Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
gerrymandle.cc
gerrymandle.cc
> If two parties tie in a district, nobody wins it.
This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it. But the spirit of the gerrymandering concept is conveyed well enough.
The designer diary: https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1/blogpost/111646/designer-di...
We're three siblings from a gerrymandered district in Austin, Texas, and this is the story of how we designed a board game about gerrymandering — and ended up at the Supreme Court with 82 copies of Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game.
Mapmaker is a great game for tabletop veterans and newbies alike, although the first playthrough can be a little opaque even to regular gamers (especially the first few moves when there are no established district boundaries yet). It definitely benefits from repeat play, goes quickly once you know the rules, and has you doing only one thing each turn.
Definitely a game that has earned a permanent place in my collection.
If you interpret a "tie" in this game as "either party could win within the margin of error", then it becomes a lot closer to solving the problem that gerrymandering algorithms try to solve in real life!
Under any real world system, you will lose this election if you rig it this way. You just can't predict who will win it instead.
Yeah I don't know if that was just the puzzle today, since this is the first time I've heard of or played this game, but that feature seemed like a disappointing execution of an otherwise genuinely unique idea.
Winning a single district for your extremely minority party while locking the other two parties out of winning anything isn't even remotely analogous to how real world gerrymandering works, at least in the US where the term is typically used. It also feels like cheating, since it relies primarily on exploiting a flaw that exists exclusively in the game but not in real life. I'm all for simplification of real world factors in games, but not to the point where the entire path to victory relies on that simplification.
A more accurate and more interesting variation would be to just have two parties with puzzles that rely on crafting districts where the party with fewer voters wins the majority of seats, with the challenge coming from voter distribution patterns that make it hard to create winning districts while following the game's rules. The addition of a third party and ties that result in nobody winning seem both unnecessary and worse.
Ties happen from time to time. Here's one I could find [1], and I recall one that I can't find maybe a decade ago in coastal northern california that they resolved by throwing dice.
[1] https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2024/dec/4/election-tie-blue-la...
"A partisan districting protocol with provably nonpartisan outcomes" by Wesley Pegden, Ariel D. Procaccia, Dingli Yu https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781
Maybe add that as an option to the game?
I sort of think that the increasing drive to gerrymander everything to the extreme may eventually show that First Past the Post voting is fundamentally broken and we have to replace it with proportional representation - or at least that is my hope.
The seats in the Bundestag are parceled out in proportion to shares of the national vote among federally recognized parties, and each party has a list of candidates who may or may not get a seat from that party's resulting allotment, based in part on the popularity of those candidates in their local list elections. The math of it is a bit more complicated than that, but it works quite well to completely sidestep the gerrymandering problem. The flipside is that parties must be registered federally to participate, and this gives the government a great deal of implicit power to exclude parties it doesn't like.
CGP Grey has a good YouTube video explaining it, probably better than I have here [2].
[1]: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/german-election-ballot-paper...
In 1930, there was an average of 294k citizens per Rep. In 2020, there was an average of 761k citizens per Rep. At some points in U.S. history, the ratio was 30k:1.
I am not sure whether having very small districts would help or hurt gerrymandering, because it all depends on spatial constraints and spatial/density autocorrelation. I do think it would be good for the Republic if our representatives cam from a local community where you reasonably expect that might have gone to school with them, or have met them at the coffee shop before, and where they can run a campaign by personally knocking on doors, which can be done if the ratio was like 80k:1.
And the House is MEANT to be cacophonous and boisterous. Objections based on convenience and space, are not serious in terms of the meaning of the House. Within a decade or two, it will be 1M citizens per House Rep. Adn everyone of them will bought, because you have to be bought to get elected.
1. Due to geographic sorting smaller districts would be more intensely partisan than today, not less. A smaller land mass is going to be more deeply blue or red
2. A gigantic house would be less cacophonous and boisterous, not more so, because you'd need more hands-on party control to get anything done. It's deeply unrealistic that a huge mass of representatives are going to get anything passed on their own. You'd end up even closer to parliamentary-style party leader control of the House, which personally I'd like to avoid.
Combining these two points, you'd have even more ideologically intense & disciplined parties with smaller districts/a larger House- the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve I think
3. 'Objections based on convenience and space, are not serious in terms of the meaning of the House' this would be news to say Germany, which recently ended its famous 70+ year old MMP system precisely because their lower house kept expanding too much. They found the issue logistically too difficult to deal with, and are now moving to a more classic PR setup
Bonus extra point- the UK already has one of the world's largest lower houses, with relatively small districts and lots of local representation. Is the UK particularly well-governed, do you think? Small single member districts are rent-seeking machines- way too easy for a local rep to get captured by Major Local Employer (or NIMBY group)
Every member should be able to bring some number of proposals to full vote and all members should be forced to make a vote. Make every GOPer put a No vote on the "release DJT rape transcripts" bill, instead of burying them in committee. Make every pretend liberal vote No on "Medicare 4 All".
What you implicitly describe as a strength, competitive districts, leads to winner take-all political dynamics and MORE extreme politicking, and leads to districts that are perpetually unhappy with their representation.
And in aggregate, the less the party and President can influence a Representative's re-election chances, the more independent that Representative can act, and the more that Representative can reflect their district's particular beliefs. This is a moderating dynamic. In fact, it threatens the two party system in the House allowing cross-party. They can try to be as disciplined as they want, but if they have little leverage over its members, then it will be a fruitless endeavor.
Re: govern-ability of a large House. This is repeated over and over, yet it seems more about opinions and reinforcing the status quo, which is not working, than evidence. And the larger point is that we need to start with the purpose of the House. First fulfill that: To Represent their Constituents faithfully. Without that, none of the other stuff matters. Working efficiently for the wrong ends is not winning.
In terms of the UK, while the ratio in the UK is 100,000 citizens per MP, for a citizen to be a candidate for MP, their Party must approve them, or at least, not veto them. That is not generally true in the U.S., and only true to the extent that the party can send ad money to someone else in the primaries. I think there is good reason to think that smaller districts in the U.S. would give weaker control to Parties, not stronger control.
You are correct that major local employers and NIMBY groups can dominate in small districts. Do they not now? Between begging for money from every monied power and hoping to avoid the ire of the Party and President, where does that leave the Representative in terms of representing their constituents?
In the end, I just don't find myself convinced by these objections, but I do thank you for your considered response.
Consider the Olympics instead. Judges score, and 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place simply fall out of the scores, nobody had to design a tournament bracket to make that happen. Give voters that same instrument: score every candidate on desirability. For a pooled multi-seat district, take however many winners the pool needs, ranked by score. Nothing stops someone from voting like they do now, give the candidate you despise a 0 and the one you want a 100, but most people think in preference, a first, second, third choice, not a single binary mark.
The numerology of district size and pop-per-rep will always be heuristic at best. If the goal is to improve representation, we should focus on the mechanism of selecting people and elevating them into office. That's the biggest bang for the buck.
2. A country of 340 million people with an elected representative from every small town would have an unrealistic number of representatives. 1 for every 5k citizens would be 68,000 reps in the House
I get that you're fetishizing hyper-localism to the exclusion of all else, but it's just a bad basis to run a modern society. This is not a realistic vision
Practically, and with all due respect, you keep stating opinions why it is a "bad basis to run a modern society" but you never articulate why exactly. To my mind, the increased complexity of the world can use more Representatives to work and specialized in more specializes committees.
As long as I'm waving my magic wand around, I'd also like to see it handled more like jury duty, the representative just gets picked at random from the pool of 30k. Or maybe randomly select 10 people, and that's who we get to vote for. Then after 2 years, they get to run for re-election one time, and if they fail to get a majority, we randomly pick another 10 candidates.
I think what made me quite confused at the start is mis-reading the instructions that every district could have no more than four houses; I thought I had to split the land into equal areas. Once I understood that, the solution felt much easier.
US/California etc gerrymandering is dramatically illegal IMHO. I see the recent gerrymandering in the USA as a kind of political cancer actually....
I think the average member of either party generally understands gerrymandering to be bad, but with an redistricting arms race escalating nobody wants to be left behind.
I think gerrymandering generally is abhorrent and anti democratic. At this point we need a new, more fair redistricting aggressively enforced from the top down to change course, and I'm not sure how we can get that through when it would likely take a 2/3rds majority in congress to pass... but significant members of congress benefit from gerrymandering and would lose their position in the next cycle if it were taken away, so they are unlikely to support the measure.
How do you curate the puzzle each day? Can you easily automate a bunch of puzzles then hand select them so back to back days aren't too similar? Or is it manual?
Hmm, that is interesting, I had not thought about that. I will see if it makes more sense to reverse the axis. Might just make it more confusing though
> How do you curate the puzzle each day? Can you easily automate a bunch of puzzles then hand select them so back to back days aren't too similar? Or is it manual?
It's mostly manual, but I have some tools to quickly create map layouts and fill them with various distributions. Just to speed up testing out new levels.
You can also click a square in the "Districts" section of the header to switch to a different district, including an empty one to create a new one.
Cool concept tho! Would like to play it if I could only understand how
Sorry this isn't super clear. I'll try to think of a way to make it more intuitive.
For example, one can't show how ranked-choice voting would reduce the dodgy win of X without also knowing how the Y/Z populace breaks down in terms of voting for the other side over X.
No, that's not it. Is it that some empty hexes (not just outside the map, but inside as well) are mysteriously not allowed?
Can't view it at all.
Since todays puzzle heavily relies on empty space, it can be a bit confusing. I'll try to make this a bit more clear for new players