually serious about electoral reform that might reduce their influence?
That doesn't seem to represent "what voters want" very well.
Gerrymandering is where you draw up districts such that the voting power of people who won't vote for you is minimized. It doesn't have to result in homogeneous districts. The point is to maximize your party's voting power as durably as possible.
Gerrymandering is to draw districts according to political party affiliations. So of course if you only divide up your districts by political party affiliation (in rather extreme ways) you will discover that doing so doesn't lead to stable political systems. No shit, that's the problem with gerrymandering.
Any serious analysis of this problem needs to confront the realities of geographical location and migration.
That not really what it is. It's to draw districts in order to give a particular party an advantage. Usually the way to do that is not to draw them along party lines, but to mix voters of different affiliations in the same district such that your party comes out with a majority in as many districts as possible.