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Comment by dageshi | Hacker News Reader

Please correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression redrawing the boundaries wasn't some diabolical plot but rather the boundaries were set independently and intended to equal up consituency sizes? The fact that this doesn't favour Labour should be beside the point?

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Correct - the Boundary Commissions (there's one for each nation) are independent and come up with the new boundaries, based on simple mathematical principles. Parliament then votes them through.

In 2012/2013 Labour managed to defeat the government in the vote. The boundary changes would undoubtedly have favoured the Tories, but that's because the Tories are more popular, not because of some nefarious plan.

There is basically no way of redrawing those boundaries that is apolitical. It may not be a "diabolical plot" but constituency size is not all of it. How you alter that inherently alters vote distribution in a FPTP system, and as such it is a major problem.

Even if you supposedly makes it fairer by evening out constituency sizes, and even if the people doing it are trying to be fair, the net effect due to the electoral system can very easily be to disenfranchise the voters even more.

You need to boundaries to be created by a well-known, impartial algorithm rather than a person. And you pay a committee of academic programmers from other countries, with no political ties to the country where it's intended to be used, to design the algorithm. And you use the same algorithm forever rather than changing it from year to year.

That solves the gerrymandering problem. Of course, it doesn't solve the problem of getting whichever party currently benefits from gerrymandering to agree to switch to the neutral algorithm.

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