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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.
...including nice charts and graphs can be found here on FraudFactor.
From the examples given in the FraudFactor article, both sides seem guilty of gerrymandering whenever possible.
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It's crazy that in the US politicians are involved in drawing district boundaries at all. In the UK, we have an independent electoral commission who are in charge of this.
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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.
To me, the first problem with our government is that it's too large. The second, which is directly related to the first, is that it's filled with too many politicians. Our government tries to do too much, most of which it sucks at. These thoughts are the main reason I call myself a libertarian.
... just replace our representative democracy with a true democracy.
As King Longshanks once said (in Braveheart at least), "The problem with Scotland... is that it's full of Scots!" The problem with U.S. politics is that it's filled with politicians.
In the simplest way, how do we solve this problem (and thus issues with gerrymandering, lobbyists, the inability to elect anyone outside the two party system, etc.)? "Easy"
But wait, I hear you say, that would be rule by "tyranny of the majority."
Here is where my libertarian ideals come in to play. Of course this is all hypothetical, idealistic, unrealistic, and some might say, Unpossible... ahem.
But what if we eliminated this looming threat of tyranny under this truly democratic system? How could this be done? Well think about where tyranny of the majority comes from primarily -- issues related to control of private citizens lives.
Are you allowed to drink alcohol and smoke drugs? Look at porn? Own a weapon to protect your life and property? Practice atheism or a minority religion?
These are examples of issues where the tyranny of the majority could have a negative effect. I think the central thing to all these issues is that they should not be controlled by the government in the first place. If we had an ammendment in the constitution that clarified the constitution, that the federal government shall not make laws that seek to control the behavior of a person not explicitly harming another person, then what is left for the tyranny of the majority to affect?
Then when an issue comes up in front of our tiny, truly democratic government of the citizens of the United States, it's a referendum that we all vote equally on. If there are multiple choices, we use a smart voting style (approval, counting, etc), and not the insane methods used now to pick such unimportant things as our next President.
This is just an idea that has been brewing in my head, can anyone see holes in it and offer constructive criticism?
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
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
A buddy of mine came up with an initiative in CA to eliminate the bias in redistricting by using a set of easily-understood rules that could be set into law and would ensure a balanced outcome based on geography and population levels, not political benefits.
You can find the details at Fair Vote 2k2.
He's still working on getting it passed into law by the voters in CA. It's tough when it doesn't really benefit the party in power to change the system to make it fair.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
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
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.
...and get our licks in in the primary. Really, to me, what this article says is that political parties really have become obsolete bodies whose only purpose is to disenfranchise the voters, and that we voters should simply ignore parties and vote pragmatically.
I don't register with a party affiliation because I find both parties so distasteful. I think it would be very wise for us independents to figure out for what party our district has been gerrymandered and register in that party, and if we run, run in that party.
It would be cool if the supremes solved this by ruling that all voters have to be able to vote in all primaries.
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.
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.
Hmmm... maybe there should be a law that requires election districts to have the minimum possible perimeter. :-)
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If you want to see ugly, take a look at the North Carolina 12th district. It's been re-drawn more times than I can remember, and been ruled illegal almost as many.
The NC Libertarian Party offered to redraw the districts as a disinterested 3rd party to the process (theirs would have mostly followed county lines), but the Democrats & Republicans would have none of that, and so we have our snake-like boundaries. A better view is available in this pdf (area in gray).
Chip H.
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.
It seems to me like gerrymandering could be cut to manageable proportions by mandating a few simple rules, enforced in order of priority:
1) Districts must be contiguous.
2) No party registration data may be used while assigning districts.
3) Districts must encompass areas equivalent in population within 0.X%.
4) Districts must have a ratio of perimeter to area of no more than Y.
5) Redistricting may not move the geographical center of any district by more than Z miles per census cycle.
We'd need to do a little study to find apprpriate values for X, Y, and Z, of course. But does it really need to be any harder than this? It is about fairness of representation... right?
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
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!
First, the commissions are made up of three people:
A judge, chosen by the Chief Justice of each Province or Territory, who acts as chairperson and two civil servants chosen by the Speaker of the House. In practice, many commission members, aside from the chairpersons, have been university professors or non-elected officials of legislative assemblies. N.B. Sitting members of Parliament, the Provincial Legislatures or the Senate are not permitted by law to be members.
Second, the commissions hold hearings that the public is entitled and encouraged to attend. There is a specific Parliamentary committee that forwards complaints and suggestions to the commissions, but the commission is under no obligation to consider them. The commssions are required to draw boundaries based upon population density, mainly, but other factors are considered.
After forty years of an independent commission, a certain amount of trial and error and fine tuning has resulted in a process that is indeed independent and effective. I cannot recall a single instance where boundary disputes were referred to a court for resolution.
The term comes from an election (in Chicago?) where the mayor (Gerry) came up with a set of fixed boundaries, one of which was in the shape of a salamander (lizard). Hence gerymander.
Any experienced pol will tall you that this type of trickery has a much bigger impact on an election than outright fixing of the polls. The way to cheat is by fixing the rules and by keeping opposing voters from the polls. During seggregation that is exactly how they stopped black people voting in Missisippi, any black man who dared to vote was liable to be lynched. The KKK and the police would man roadblocks to keep blacks from the polls and then there were the litteracy tests.
One of the big impacts on the Florida outcome was the state law that prohibits someone who has ever been convicted of a fellony from ever voting. This is another holdover from seggragation, litteracy tests were struck down but not felony disenfranchisement even though the intent (and effect) was largely the same - disproportionately disenfranchise black voters.
Click on my sig and you will see an article by a UK journalist who is one of the few who reported on this aspect of the Florida fix at the time the fix was in.
The answer BTW is not to try to fix the system to make it harder to gerrymander, change the electoral system to Single Transferable Vote and multi-member constituencies. That way you also create a way for the minor parties to be represented. With the increasing corruption of the Republican party Democrats should seriously consider this even if only as a self-interested move.
Regardless, there is a better way to get Tom DeLay and King George out of office. Get so many voters to the polls to vote against them that it does not matter how they try to rig the vote, they fail.
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Of course, that's now backwards and the Senate represents the country better thanks to these stupid redistricting plans. In the last general election, less than 30 of the 530 seats changed (IIRC), but no matter what the number was it was pathetic compared to the way it used to be. Many seats were unopposed. Districts since the last census have been drawn largly like this: the Democrats negotiated so that their candidates got strong "safe" districts with little to no opposition. In exchange, the Republicans got everything else, so congress won't change much untill after the 2010 census.
OK, so how do we fix this? The answer is to take the political parties out of it. Somewhere (Iowa?) a amendment or some such was passed so that when redistricting, the commite can only look at city boundries, population, voter turn out, and other such things to try to make the districts fair, they were NOT allowed to take political party registration and such into account. The result? In the last election almost every seat in that state was well contested and so the citizens there had a good democratic election working for them, while those of us in most of the country basically get force fed some candidate (who may be great, but may be terrible). What we need is to pass laws like this all over the country, so that none of these shenanigans go on.
As we all know the current process works REALLY well. Let's take Texas for example. In Texas, the Democrats didn't like the Republican redistricting (which from what I've heard was unfair, and I'm a Republican, FYI) so they FLED THE STATE just to keep it from getting passed. TWICE. If we fix this process, there would be nothing for them to complain about, because things would be fair (or at least many MANY times closer to fair than they are now).
Please, let's pass some reform!
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Single Transferable Voting, aka Proportional Representation.
This simulataneously removes the problem of voters voting against their consciences for fear of wasting their vote. In the PR system, no votes are wasted. It has been used in Ireland and other European countries for quite some time now, and the constitution is designed to allow for coalition governments. Just about all of the smaller parties have been players in coalition governments at one time or another.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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.
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.