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 ...
Gerrymandering is an issue precisely because of winner take all. In a proportional system the definition of districts (if they exist at all) doesn't have the same effect on the outcome of the election.
In fact, the best solution to gerrymandering is adopting an electoral system (proportional) that isn't susceptible to gerrymandering.
For example the mandates might be distributed proportionally globally or per district. In the latter case gerrymandering works when you have rounding problems (10 mandates per district and one party has 9% of support). There are also usually thresholds under which you don't get to the parliament altogether, and the "wasted" votes are distributed proportionally between the other parties - so again, gerrymandering still works when this is done per-district rather than globally.
This is exactly the situation in my country (Poland), and gerrymandering isn't a thing mostly because of people looking at it as corruption and protesting whenever some government tries to do it (last time it was PIS trying to change voting borders to add a lot of PIS-voting countryside to the capital city to finally win elections there :) - after protests they didn't do it).
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.
SCOTUS was asked to lay out a standard for courts to follow in deciding gerrymandering cases. A court can't know a priori whether a partisan skew in a particular map was deliberate or the result of geographic factors. So you can’t just treat it as a “separate issue.” Among other things, even if there’s evidence of intent, there might not be causation. You can intend to do lots of things that you don’t actually end up accomplishing.
You can kick the problem to a "neutral commission"--but that's giving tremendous power to unelected people. If "commissions of neutral experts" were a real thing that exists we could just dispense with democracy and rely on them! The Constitution is all about asking "who has the power?" but on issues like this people overlook that and get mired in "who would come up with the best answers under unrealistic assumptions about bias?"
Put differently, having legislatures draw districts might make it harder to "vote the bums out." But gerrymanders are actually pretty fragile. Democrats had massive geographic and gerrymandering advantages throughout the 1970s and 1980s: https://crystalball.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/conten.... But Republicans still managed to break through that in 1994, and since then it's flipped back and forth quite a bit. With a "neutral commission," by contrast, you've created a body with a lot of power that can't be voted out.
Also, what target are the experts shooting at anyway? That’s difficult to tell for the same reason it’s hard for the court to tell. Are the experts supposed to be leveling natural partisan skew due to geographic factors?
No, we have democracy in order to choose between competing policies and ideologies.
An expert comission has a pre-defined, fixed policy - produce fair district maps, and they work to carry it out. The idea that no-one can carry out a task without bending the result to suit their personal views is absurd. If you ask some car designers to design you a saloon car, they'll design a saloon car, even if they personally prefer sports cars.
In theory, neutral experts could be used to determine the best policies towards the democratically chosen goals. And it actually works that way for the most part. The vast majority of stuff that goes through a parliament is stuff you never hear about, after all. They're like your car example. It's the few percent of topics where there's controversy where it's difficult, in practice, to find experts who will genuinely stay neutral - precisely because they're so controversial.
I disagree with that. If you asked people what the goals should be for educating children, they’d probably be in broad agreement. But they differ widely in how they think those goals should be achieved.
Experts are only useful when there is a fairly rigorous scientific framework in place that has predictive power—the ability to predict what will work and what won’t.
Even in areas adjacent to those fields, the effectiveness of expertise quickly breaks down. Public health has elements of both medicine and social psychology, and the results were all over the place during the recent pandemic. When you get into other territory: education, welfare, etc., the real world value of expertise is even less.
At least in the US, this seems to be empirically false.
It works pretty well in Australia. Here, federal election district boundaries are drawn by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), an independent federal agency. I've never heard anyone remotely mainstream suggest the system is rigged or gerrymandered or politicised. (There are certain elements of "unfairness" built into the system – most notably, that the least populous state gets the same number of Senators as the most populous state, just like in the US – but the AEC didn't decide that, the Constitution says it.)
The AEC has total control over federal elections–the states have no role in decisions regarding them. For state/territory and local elections, each state and self-governing territory has its own electoral commission, similar in principle to the AEC – although some of the details, such as how exactly it is appointed, will differ. Unlike the US, in Australia, local government has zero role in running elections, even local government elections–all control of elections is at the state/territory and federal levels.
The AEC and its staff (and their state/territory equivalents) are required to be politically neutral. They are not allowed to belong to political parties or publicly support or criticise them.
The chief executive of the AEC is appointed by the government for a five year term. Although government politicians (effectively) choose the chief executive, they are required by law and custom to choose someone without a record of past involvement in politics – the current incumbent used to work in a civilian executive role for the federal law enforcement, before that as a manager for a defence contractor, and before that he was in the military – so obviously someone with some demonstrated experience in management/leadership but without any known political affiliation.
As well as its chief executive, the AEC has two other members – a chair and a third member. The chair must be an active or retired federal judge – the Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Australia gives the government a list of three judges, and the government gets to choose one from that list to become the chair. The third member is also chosen by the government, but legally must be head of another federal agency – (non-binding) tradition dictates that the government choose the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Australian Statistician. Major decisions–such as drawing electoral boundaries–must be made by the Commission as a whole, by a two-thirds majority vote.
> With a "neutral commission," by contrast, you've created a body with a lot of power that can't be voted out.
Nobody can vote out the AEC, but the government can remove its three members from office for "misbehaviour". However, the removed member can challenge the removal in the courts, so if the government tries to remove one without a strong justification, the courts are likely to strike down the attempt, whereas removing them with strong justification is likely to be upheld. To my knowledge, no removal has ever been attempted. (Also, the AEC is established by statute not constitutionally, so Parliament could amend the law to abolish the AEC and replace it with something else–highly unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.)
I can't see why you couldn't use a similar model in the US, and why something like that couldn't work there. (You couldn't copy the exact Australian model into the US, due to various differences between their respective national constitutions, but you could translate some of the major ideas of the Australian model into something that could work in the US context.)
The article gives an example identical to yours.
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.
The election will prove the final results, but the process so far has been pretty bad to get what appear to be not significantly different results.
It seems beyond odd to me to think "eh, this paper is dusty; let's just do what we want".
A democracy should make its own rules as it goes. Americans living today ought to decide the rules under which those Americans live, not hope that somehow slavers who lived centuries ago magically determined the correct rules to live by forever.
I don't think writing some of the rules down in bigger type and calling those a "Constitution" helps much at all, and so I'd argue against it as a practice, but certainly a situation in which most Americans weren't born until after the constitutional rules in place today were fixed is not a success. The last successful new Constitutional Amendment to be written was in 1971. If you were born after 1971 your "democracy" never really decided any of these rules, if you were born after 1950 you never voted for the rules you live under.
In its early days the American Republic fiddled with the Constitution a great deal, and that's much less objectionable. Even as late as a century ago, there was some flexibility left in this vital joint, but today it's gone.
Not everybody agrees, for example in UK the parliament is the ultimate sovereign and it is not bound by law other than self restraint.
While requiring more than "a simple majority" seems like a mechanism to prevent certain regrettable outcomes, it really doesn't, it's just a line in the sand. We should oppose a million people voting to execute one innocent just as fervently as 500 people voting to execute 499 innocents, the problem isn't the ratio and so a correct solution can't be about the ratio.
Consensus is great, I love consensus - if you can find a consensus that's brilliant. But super-majorities are not a consensus. And of course when you really do have a consensus it tends to be naturally enduring anyway. I am very dubious of people who imagine that there might be a consensus for policy one minute and then shortly after the consensus is gone. I think there was only ever some clever sleight of hand to deliver the illusion of consensus at all for some purpose.
When contemplating making major changes in governmental structure, consensus would be best, but super majority is probably second-best and first-achievable.
You can’t run a country needing 100% consensus of over 200M people.
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?
I doubt that the concept of "laws" is a single coherent concept, but supports many different views, such as the conditions under which people are ethically obligated to obey them.
The debate isn’t about whether gerrymandering is acceptable, but over who should be given the power, if anyone, to do something about it, and whether, if the courts are empowered to do so, they have clear guidelines to apply in exercising that power.
To borrow from Mao Zedong, "sovereignty" grows from the barrel of a gun — in that sense, only one U.S. state has been sovereign in the past couple of centuries,* not least because of the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution, to say nothing of the Civil War Amendments and the 19th and 26th amendments (giving women and 18 year olds the right to vote).
And the former Confederate states are a special case: They probably make the most noise about their alleged sovereignty (apart from a few of the low-population, right-wing outliers in the non-coastal West), but they indisputably haven't been sovereign since Appomattox — they gambled and lost in a world-historic example of FAFO.
* The one exception was Texas, which was an independent republic from 1836 to 1845, with its own small army and navy as well as embassies in Washington, London, and Paris; Texas, of course, was one of the rebelling Confederate states that incontestably lost its claim to sovereignty in 1865.
A bunch of Americans were flipping out months ago because a local legislature basically flipped the bird to the Federal government and decided it gets to overrule national laws, and then a Supreme Court majority said yeah, we're not going to explain why but it's urgently necessary to let you go ahead with that with no further discussion.
In principle, if you believed a word of what these Supreme Court Justices said, you could do all sorts of violence to the Republic via this same mechanism. But of course if you were trying to, say, reduce gun violence, rather than help ruin poor women's lives you'd suddenly find they remember that you can't override national laws and there'd be an injunction in force before you could say "Shadow docket".
Phrases like “live by the sword, die by the sword” and “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” come to mind. You can’t, as OP did, call the Constitution “dusty old documents” that shouldn’t bind the nation on one hand, and in the same breath complain that the Supreme Court refused to rely on that “dusty old document” to overrule a law that the elected legislature of Mississippi chose to enact against a backdrop where the national legislature has never said anything different. There being no contrary federal law, that “dusty old document” is the only reason anyone has ever cared what nine lawyers think about abortion.
[1] There still isn’t—only 30% of Americans support Roe’s 22-24 week viability limit, and there is strong public support for restrictions that Roe prohibits: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-americans-stand-o.... Roe thus differs from even those other cases, like Griswold, that have become uncontroversial due to changes in public opinion.
> According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, a group that advocates for abortion rights, abortion would become illegal in about half the country if Roe were overturned. Its metric indicates that 24 states would likely ban abortion outright if Roe is weakened or overturned.
And I'd have to see numbers to believe you when you say that it's what the residents of those states want.
The majority of the US states were not there first – the majority of the US states were effectively created by Congress. Federal territories–which as such were fully under control of the federal government–were elevated into states by Congressional decision; frequently, Congress also decided how many states some federal territory would be partitioned into. The only states which could be said to have had some independent sovereignty pre-existing federal control were the original 13, Vermont and Texas. One might also count Kentucky and Maine, being consensual splits from the original 13, in the list; possibly also West Virginia, although the degree of consent involved in its separation is more debatable. So we are talking about 15/50, maybe 18/50 if we are generous. (Hawaii doesn't really count because the State of Hawaii is not continuous with independent Hawaii, since for over 60 years in-between Hawaii was a federal territory–but even counting Hawaii, that's only 19, leaving 62% of US states created by Congress out of non-sovereign territories.)
It is also different in that US states can have their sovereignty further limited, against their consent, by constitutional amendment (which they may have voted down, but the other 3/4th of states supported), or by Supreme Court decision (who decide what "state sovereignty" means in practice, and can choose to interpret the concept broadly or narrowly, and may alter its boundaries over time as their case law evolves due to changes in judicial whim and the ideological composition of the Court.) By contrast, under EU law, any further major transfers of sovereignty from the member states to the EU require unanimous agreement.
And the biggest difference is that the EU is a club you are allowed to leave (as Brexit demonstrates), the US is a club from which exit is near-impossible (see the US Civil War). That fact gives EU member states vastly more sovereignty than US states have. Indeed, it is disputed whether secession of a state from the US is possible even if Congress agreed to it – many say it would require a constitutional amendment. The EU treaties now contain an explicit right to leave, and it was generally assumed that one existed implicitly even before it was explicitly stated. If the EU tried to reduce the sovereignty of a member state against its will, bypassing unanimity (such as via qualified majority voting, or via an ECJ decision), the member state can always respond by leaving – and it is likely a mere serious threat of leaving would result in them being allowed to stay but with an exemption from the decision in question. What US state could ever hope for that kind of sovereignty?
I don't know why so many Americans want to compare the US states to the EU member states–it is not a very sensible comparison. Better comparisons for the US states would be the Canadian provinces, the Australian states, the German Länder, etc–they are roughly the same kind of thing as US states are (units of a federation lacking their own sovereignty under international law), whereas EU member states are a very different kind of thing (fully sovereign states under international law)
Other than, you know, the previous President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, who did exactly that.
They entered the US on the same terms as the original thirteen colonies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_footing
> It is also different in that US states can have their sovereignty further limited, against their consent, by constitutional amendment (which they may have voted down, but the other 3/4th of states supported),
I’m not sure that’s a dispositive distinction. The EU and the US are, on paper, more similar than different. In particular, EU law overrides national law just like federal law overrides state law. In some ways the EU is even more powerful—for example it can directly force member states to enforce EU law, while the federal government can’t force states to enforce federal law.
> or by Supreme Court decision (who decide what "state sovereignty" means in practice, and can choose to interpret the concept broadly or narrowly, and may alter its boundaries over time as their case law evolves due to changes in judicial whim and the ideological composition of the Court.)
This is true of the EU as well. The ECJ has the power to interpret the EU treaties including points about sovereignty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_v_ENEL
> This groundbreaking case established the principle of supremacy in EU law, which is an independent source of law that cannot be overridden by domestic laws.
> By contrast, under EU law, any further major transfers of sovereignty from the member states to the EU require unanimous agreement.
The notion of the Supremacy of EU law over national law was created by judicial fiat. It was included in the EU constitution, which was never adopted by consent, yet remains the law of the EU.
> Better comparisons for the US states would be the Canadian provinces, the Australian states, the German Länder, etc–they are roughly the same kind of thing as US states are (units of a federation lacking their own sovereignty under international law)
The German Lander are a better comparison, because the Canadian and Australian states were created at the same time as those countries. And the German Lander are in fact sovereign entities.
More generally, international law doesn’t recognize one kind of “sovereign entity” and demote everything below that to “administrative subdivision.” Sovereign states can cede part of their sovereignty to a federation and yet retain part of that sovereignty, as the US states did, as the EU member nations did, as the members of the Soviet Union did, and as the members of the United Kingdom did. The aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the impending dissolution of the United Kingdom (of Scotland secedes) demonstrates that these sub-federal boundaries continue to have meaning.
In practice diplomatic solutions are found to avoid direct clashes.
[1] ECJ has of course claimed otherwise, but some national constitutional courts reserve the right to interpret and follow their own constitutions, even when they would lead to diverging from ECJ rulings. In fact they might not have other options.
[2] https://verfassungsblog.de/national-courts-cannot-override-c...
The Canadian provinces and Australian states were pre-existing self-governing British colonies, and are legally (under domestic law) considered to be continuous with those colonies. When the Colony of New South Wales became the State of New South Wales on 1 January 1901, initially very little changed – the colonial government became the state government, in fact it was the same thing, they just replaced the word "colony" with "state". Gradually, certain powers were transferred – over time, the Australian states lost some of their powers which were taken over by the federal government; concurrently, London gradually gave up the powers which it had over the Australian colonies/states, either passing them to the federal government, or the states. It was a slow process over decades, and is generally not viewed as having been officially completed until the Australia Acts of 1986, which formally terminated the UK Parliament's legislative power over the Australian states (which however had de facto fallen out of use decades earlier).
Also, under Australian constitutional law, the Australian states are considered "sovereign", albeit the term is understood differently than in US or German law – sovereignty comes from the Crown (the British monarchy), and the states are sovereign because their governments have a direct relationship with the Crown which acts as their formal head, separate from the federal government's relationship. In a certain sense, the Australian states are more "sovereign" than the Canadian provinces, because their relationship with the monarchy is more direct–Australian state premiers directly advise the monarch who to appoint as the state Governor (the monarch's representative in the state); by contrast, Canadian Lieutenant-Governors (the monarch's representative in the province) are appointed by the Governor-General on the advice of the Prime Minister.
> More generally, international law doesn’t recognize one kind of “sovereign entity” and demote everything below that to “administrative subdivision.” Sovereign states can cede part of their sovereignty to a federation and yet retain part of that sovereignty, as the US states did, as the EU member nations did, as the members of the Soviet Union did, and as the members of the United Kingdom did
The same word can mean different things in different legal systems. A good example is "treaty", whose meaning under US domestic law is much narrower than under international law. Under US law, something is only a "treaty" if the President asks and receives the Senate's consent to its ratification, otherwise it is just an "international agreement". As far as international law is concerned, "treaty" and "international agreement" are synonyms, and the distinction US law draws between them is largely irrelevant.
In the same way, when domestic legal systems such as those of the US or Australia speak of "state sovereignty", they aren't using that phrase in the same sense that international law uses it. Nevada is a "sovereign state" under US constitutional law, New South Wales is a "sovereign state" under Australian constitutional law; but neither is a "sovereign state" as public international law defines that term.
> The aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the impending dissolution of the United Kingdom (of Scotland secedes) demonstrates that these sub-federal boundaries continue to have meaning.
As long as sub-national boundaries remain sub-national, international law doesn't care about them. The moment they become national boundaries instead, international law suddenly starts caring. When independence occurs – which is primarily a factual rather than legal question - the status that entity had under domestic law prior to its independence has no international legal relevance. The US has "sovereign states" such as California and "non-sovereign territories" such as Puerto Rico; suppose the US suddenly breaks up, and both California and Puerto Rico become independent sovereign states – the fact that one used to be "sovereign" under US law and the other wasn't, has zero relevance to international law; from an international law viewpoint, they are both now sovereign, but prior to their independence neither was.
Similarly, whether a newly independent state is regaining its past independence, or has never been independent before, has little or no relevance under international law-as far as international law is concerned, prior to its independence, there was no "state" (in the international law sense); and when a state regains its independence, it is not always considered legally to be a continuation of the earlier state (whether or not it is really depends on the circumstances of the case, and whether other states choose to treat it as one or not). From an international law viewpoint, if Scotland becomes independent, effectively that is a new state called "Scotland", lacking any direct legal continuity with the former state of the same name
The boundaries between EU member states are within the scope of international law, because they are inter-state boundaries; the boundaries between US states or Australian states are outside the scope of international law, because they are intra-state boundaries, in the international law sense of "state".
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.
(As a side note, Wikipedia's toy example of "STV in a party system" considers a case where three parties field candidates for 5 seats and receive 48%, 45%, and 7% of the vote, resulting in those parties respectively winning 2, 2, and 1 seats. This is about as bad in terms of proportionality as any other system [Party A has 686% of Party C's votes and 200% of the representation; Party B has merely 643% and 200% of the representation], which isn't a surprise; 5 seats don't allow for proportionality unless you're lucky enough to see a 63-37 split in the electorate. But if party-based proportionality is a concern, the correct answer is fairly obvious - the three parties should receive 2, 2, and 0 seats, with one seat going unfilled. It is interesting to me that no one ever seems to contemplate this as a possibility.)
I don't think that the approval voting scenario you suggest is good though. If I want to elect five candidates, I want 5 candidates that represent the diversity of the population. But it seems to me that your suggested method will elect 5 candidates of the largest voting bloc, not at all what we want.
The example is very explicit that votes are cast for parties and all of the benefit of receiving a vote goes to the party for which it is cast. As such, the model is only coherent if there is no such thing as voting for a candidate.
But really, what exactly the original example intended to convey is a pointless pedantic argument I'm not getting into.
The crucial point is that you absolutely can have multi-member proportional districts where you vote for specific candidates. So to someone who advocated for a such multi-member districts, the contention that you have to give up voting for individual candidates simply isn't true.
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.
Setting entirely aside the questions of morality, you also lose economies of scale by doing this, and there are already hierarchies that enable local governance as well as local representation in regional governance.
I'm not saying there aren't ways to improve the system, but what tptacek is trying to say is that "this shit is complicated and all about trade-offs, and you can't always get everything you want". In some ways it's the definition of a wicked problem.
It's not about "creative problem-solving towards some goal" it's about balancing competing goals from competing stakeholders. The status quo has stakeholders who benefit and will not like change, and will not like the characterization of the status quo as "an accident" or "side effects of some other design decision".
This sentence has no coherent meaning:
"It's not about "creative problem-solving towards some goal" it's about balancing competing goals from competing stakeholders. "
There is no meaningful contrast between the two phrases.
You said to have them incorporate their own city. This seems different?
> There is no meaningful contrast between the two phrases.
Sure there is: in these cases, there is no single well-defined all-encompassing goal, and it may not be possible to define one.
Everyone in a polity (a town or region or nation or perhaps special district) should be free to vote for every candidate running for that polity. The polity should have no geographic sub-divisions. If, as was mentioned above, a neighborhood in Chicago has a special culture, then:
its residents have their city concerns met when they participate in city elections,
and they have their regional concerns met when they participate in regional elections,
and they have their national concerns met when they participate in national elections.
But if you decided that their culture was so special, and deserved so much special protection, that the above was not good enough, then my suggestion is that the neighborhood should incorporate as its own city. Instead of being a neighborhood in Chicago, it should be an independent city with its own elections.
As I said, if you really wanted to rescue some unique neighborhood, my suggestion is that you do so directly, without trying to achieve the effect as the accidental side effect of an unrelated architectural decision.
I was referring to Thomas's goals. What does Thomas want to do? What is he trying to achieve? Whatever his goal is, he should approach that directly, without relying on accidental side effects of unrelated architectural decisions.
What’s the next step, then?
"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."
Assuming his goal is to protect the unique culture of that neighborhood, two options are:
1. the neighborhood already has its unique culture protected because the people in that neighborhood help elect the city government
2. the unique culture of the neighborhood is not sufficiently protected by the city government, therefore the neighborhood should incorporate and so become its own independent city
Again, whatever Thomas's goal is, I'd suggest that he achieve his goal directly, rather than trying to achieve the result as the accidental side effect of other architectural decisions. Gerrymandering is a very weak way of trying to defend the culture of a neighborhood. If his goal is to protect the culture of the neighborhood, then he should think of an architecture that would do so directly.
No option is clean.
Why should Thomas do something direct if something indirect achieves his goal, if a little bit less, but with far fewer harms?
Direct is not always better than indirect, especially in domains where any direct action has myriad indirect effects too.
About this:
"What do cities have to do with congressional boundaries? Districts span cities."
My point is that districts should not exist.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-have-politics-in-the-us...
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
Ironically Cuba’s national assembly is the only one I can think of where political parties aren’t allowed to endorse candidates.
It's the kind of broken, bad feature thought up by people assuming everyone would be as politically invested as themselves.
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...
It doesn't actually seem like an unreasonable claim, especially as there are so many contradictory definitions for "middle class", but I think we'd have a clearer picture if we could say, for example, "The median wealth voter in the US is 55% likely to vote Republican".
For context, here is what one source[0] says:
> Democrats have a huge advantage (63 percent) with voters earning less than $15,000 per year. This advantage carries forward for individuals earning up to $50,000 per year, and then turns in the Republicans’ favor — with just 36 percent of individuals earning more than $200,000 per year supporting Democrats.
> Interestingly, the median household income in the United States is $49,777 — right near the point where the Democratic advantage disappears and the Republicans take over.
[0] https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/economic-demogra...
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.
Here's an idealized example. Imagine a state with 1,000,000 people. 400,000 Democrats live in a narrow strip on the Eastern border, uniformly distributed in that strip. The 600,000 Republicans are uniformly distributed in the rest of the state.
Split the population in half by a north-south line. The Eastern district has 400,000 Democrats and 100,000 Republicans, and so has a Democratic representative. The Western district has 500,000 Republicans and so had a Republican representative.
Now try an east-west line. Each district has 200,000 Democrats and 300,000 Republicans. There are two Republican representatives.
Yet on a map, both divisions look fine.
That's one reason the anti-gerrymandering rules specify looking deeper than just population and compactness.
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.
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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.
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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.
And similarly, the false notion that all members of Party A are fungible, and it doesn't matter if I, personally, am represented by someone I hate, so long as there's a member of my party somewhere in congress.
But that's not really the point of a representative republic. Our specific, local needs and desires are supposed to actually be represented by by our members of Congress.
So in terms of actual representation, it would actually be better to have a district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate A, and another district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate B, because then the vast majority of people would be getting the representative that they voted for, and represents them.
In the scenario where every district is purple, fully half the people have no representation of their interests in congress.
> So in terms of actual representation, it would actually be better to have a district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate A, and another district that voted nearly unanimously for candidate B, because then the vast majority of people would be getting the representative that they voted for, and represents them.
No, only the throwaway districts in gerrymandered maps are represented, all other districts swallow up many more unrepresented voters.
> In the scenario where every district is purple, fully half the people have no representation of their interests in congress.
But you missed the point, not every district can be purple. In absolute terms, more people would be represented than the status quo. It's better than gerrymandering.
But again, not my prefered solution.
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.
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.