Redistricting Videogame Shows Problems in the System

An anonymous reader writes "This is a cool redistricting game that was launched out of the capitol building in Washington DC last week. It was created by the USC Game Innovation Lab and has been getting lots of press. It's about time someone took on a tough issue like redistricting reform using the power of the internet." It's crazy that gerrymandering is actually good fodder for a video game.

Comments

Sure it's a game

[Red Flayer]

It's crazy that gerrymandering is actually good fodder for a video game.

Why is that crazy? Gerrymandering, and indeed, much of politics, is a game. It's just played for higher stakes than we're used to when we think of games.

Or did you think that American politics at the highest levels was actually about serving the public?

Re:Sure it's a game

[moderatorrater]

However, even serving the public is a game. Games are, at the end, mostly resource management and getting the most benefit for what you do while there's always trade-offs. Politics are the same. Those with an income over $100,000 are obviously not going to need welfare, but for those who are stuck with a lower income and want to stop, welfare is a big help. As a politician who's trying to serve the public, you're trying to do what's best for the most people or, depending one your beliefs, your constituency. There's always going to be some downside to a particular policy. In addition, you have to manage your political party and allies. No matter how you run politics, it's a game.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Ucklak]

People who spend money tend to be lower class.
People who save money tend to be middle class.
People who invest money tend to be upper class.

People themselves and the decisions they make are the biggest obstacle they have to overcome.
As much as 'people' would like to obliterate `classes`, class warfare will always exist just as some people will like the color green over the color pink.

Re:Sure it's a game

[CaptainCarrot]

This is flat-out untrue. My family on both sides were immigrants who arrived in the US in the late 1880s. I'll just trace what happened on my father's side.

The original immigrants, my great-grandparents, were oil refinery workers. That meant they had it relatively good, I admit -- most of the immigrants of the time from their ethnic group were coal miners.

My grandfather started out as an ordinary refinery worker, and through sheer hard work rose to management. He was, unfortunately, forced into a premature retirement in the early 1960s. His employer, Esso (now Exxon), decided to try out their new computers and reconcile their employee records, which is how they discovered he never had more than an 8th grade education but was doing a job that required at least a BA in Business Administration. My grandmother was a housewife, not counting her work as a child laborer in a silk mill. This was a common situation for women of her class and time, but her younger sister's career was not. She was the first woman to hold a management position at Western Electric. My grandmother's younger brothers were of an age to fight in WWII; they went to college on the GI Bill and ended up as professionals.

My father's generation all went to college, including his sister although she had no career in mind and became a housewife. This was again fairly typical for her time. The others were all professionals of one kind or another. It's noteworthy that it was only at this time that my family began to speak English at home. My father was the first to know the language before attending public school; his two older siblings and everyone who came before him did not.

My generation were all college educated if they wanted to be, which I think amounted to all of us but one. We are all, both men and women, academics, professionals, and business owners.

In four generations we rose from a class where it was not customary to be educated at all to the upper middle class of the United States, not because we were privileged in any way but because of a dedication to making a better life for descendants. And one or two generations before that? At least on my grandfather's side we were serfs; slaves in all but name. In the part of Europe we came from, serfdom was not abolished until almost 1850.

Taking the long view, insisting on instant equality is asking much. Should women be paid the same as men for the same work? Absolutely. But look at that timeline. My family was in this country for 80 years before it was usual for women to be employed outside the home. Women weren't even allowed to vote when my great-grandmother got off the boat at Ellis Island, and they were not enfranchised until 30 years later. In another 40 years a college education finally became almost as common for women as it was for men; another 40 years later the situation has actually reversed. It would be a bad thing if the injustice of sex-based pay inequity took another generation to be fully corrected, but relatively speaking there are far more oppressive injustices around than that. (At least now it's universally acknowledged that equal pay ought to be given for equal work regardless of sex. That wasn't a given not so long ago. Modern reactionaries who want to argue that there really is no injustice here are forced to the position that women usually don't do equal work, an absurdity on its face.)

There are a number of cultural issues standing in the way of minorities today, but a determination to make a better life can overcome just about anything. Perhaps my perceptions are skewed: the manager who hired me into the company where I now work was black ("was" because he retired since) and I've almost always had black co-workers. Not one of them was born into the middle class. They simply didn't give up until they achieved what they wanted, often in the face of opposition from all sides. Had they accepted that being born poor doomed them to poverty their entire lives, I'd have never met them let alone worked for them.

My own family is proof that even a language barrier need never be a serious obstacle.

So go ahead. Tell me it's a hoax. Just don't expect me to believe it.

yellow snow

[Mipoti Gusundar]

Most interesting subject and wery different from usual footballs/rollplaying/flightsim nonsence.

I for one am looking forward to EA Sports Enron and Nintendo bookskeeping.

What about multi-member districts with STV?

[ckd]

One of the big issues in redistricting is minority representation (or non-representation), which leads to districts that consist of urban regions connected by a thin corridor or other similarly bogus shapes. Instead of artificially trying to group minorities (or party strongholds, or whatever) into specific geographical areas, though, why not remove that layer and replace it with a system that inherently represents various groups proportionally?

Using a single transferable vote system like that used for Cambridge (MA) municipal elections could work quite well. In the city council race, there are 9 seats, and any group capable of generating at least 10% of the total votes can elect a councillor of their own, even if that group is spread from one end of Cambridge to the other. Some councillors do have unofficial "districts" where their support is strongest, but this is not a requirement in any way.

STV elections also avoid the "wasted vote" problem with independent or smaller-party candidates, since voters can put one of those as their #1 choice, and if they don't win, those votes transfer down the ballot to the #2 or later choice as necessary.

With the current breakdown of seats by state, a system with a maximum of 11 seats in a district would allow all but 11 states to operate as one large multi-member district; raising the threshold to 13 would add Georgia, New Jersey, and North Carolina to the single-election list.

To use Massachusetts as an example: the current 10 seats in the House are all held by the Democratic Party. I doubt there's any viable redistricting that would allow the Republicans to win even one seat. Under a 10 member STV system, though, the 13% of the state that's registered Republican could elect at least one, and with support from unenrolled voters, possibly more.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[arodland]

Er... with the current system there's pretty good odds that the only representative that's technically "yours" is a guy you didn't vote for and who doesn't agree with you. With multiple-member districts and proportional representation, there's a much better chance that at least one of the members from your district (whether that's a state or something a bit smaller) will be available to support you.

Take the example from the parent. Suppose you are one of the 13% of registered Republicans in MA. Who do you write to? The Democrat from your district, the Democrat junior senator, or the Democrat senior senator? But if MA was a single district with 10 seats, you'd end up with one guy who could argue your position on the floor, anyway. And representing the range of issues that people care about seems more important than representing purely geographical areas anyway. Especially when those geographical areas can be redrawn at will by those in power to represent purely political interests.

Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[Doc Ruby]

The best system for districting the US seems to me to be the one based on post offices. Each post office does define a community, especially in Federal services terms. It serves a small group of people who live very close, sharing mostly the same conditions other than those inside their private dwellings - which are also likely to be similar (and even homeless locals have the same access). It is the most common face of the Federal government, directly serving the community. And it already services election procedures like registration and delivery of election info.

I like the system where each person in a post office's service area (usually a ZIP code or two) selects the neighboring postal zones (up to the state border) to which they're most "connected" in order of "closeness" (as defined by the person selecting). Then all the responses are tabulated purely statistically to generate a map of the most interconnected regions, in a quantity equal to the number of representatives allowed in the state. There could be a second round to accommodate exceptions, like tiny islands (below some predetermined population size) or extremes of minimum/maximum populations in different districts, where the exceptional zones select their associations, as do the neighboring candidates for association to accept association with the exceptional zones.

We should choose our own fellow constituents who choose our mutual representatives. As long as the politicians themselves mediate the process with any discretion, the process will primarily serve them and their parties or other interest groups. We've got the stats and the sense of our neighbors to do it equitably and quickly. We should redistrict at least 10-20% of districts every odd-numbered year for reelection to the House of Representatives on the following year. After no more than a decade or two we should have equitable districts without a hasty conversion that will generate unmanageable sabotage from the existing order.

Re:Grand Strategy Guide for Electoral Victory

[allanc]

What you're not taking into account is that usually the change in majority comes only from a major, major shift in public perception of the current bunch of weasels, faster than they can compensate for with redistricting. E.g., last Congressional election, and the "Republican Revolution" back in the 90s. And this last time, the new majority party just barely managed to squeak through with a majority. I don't recall how much the Republicans won back in the 90s, but I know that the election immediately following it had them just barely keeping their majority.

The congressional incumbancy rate was 98% in 2000.

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[Dachannien]

To my thinking, the solution is simple: mandate convexity of the districts, with an exception for irregular district borders at state boundaries. Districting would then become a sort of Voronoi diagram over a non-uniform space due to population density. This would reduce the problem to one of choosing the centroids of each district, which would be much harder to manipulate inappropriately due to the complexity of the problem. Still, you could define the locations of the centroids based on some metric such as maximization of distance between the centroids.

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[mrchaotica]

Let us say you want to pass a state law or a national constitutional amendment that bars gerrymandering. How exactly would you word such a statute? It needs to remain flexible enough so that electoral districts can be changed in the future in response to population changes, but still not allow the "crazy shape" districts that are now common.

Define an algorithm that takes population distribution (but not race, age, political affiliation, etc.) as input, and tries to make districts of equal population while minimizing the ratio of circumference to surface area (i.e., trying to make the districts as close to circular as possible). Then just implement it and run it after every census.

The Emergence of the Political Game?

[Billy the Mountain]

I was thinking about this idea a few months ago: You create a realistic sim-type game that when played, it encourages the player learn or develop a particular political point-of-view, simply by demonstrating how things work or don't work together. There was an old game from the mid-late 80's that sort of worked that way called Spheres of Influence.

BTM

I wrote my own redistricter too...

[Soong]

http://bolson.org/dist/

I think I've gotten pretty good results for CA, TX, IL, FL and PA

It tries to create impartial districts that keep people on average close to the center of their districts. It works pretty well, but is kinda computationally intense. It could almost become Redistricting@Home if there was interest in the approach.

Re:The obvious solution.

[AndersOSU]

I am in fact familiar with the concept of money...

The point here is social inequality. Money may be a proximate factor for social inequality, but I find it unlikely to be the ultimate cause. Money has been around a long time, and throughout that time there have been wide swings in social inequality - it seems desirable to minimize inequality, while maximizing both average and total wealth.

There are other ways to keep those born rich from staying rich, besides your modest proposal, such as inheritance and progressive taxes. These things exist today for that very purpose, but somebody's going to call any type of tax unfair. I think we could stand to be a tad more progressive, making things a little easier for the poor and a little harder for the rich and the corporation, especially in these days of increasingly consolidated wealth, shrinking middle class, and growing poverty.

Before anyone calls me a pinko commie, I think that that the promise of personal wealth is the greatest part of capitalism. However, the grubby capitalistic hand needs to be slapped from time to time to keep it from harding everybody else's cookies. Besides, while money necessarily provides an advantage, there is no reason why that advantage should pay such high dividends to the rich due mainly to its interest bearing nature, and yield such low returns to the poor.