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Comment by h11h | Hacker News Reader

No it isn't according to the definition everyone else uses for "gerrymandering" (drawing specific electorate boundaries with partisan goals).

What he's complaining about (that the system of one representative from each electorate biases against candidates who could never win in one electorate but have a modest amount of support in the entire population) is worth contemplating, but isn't gerrymandering. New Zealand addresses this problem by giving everyone two votes, an electorate vote and a party vote, and members are chosen from electorates and party lists. New Zealand only has one chamber. Australia has two. Australia's Upper House is elected at a state level with multiple members from each state, so this is where minor party candidates get elected.

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I think his argument is that it is "gerrymandering" in the sense that the system is maintained the way it is, because that serves the political self-interest of the major parties. The boundaries themselves aren't gerrymandered, but the system according to which they exist is.

By that definition, one might say that Australia has a single layer of gerrymandering – gerrymandered at the systemic level but not at the district level – while the US has two layers of gerrymandering – gerrymandered districts in a gerrymandered system.

How does preferential voting favor bigger parties? It does the opposite.

Use of the word gerrymander in this way ("having boundaries at all is gerrymander") is meaningless.

> How does preferential voting favor bigger parties? It does the opposite.

It depends on what you are comparing it to. Preferential voting (aka ranked choice or alternative voting) is less favourable to bigger parties than first past-the-post is. But it is more favourable to bigger parties than other systems such as single transferrable vote (STV) or mixed member. The biggest reason why Australia hasn't moved to STV or mixed member for the House of Representatives, is that doing so would benefit smaller parties at the cost of the bigger ones.

> Use of the word gerrymander in this way ("having boundaries at all is gerrymander") is meaningless.

An STV or mixed member system would still have boundaries, but would be less advantageous to the bigger parties. Why isn't choosing a system which is intentionally more advantageous to the bigger parties a "gerrymander"?

> The biggest reason why Australia hasn't moved to STV or mixed member for the House of Representatives, is that doing so would benefit smaller parties at the cost of the bigger ones.

Where the evidence for that claim? More likely is that there's no impetus for change, at the least, and quite possibly no interest in it given people's feelings about how the Senate is voted and the proliferation of smaller parties there.

The current system was adopted for clearly political reasons - due to the outcome of the 1918 Swan by-election, which the ALP won because the conservative vote was split between the Nationalist and Country parties. The Nationalists were the direct ancestors of the current Liberal Party. If the system was invented to serve the needs of (one of) the major parties, who really believes that its survival isn’t because it serves the needs of both of them (or should I say, all 2.5 of them)

What you're describing is smaller parties benefiting from PV. You haven't addressed your claim. Labor is the big party and the smaller conservative parties are benefiting.

In the Australian context, the big parties are Labor and the Coalition. The Coalition is formally an alliance of two parties, but in many situations they act like a single one–indeed, in Queensland they actually merged into one (the LNP), and effectively they are a merged party in the NT as well (the CLP), although that technically was never a "merger" as such. The Nationalists and Country party in 1918 were the historical predecessors of the current Coalition. The "small parties" are the minor parties which are neither Labor nor the Coalition, but still manage to win some seats in Parliament–nowadays primarily the Greens on the left, One Nation on the right, and a random mishmash in the middle–although as we go back through the decades, other players have risen to prominence only to subsequently fade away (most notably the Democrats and before that the DLP). And then you have the "micro parties" which run candidates but never win any seats, or one or two of them might strike it lucky on very rare occasions (like the now-defunct Motoring Enthusiasts Party did in 2013).

It also bears mentioning that in the election, the Liberals (Australian right wing for anyone watching US politics) lost Wentworth. To give an idea about how right-wing Wentworth, is, that a was the seat of a recent Liberal prime minister. Lost Kooyong, seat of a prospective candidate for Liberal leadership. Lost a bunch of other seats that broadly support right-wing policy.

There is a revolt underway on the right of Australian politics as various factions battle to decide what exactly the right wing is going to stand for. That contributed a lot more to their election defeat than the concerns this gentleman raises. There were significant swings against both major parties, although the Labor party just lost a few votes while the Liberals were eviscerated.

That isn't gerrymandering, that is losing lots of votes leading to the loss of an election.

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