[RD] "Race"-based Gerrymandering

[Berzerker]

Making districts competitive is a laudable goal, but impossible without creating noncompetitive districts in the process. For example, if the vote distribution in a state is usually 60-40, there is no way to make all districts 50-50. You can do so for some of them, but in the process you would have to create a few 70-30 ones to compensate.

There is no way to avoid safe seats in a first-past-the-post system.

This isn't actually true. The districts are competitive, only the competitive part happens in the primary for the dominant party, rather than in the general election.

The goal is making every district competitive by diluting ideological concentrations. If we took a red state that votes 60% R and 40% D I'd prefer districts that are 60-40 to 70-30 and 50-50. When ideology is concentrated too much, opponents get ignored and its a battle to see who can be more extreme in the primaries. But at 60-40 or closer primaries induce centrist candidates because opponents cant be ignored, the swing vote will go with the 40 instead.

If a city has an ideological concentration favoring Democrats, is it better to have 1-2 people representing the city or 5-6? Cities should be like the hub of a wheel with the spokes reaching out to the rest of the state. Preferably each and every representative covers a part of the city. The enemy of democracy are safe seats, they make other seats safer and soon there's not much point in voting for an opponent.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

There is no swing vote that equals 10% in most districts and I'm pretty sure that you couldn't design a district that gave you that kind of seeing if you tried.

Elections these days are a contest of turnout within a party and less about ideas clashing between parties.

Edit: Spelling

 

[Perfection]

The goal is making every district competitive by diluting ideological concentrations. If we took a red state that votes 60% R and 40% D I'd prefer districts that are 60-40 to 70-30 and 50-50. When ideology is concentrated too much, opponents get ignored and its a battle to see who can be more extreme in the primaries. But at 60-40 or closer primaries induce centrist candidates because opponents cant be ignored, the swing vote will go with the 40 instead.

If a city has an ideological concentration favoring Democrats, is it better to have 1-2 people representing the city or 5-6? Cities should be like the hub of a wheel with the spokes reaching out to the rest of the state. Preferably each and every representative covers a part of the city. The enemy of democracy are safe seats, they make other seats safer and soon there's not much point in voting for an opponent.

If you got a 20 point margin, opponents can very often be ignored. I mean, sure there are Roy Moore type scenarios or huge swings in party favor, but these are relatively rare events. A party-line incumbent can pretty safely ignore the opposition. Moreover the majority party can pretty safely repeatedly win super-majorities in the state legislatures

Now if you do some highly competitive districts, sure you have some solid noncompetitive seats, but now you can get it where the competitive seats can actually swing the state legislature. These legislators are constantly having their neck breathed down upon by the voters.

 

[Birdjaguar]

House of Reps should be selected at random like jurors from a pool of those who are registered voters between 25 and 75. Being selected for one term would give you an option to serve in the next, but no longer.

 

[Perfection]

House of Reps should be selected at random like jurors from a pool of those who are registered voters between 25 and 75. Being selected for one term would give you an option to serve in the next, but no longer.

You might enjoy Fifty's system:

Each economic decision would be brought before a committee consisting of an anarchist, a communist, a socialist, a classical liberal, a conservative, a fascist, and a polygamist. They would have a 1on1 basketball tournament, the winner of which gains the right to make every economic decision for my country for one week, at the end of which another basketball tournament will take place to determine the next week's Chief Economic Planner.

 

[Katie88]

If you commit to nonpartisan districtmaking, the problem of racial gerrymandering disappears entirely.

Having a nonpartisan authority in charge of districting seems like a no-brainer. We have that here, and it's also open to public consultation and suggestions (which are actually listened to and often implemented).

But I suppose it's in neither party's interests to do it, and the temptation is just too strong to stack the deck while in power.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Having a nonpartisan authority in charge of districting seems like a no-brainer. We have that here, and it's also open to public consultation and suggestions (which are actually listened to and often implemented).

But I suppose it's in neither party's interests to do it, and the temptation is just too strong to stack the deck while in power.

This has always been a thing but now one side is taking it to an extreme. I can hope that they go so far that it forces constitutional changes to rectify it. I'm not holding my breath though

 

[Farm Boy]

A bit of history, regarding both your take on the situation and what comes from your proposed solution. Just keep it in mind.

 

[dutchfire]

A bit of history, regarding both your take on the situation and what comes from your proposed solution. Just keep it in mind.

That one is brought up a lot when discussing districts, probably because of the funny shape, but I don't think it really proves a lot. The scale kind of distorts everything.

The district is geographically quite compact. Some quick and dirty estimates on google maps show that it is roughly 20 km across. You could walk that if you wanted to (if Chicago wasn't so damn dangerous). For reference, North Carolina's 12th is roughly 150 km.

The Illinois district also consists entirely out of Chicago urban/suburban area. It's not like it's two different cities linked together by a small stretch of rural area. As such, the district is geographically, socially, culturally and economically rather homogeneous, as far as these things go.

In general, I would say that concentric rings would be an appropriate basic shape for many large urban areas.

 

[Farm Boy]

Well, it does contain exactly one highway connecting two different areas. Nobody lives on the highway. But it's the way it is because of racial districting, the topic of the thread. The size has everything to do with density. The shape is entirely to do with ethnicity and nothing else. It is, intentionally and bipartisanly, latino(and hilariously enough because of how that classification works, white). Intentionally. Its shape is also the result of a successful constitutional lawsuit. Not that it made it less ridiculous(the appropriateness of which is nearly entirely partisan near as I can tell), but should be informative regarding how successful depoliticizing this with the courts is likely to be. Or changing the constitutions themselves, something that can only adequately be described with the word, "political."

It's brought up a lot because it's a good litmus test as to whether the person(s) with whom you are discussing possess principles or rationalizations pretending to be such. That makes it useful.

 

[dutchfire]

The scale is important because geography is, in fact, not scale-invariant. Jaggedness is expected on the scale of a few hundred meters, whereas an identically jagged map but on a scale 10 times as large would be extremely suspicious.

As an example, the triangular dent east of Woodlawn Cemetery looks very suspicious on first sight, but a look at a detailed map shows that it is only a mall, a high school and a couple of sports fields. And this is one of the bigger dents in the district boundary. The eyeball test doesn't work so well on this scale.

 

[Farm Boy]

It works well enough when it's two separate neighborhoods, one roughly classifiable as Northish in Chicago terms and one roughly classifiable as Southish. Which matters. They're connected by what is literally a corridor down the 294, only the road, no residents. The rings are not coincentric. The northern section is largely Puerto Rican, the southern Mexican American. No, the only reason the district is as it is, is because it makes a majority latino district, which was the expressly stated goal of the process. It also happens to make a majority white district, but whatevs. I don't buy the scale argument. The district must encompass approximately the correct number of people. The jaggedness, to the extent that such jaggedness is ever explainable is simply larger when they're more spread out. Redrawing part of a suburb that holds 30,000 is not less impactful, even if you can walk it, than redrawing an entire county that holds 30,000, even if trying to walk across the latter in the weather this week would kill you. Assuming you aren't kitted out for expedition/hobby, of course. If anything, a huge rural congressional district may warrant some additional leeway in interesting shape if it needs to bulge to snag additional pockets of population density. If anything. Take it as a strong qualification.

 

[warpus]

Having a nonpartisan authority in charge of districting seems like a no-brainer. We have that here, and it's also open to public consultation and suggestions (which are actually listened to and often implemented).

But I suppose it's in neither party's interests to do it, and the temptation is just too strong to stack the deck while in power.

I've been told that Americans had a curse placed on them millenia ago that prevents them from acting in a nonpartisan manner. That's why this sort of problem doesn't seem to affect anybody else.

I figured out another solution though. Just one one giant district.

 

[innonimatu]

The idea of having districts in national elections so that those elect are "representatives" of the voters of that particular district makes no sense in most countries. It would only make sense if voters could hope to actually talk to aid influence their representative. But that "representative" stands in for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people. It would not be humanly possible for a person to actually fulfill the job of representative hearing a constituency, even if one wanted to. Any interaction is necessarily going to be carried out either through the weight of numbers (polling, campaigns) or by a few privileged individuals who would have had access under some other system anyway.

The idea of a representative works on a smaller scale. For large scales proportional representation with large districts and lists is what makes sense. No real downside (the theory is not applicable), and has the upsides of doing away withe these gerrymandering shenanigans and allowing a greater plurality of ideas to be represented.

Partisanship is a disorder of bipolar political systems. If there are many groups in play alliances must and will be made (and dissolved) depending on the issues.

 

[Birdjaguar]

You might enjoy Fifty's system:

I wonder what Fifty would think of that post now. It's been, what, 8 years since he has posted? While I know he was just posting for impact, I do wonder how he has matured since those days.

 

[dutchfire]

From the other thread

As J may have discovered in my thread there is actual reasoning.

And the reasoning may be faulty, but makes sense in a way.
And i feel much fo the negative comments the US gets in said thread i created is undeserved. There sure is abuse. But the the main reason that there is so much more debate on this in the US is that - for the obvious reason: the legacy of slavery - the US even tries.
Canada and the UK for example- as far as i can tell - by and large let the chips fall where they may in the production of relatively compact districts that make geographic and economic sense. They fit minority interest or don't. I've hardly ever heard a Brit or Canadian care.
This is made hugely more palatable by the much smaller district size. Like, you can fire random geometrical shapes that size on London and Toronto and you might just get pretty minority districts by accident. And when those are then inefficient you don't care because your lower House has a bajillion seats and somewhere there will be some laughable district with the reverse inefficency. None of which matters because nobody cares in the first place.

I'm not sure that actually holds up completely. Many US states have ~100 state legislative districts, significantly smaller than US House districts, and these are also gerrymandered to hell.

 

[dutchfire]

I don't buy the scale argument. The district must encompass approximately the correct number of people. The jaggedness, to the extent that such jaggedness is ever explainable is simply larger when they're more spread out.

I don't think the scale argument is so hard to understand. Try making a sphere with radius 5cm out of Lego bricks. It'll look jagged. Now make a sphere with radius 1m out of Lego bricks, you can make it look much smoother because the length scale of the constituent bricks is now much smaller than the length scale of the actual object.

Drawing district lines has fundamental minimal length scales, and when your district is small, you're going to notice this. As I pointed out above, some of the biggest dents in the Illinois district are essentially single lots.

Redrawing part of a suburb that holds 30,000 is not less impactful, even if you can walk it, than redrawing an entire county that holds 30,000, even if trying to walk across the latter in the weather this week would kill you.

Well, it seems that we fundamentally disagree on that.

 

[metatron]

From the other thread

I'm not sure that actually holds up completely. Many US states have ~100 state legislative districts, significantly smaller than US House districts, and these are also gerrymandered to hell.

Yes. Of course. I'm aware of that.
I was talking about national elections.

 

[Farm Boy]

How could we fundamentally disagree that redistricting 30,000 people is the same as redistricting 30,000 people? The only allowance I'm going to make there is that sometimes minority interests with significantly divergence do need enhanced representation, but in the federal sense I think the Senate does quite enough of that already. The House of Representatives needs to be proportional. I'm not talking about the random dents and jags man, I understand cities are made up of lots, but you can't tell me the fundamental shape of the district entire is not for the purpose for which the records state was the goal of the shape! It is an expressly political drawing of the district to achieve a specific electoral result. One which it has accomplished every two years since 1992.

If we aren't on the same page here, then I guess your right about having some pretty stiff fundamental views of the world.

 

[dutchfire]

How could we fundamentally disagree that redistricting 30,000 people is the same as redistricting 30,000 people?

What we disagree about is whether being redistricted together with people who live 2 km away is comparable to being redistricted together with people who live 150 km away.