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Gerrymandering by Computer
jefu writes "In the latest New Yorker there is an excellent article on redistricting and gerrymandering (more permanent URL). It discusses how recent gerrymandering is being done with the aid of computers. It also discusses how redistricting is polarizing voters and is making many seats in the House of Representatives 'safe seats' which effectively gives incumbents a permanent seat. It is not hard to see how this also tends to leave our 'elected' representatives in a position where voter input is less important to them than things like lobbying." Few articles about gerrymandering really get into how ugly and blatant it is.
Here we have seen another step towards the death of democracy. Where those incumbents, who got elected by the people, no longer need to respond to people. Where the big money businesses can pay their way to get laws favorable to them pass. It will be the society of the rich people, for the rich people, by the rich people.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
I know I posted on something similar maybe a week ago. What's ugly is that it was already seeming like our representatives (in general) cared very little for our wishes (consider the recent secret spending bill) and more for their pocketbooks. Obviously we can't expect everyone to be a martyr, but this is getting rediculous. We're a democracy in name only. We vote for appearances. Less and less of what we say we want is really heard.
Who, then, is really running the country? And how did they really get in office?
No, serious, I want to know. Because I'm starting to think that my voice really DOESN'T matter.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
In Iowa, for example, voter party registrations are not allowed to be used in the redistricting, so it is non-partisian. Several states have initiatives to switch over to non-partisan redistricting.
Save for the fact that software is being used to help the process along. I find this less worrying than it appears -- ultimately the advantage gained by gerrymandering is slim and short term, since demographic change is inevitable, especially in a society as mobile as the US.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
How much longer until our vote is purely symbolic and has nothing left to do with reality?
Although in the article, they mainly focus on Texas, it's pretty clear that the whole system is being gamed and gamed hardest by the Republicans.
How's the job market in Europe these days, I wonder...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I believe this is one of many, why political positions shouldn't be a career. One of the founding fathers felt that one should get elected, do what's needed during the term, then go back to what one was doing before. No making a career out of it.
From the article: "He opposes abortion, fights for balanced budgets, and voted for the impeachment of President Clinton. His Web site features photographs of him carrying or firing guns. Through it all, though, Stenholm has remained a member of the Democratic Party"
I wonder what you have to do to be conservative down there.
Also this makes me think that gerrymandering isn't the only threat to democracy in the states. It seems Michael Moore's claim that the Democrats and the Republicans are the same isn't so far off.
Taxes.
The unproductive majority will claim that the wealthier minority must pay for all the social programs. Social programs, are, of course, not in conflict with your proposed amendment, because they aren't trying to control anyone's behaviour (other than "donations" to those programs by the wealthy minority).
Until the government restricts itself, or is restricted, to the specific powers granted it by We The People via the Constitution, we will always have a problem of tyranny - tyranny of the majority, tyranny of the lobbyists, or tyranny of one of the two major parties.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
Not quite "whenever possible". At very least, redistricting has been historically confined to census cycles, by a sort of gentleman's agreement between the parties. The reason it's been in the news so much lately is a couple of Republican-controlled state legislatures (Texas, most notably) have escalated the process and begun redistricting more frequently.
No doubt the Democrats will follow suit as soon as they can. But the fact remains: this is a chain of events that didn't need to be set in motion.
What does "independent" mean, really?
Are they "independent" like the NRA is to the RNC, or like the ACLU is to the DNC?
The problem is that these commissions are made up of people who are inevitably partisan, so what you end up with is only the illusion of independence, when in fact the party with the most adherents on the commission effectively draws the district boundaries to the benefit of its members, while making it look all nice and non-partisan. Not good: I'd rather have the honest appearance of partisanship and public pressure resulting from bad press than a hidden agenda and no accountability masquerading as an "independent commission."
In reality, there is no way to draw district boundaries in a "fair" way, because "fair" means different things to different people. The closest thing you can do is to permanently fix some method (algorithm) for drawing boundaries, which takes humans out of the loop forevermore; from that point forward, the rules of the game are at least known, so they don't change drastically every time a new party gets a 51% majority.
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We have all known this for some time. Look at some of the people up there. The Senate represents party intrest only and the House is purely special interest.
If it wasn't for the need of Republicans to get seats in the House and Senate minorities would have been totally marginalized by Democrats. The Democrats speak a very good game of inclusion but they are in effect the party of exclusion. Gingrich and his cronies understood that and used it to their advantage.
The best solution to this would be to give each state X number of seats and then award those to the top X number of vote getters statewide. This would still protect the original intent of the framers of our Consititution and allow for more diverse people in office. It might finally allow a green or gasp, a libertarian, into the so called hallowed grounds.
People bitch and moan all the time about Presidential abuses but convienently ignore what goes on in the Senate (requirement of super majorities to vote is not in the Constitution - it is the exact fear the framers had - a government trapped by a militant minorty). Neither side will give up that power and hence they sell us out when making deals.
Whine about Electronic voting, Bush, and Diebold all you want. You really don't have a choice in who is elected to the House of Representatives... and apparently don't care.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The reason gerrymandering exists is simple: you need to split people up into relatively equal-numbered-sized chunks, so each representative represents a mostly equivalent number of people.
Where those lines are drawn can be key to who gets elected.
Let's use a simple example. If each representative represents 100 voters and you have 100 relatives that live in a 2-block square, the best district for you would be a shape specifying the exact size of that 2-block square where your relatives are. You can pretty much guarantee that all your relatives will vote for you, or at least most of your relatives won't vote for someone else. Thus you're a guaranteed winner.
What's wrong with that? Are you not going to represent the will and desires of those 100 people?
Any whining about gerrymandering is done by the people that lose out. In this case, it's the Democrats (usually) that are whining about gerrymandering, because they're starting to get voted out of office at the local level. In the past, the Republicans were whining about it because they were "drawn out" of the election process by the Dems.
Really, it's just a game of tactical advantage played by people on all sides. Advantage today turns into disadvantages tomorrow. Whiners today turn into brutal gerrymanderers of tomorrow.
That's how it is.
And "independent" councils are nothing of the kind. Anyone involved in the political process is a political actor, and are by definition not independent. They live, work, and eat with everyone else...it's just that everyone agrees not to complain too loudly when the "independents" favor one part or another.
...and never have been. We're a federal republic. Just thought I'd clear that up. Moving on, there are all manner of creative ways to eliminate gerrymandering. None, to date, have been effectively employed. The 'one man, one vote' concept could work, wherein we eliminate districting altogether...but that leads to under-represented folks in less densely populated areas, since politicos will pander to the highest concentration of votes. In other words, ALL candidates will spend all of their time and money in the big cities, making promises to those folks, while ignoring the needs of the rural communities. You could also mandate (gasp!) multi-party rep elections. That is to say, instead of allowing an icumbent to run unopposed, there *must* be a candidate from each party for the election to be valid. The subtext being that, if no one is there to oppose him, things must be going along just fine, and he is not needed. Add a twist, and make it three parties! Or four! Watch how many people become interested in politics then. Watch how many more voters make it to the polls, when given a range of choices instead of 'white meat' or 'dark meat'. Perhaps they are sick of Turkey altogether, and would prefer a nice cheeseburger. What happens when you offer the voter steak? Or veggie-dogs? There are plenty of other ideas as well. But to eliminate gerrymandering under the current system, one would need to wrest control of district boundaries from elected officials...preferably into a rotating panel of technogeeks who would rather simply get the damn things done so they can get back to their labs.
I wish I could be constructive in my criticism, but it appears that my resulting decisions involve destruction instead. Permit me to explain.
... as Afghanis and Iraqis are finding out on a daily basis.
Our alleged Republic has a pretty good Constitution already. It's too bad that no one cares to obey it. With blatant violations against many items in the Bill of Rights (speech, search&seizure, rights retained by States and people, etc.) that people wholeheartedly support since each violation supports their own tyrannical pet peeve, the rights and responsibilities of liberty implied in that Constitution have been nickel-and-dimed away into insignificance.
This is similar to the current depraved state of the Congress, which has been destroyed by each voter thinking that although the Congress as a whole is terrible, that their own rep is wonderful.
Amending a document whose moral authority is lost, won't fix this problem. Either the population spontaneously starts to re-assert the primacy of Founder thinking as expressed in the Constitution, or the entire system is violently overthrown. I'm betting on the latter, and as the years pass and more and more people wipe their asses with that beloved document, then the more and more I come to hope and plan that the revolution happens.
After all, violently asserting that the Constitution is dead, would only be placing a marker above its gravesite, making it obvious that it is dead (at least in spirit). The Republic was long ago transformed into an Empire, and empires are not ruled by the force of law and culture, but by force of arms
You are correct in identifying that democracy is tyranny of the majority. You are wrong in desiring to let it loose. The prior Republic form of government gave men hope that this demon could be tamed, as well as the tyranny of the minority, autocracy. Men of good character desire neither.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Maybe it's that we don't assume that everyone is partisan. We have a long tradition of an independent civil service, which pretty much works most of the time. The members of the Electoral Commission are doing it as a career, they're not elected, or appointed by politicians. Keeping their jobs relies on them being non-partisan -- if they were elected or appointed they would have an incentive to be partisan.
The Boundary Committee publishes draft proposals and consults widely before finalising them. Of course, political parties try and persuade it to draw the districts one way or another, but they seem to be immune to that sort of pressure. They base their decisions purely on which are the natural clumps into which the population falls.
I don't hear people suggesting that the committee is biased. If this were widely believed, there would be an enormous scandal. The idea that there was any partisanship in the drawing of boundaries would in our eyes completely undermine the integrity of the election.
By the way, here are their web pages: Electoral Commission, Boundary Committee
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Instead of letting the legislators have the power to district, which by some strange coincidence affects their (re-)electability, it would be nice to have districting done by a mathemetical grid of sufficiently small size laid over the state in question, and let a publicly-known algorithm functioning like a state (ha haa) machine and work its way across the grid map, apportioning areas. With sufficient trials, the program can run until it gets cohesive districts of roughly equal population. It's just computer time, so who cares about that?
At least this forces the gerrymanderers to be smart enough to figure out how to exploit loopholes in the algorithm.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
This is an argument I've heard before from Americans, but all I can say is, it's really not like that.
Maybe it's that we don't assume that everyone is partisan.
I'm from Canada (where we also have non-partisan electoral commissions) and I live in the US (where everything is partisan). In my experience both sides are right. In America people are born and bred thinking that everyone is partisan and everyone actually is partisan. In Canada, where people are born and bred thinking civil servants should be non-partisan, there are actually non-partisan civil servants.
It seems like Canada and the US each have a system that's suited to their respective culture. I think it will take a change in culture for the US to adopt the Canadian system (or vice-versa).
I remember watching the 2000 presidential debacle with some amusement, and most interesting of all was the partisan nature of EVERY aspect. It seemed that representatives from both parties were needed not only for political comments, but for everything from counting votes to doing statistical analysis. In the end, even the supreme court decide along party lines.
I mentioned how absurd this is to my father, who is a civil servant here (Sweden) and a historian. His answer was that the concept of a politically indepedent civil servant in Europe is actually a remnant of the monarchic roots: civil servants in European monarchies were traditionally loyal to the king, not to the houses of parlament. Even though the monarchy is reduced to a symbolic role (more so here than in the UK), the tradition of indepedence from the political process lives on.
America simply does not have this background: everything in American government is fundamentally political, so the concept of an _independent_ electoral commission is impossible.
This is another great reason we need term limits for Congress. Those people are supposed to be running the country-not rearranging voting districts to ensure that they'll get relected so they can be there to waste more time redistricting the next time around.
Think about it-how many problems could be solved if elected officials were more concerned with getting work done instead of getting re-elected! Do you really think that Fritz Hollings would have spent so much time passing bills for Disney if he hadn't needed their bribes, er, campaign donations, to get re-elected? Would we actually have a budget that could be passed if politicians worried about re-election weren't stuffing it with more pork than the country can afford?
Let's all stop wasting time fighting all of the problems caused by these corrupt scum, and just get laws passed to keep them from coming back!
Hmmm... maybe there should be a law that requires election districts to have the minimum possible perimeter. :-)
I've wondered about a similar approach myself. The absolute minimum perimeter division into N zones may not be the best approach since the maps couldn't take into account things like rivers and highways that might be convenient to separate zones, nor would it factor in population density. However, it seems that it would be possible to specify rules that would lead to non-Gerrymanderable zones. For instance:
Of course I don't put it past politicians to screw up even something like this. They would probably wait till five minutes before the final selection and propose the most favorable map to themselves they could come up with that has 1 mile less perimeter than the map they stole from the other party the night before.
I was a supporter of term limits, in theory, until I moved to wonderfully wacky California. Here there are term limits for the State Legislature and guess what gets done. Nothing. Zilch. Nada.
It seems that terms limits had the unintended consequence that instead of "getting work done" the pols simply became gridlocked. Now instead of compromise, we just get a big "Stuff it up your A**" by both sides.
The issue is best highlighted by a couple of recent examples. Dems voted overwhelmingly for Drivers' Licenses for undocumented workers and repubs against. Arnold says he doesn't like the law and the Dems fold like a card house and repeal the law that was signed into law weeks earlier. On the other side, the Repubs were hell bent on "cutting the waste" to balance the budget and were appalled at the idea of floating a 10 billion dollar bond that would balance the budget on paper, but would end up costing billions more in future debt payments. Arnie boy comes to town and proposes an even larger bond sale, 15 BiLLION, and the repubs can't sign on fast enough, while the Dems are now unsure about passing such a huge debt on to future generations.
Now the point of those two examples is that these term limited pols flip-flopped like fish outta water when it suited their interests. Someone worried about their reelection might have considered the ramifications of making their previous stance so blatantly transparent. With term limits, you just do or oppose whatever the hell you want because you know it's not your neck on the chopping block if you screw up.
A large number of countries have proportional representation.
- advantage: this sort of gerrymandering is totally impossible - the one (person/party) with the most votes wins.
- disadvantage: if corrupt politicians have the support of their party, they are a long way up their party's list and are almost guaranteed reelection
- side-effect: coalitions become normal. What you have to have is some cutoff where parties getting less than (say) 5% are out of luck, otherwise you get a mess like Israel where tiny parties in a coalition can blackmail the main parties.
You say that the US constitution is 'pretty good'. I am not totally convinced on this one - it is over 200 years old and probably needs beefing up a bit. The problem is: who would do that 'beefing'. With the current political climate the way it is, leaving it the way it is is probably the safest option, otherwise the party in power will use that power to cement that power (this is normal - all parties/politicians want power, what defines a democracy is what lengths they are prepared to go to).One thing has to be said though, a country where this sort of gerrymandering is going on can not be said to be a democracy. It is a self-perpetuating ogliarchy. This would not matter much to the rest of the world if we were talking about Upper-Volta, but it is the most powerful country in the world that is trying to copy the Roman empire and that affects everyone.
The article hopes that the supreme court will put it's foot down on this issue. Sorry - I will not be holding by breath. Rehnquist - in particular - and Thomas normally vote along party lines. Even if by some mischance, the Supreme Court stopped this, what would appear in it's place? Iowa shows that it can be done but who cares what Iowa does?
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
.....both sides seem guilty of gerrymandering whenever possible.
. . . which, of course, does not make it okay.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Again, you totally miss the point. For example, lets say you have a heavily conservative part of the city with about 100,000 people that is surrounded by 5 several heavily liberal neighborhoods of about 80,000. Here are some options:
-You can take the 100,000 conservatives, make a district that will almost surely elect a conservative representative, and make 4 "liberal" districts out of the rest of the city. Now you have 4 liberal seats and 1 conservative.
-You can take 80,000 people from a liberal neigborhood and 20,000 from the conservative neigborhood and call that a district, and repeat 5x. There is no district with a conservative majority, so all 5 seats go liberal.
-You can put 50,000 conservatives together with 50,000 liberals in 2 districts, and then the conservatives have a shot at winning 2 seats.
So, when you are out looking for 100,000 breathing people, which 100,00 do you chose? Do you see why you are a retard yet?
Lots of luck. Looks like it didn't make the ballot in 2K2. :-). Remember that Lani Guinier
was denied a federal appointment for being a bit too innovative wrt electoral fairness.
Not that the Democrats haven't pulled equally partisan shenanigans.
Excerpts from OED:
No doubt that computers and demographics make it a lot more efficient.
In a system of proportional representation district size and shape does not affect the representation of the different parties. Each vote is mathematically worth exactly as much as any other.
So the problem is solved by just not existing...
Coming from such a country to the US, it's pretty bizarre how crappy and corrupt some of these things are done here.
In that session, Republican did press their advantage to gerrymander Texas congressional districts, just as the Democrats had done every decade they were in charge of Texas. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and to the victor goes the spoils. There are many things to dislike about gerrymandering, but the Supreme Court has ruled that it is prefectly legal and constitutional as long as its not done for the purpose of racial discrimination. Moreover, the new districts more accurately reflect the voting preferences of Texans as a whole.
Moreover, since when does a slanted piece by an unabashed liberal partisan complaining about the political opposition actually qualify as "stuff that matters"? Oh wait, this is Slashdot, and anything vaguely tech-related that bashes Bush or Republicans gets listed...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Oh, the idea isn't intentional sabotage. It is, "if the only person who can win in this district is a republican, then I want a chance to choose which republican runs."
The article in the New Yorker points out that in a district that's been gerrymandered, the party for whom that district has been gerrymandered always wins the election, so the real election is the primary, not the general election. So really only about 1/6 of the voters in the district actually choose, and they're the most polarized voters.
So the point is, if your district has been gerrymandered, you should register as a member of the party for which the district has been gerrymandered, so that you get to be one of the 1/6th that vote. If everybody did this, the primary would be the general election, and the candidate would be accountable to the voters despite the gerrymandering.
Term limits make politicians less responsive to people's needs, not more. They will make for more corruption and graft, not less. If a congressman is only going to be around for a couple of terms, whats going to stop him for selling you out for some corporation in exchange for kickbacks or the promise of a cushy job for a vote on key legislation? If a congressional politician can't make a career out of it, he'll constantly be looking for their next career. What's going to get him another career: pleasing voters or pleasing corporations who can actually give him a job after he's out of office?
And term limits wont do a damn thing to fix the problem of gerrymandering. The reason all these seats are unchallenged is because there is a concentration of voters of one party or another in those districts. All term limits will do is you'll have different people holding these seats, but they'll still be of the same party, the partisanship will be just as bad and congressional representation will be just as out of touch with the actual population as it is now.
Finally, term limits restrict your choice to vote for whomever you want to. Why would anyone want to limit their own right to vote, the bedrock of any democracy or republic?
I live in New Zealand, although I'm an American citizen. The country is currently run by a party called Labour. Their the equivalent of the Democratic Party. The electoral system is MMP (mixed member proportional), a supposedly more "democratic" and proportional system. In reality it just means more polticians, and small parties being able to hold disproportionate power. Arguments over electoral boundaries occur hear as well, and I doubt if there is any way to avoid them, or to avoid partisan gerrymandering. Democracy - a system of counting heads regardless of their content. www.libertarianz.org.nz
Actually, if you read other less biased sources than this one, you will see there is an entirely different side to the Texas redistricting story. New district lines were not created after the last census due to partisan disagreements between the politacal parties in Texas. A judge arbitrated the existing boundaries. The Republicans claim that this is only a temporary solution, and that the next state legislature (the current one) would have the opportunity to try again. This is the point that will likely go before the Supreme Court, and IMHO has some grounds to it as the law is quite clear that the legislatures, not the courts, should preform the redistricting. Moreover, the Supreme Court has already ruled that gerrymandering is legal, provided that the states' districts in total reflect a politics of the state. I don't quite remember the numbers (read too lazy to look up) but the Texas legislature had PREVIOUSLY been gerrymandered to benefit the Democrats to the extreme that they now have a 3-4 congressional seat advantage, despite the fact that the state consistently votes overwhelmingly Republican.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
This is the same reason why support for the Florida recounts was almost precisely divided along party lines. It's hardly a coincidence that virtualy all Democrats believed that "hand recounts are the only way to be sure," while virtually all Republicans believed that "ballot tampering/theft and inconsistent counting of hanging/pregnant chads makes the hand recount actually less accurate, or at least more subjective, than the original machine tabulation." People believe what will get their canidates into power.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I don't want to defend the practice of Gerrymandering, nor continuous redistricting BUT, this is definitely a case of "turnaround is fair play". The Republicans especcially in Texas have already had "the boot on the other foot" and this is payback time.
The current districts are a clear cut case of gerrymandering. In this last election 57% of Texas voters voted to send a Republican to the House of Representatives but the Democrats got the majority of Texas seats (17 out of 32) in the house. The current Democratic gerrymander gives the Democrats 3-4 seats beyond what would be "fair" by the popular vote. In the early '90's when the current districts were first put in place the Democrats managed to capture 70% of the house seats with only 1/2 of the vote. Micheal Barrone the author of the "American Political Almanac" called it ""The most partisan redistricting in the '90 cycle in the nation" in the Almanac he called it "the shrewdest gerrymander". To keep the post on-topic the Democratic gerrymander was implementied using a computer program, yet strangely the New Yorker didn't find that as newsworthy at the time. Here is a relevent quote from a journalism students story (apparently the Dems screwing the Reps doesn't attract as much interest in the media) on using computers to gerrymander Texas: A scrupulously fair redistricting would give the Republicans 3-4 additional seats. The Republicans to be fair are engaging in their own bit of gerrymandering to "unfairly" pick up an additional 2-3 extra seats to give them a total pick-up of 6-7.
It's worth noting that those 2-3 extra seats aren't quite as aggressive as what the Democrats achieved throughout the 90's. In the 90's however, there was no comparable outcry from outraged defenders of representative democracy. Republican complaints didn't get any traction in the media. Most likely this is a case of the Republicans not playing the game as well as the Democrats - they fought the gerrymander but didn't go the the extra-ordinary lengths that the Dems did in this round. Perhaps they didn't think that the press would be as kind to them.