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Tweaking The Math Behind Political Representation
mlimber writes "Nature magazine's news section has an interesting story about how the seats in the US House of Representatives should be divided up. The problem is that the population isn't evenly divided by the number of seats in the House (435). So how should one allocate the fractional parts? The current method tends to favor big states, while a recent proposal by a mathematician is for what he calls a 'minimally unfair' allotment. He is predicting 'one person, one vote' challenges on this topic in the near future."
Is there anything new in this article? people have been complaining about congress seat inequality forever...
Once they get this little pesky problem fixed, our government will be awesome!
How many delegates went to Vermin Supreme?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
The current method doesn't favor big states. FTA, "the current method has an inherent bias towards giving small states a boost up".
#!
The article starts by noting that California dominates the House of Representatives, but this doesn't really change that fact. Tweaking a seat up or down does change things a bit, especially where the electoral college is concerned, but the real problem is gerrymandering. Seats end up being permanently allocated to one party or another, with the incumbent enjoying an immense advantage.
If you want to fix a problem, come up with a better algorithm for drawing district boundaries. Right now the party in charge DOES use an algorithm, one designed to create the pessimal boundaries that ensure its maximum advantage.
Of course, there are many such algorithms, and no matter how fair they are the legislature would vote to choose whichever one favors them best.
A vastly more critical glitch is that it is possible to draw congressional boundaries in such a way as to increase the influence of demographics tending toward electing one party and decrease the influence of the demographics tending toward the other, and the people who have the power to redraw districts barely even bother to hide the fact that they're doing so anymore. Solving that glitch with a means to draw boundaries that is guaranteed to be impartial, so that the elected representatives actually did reflect the preferences of the people electing them-- now that would be a serious improvement to democracy.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
From article I
The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand
A house of representatives with 10,000 people might actually be unwieldy enough to actually have to do business, rather than listen to speeches all the time.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Of course, what the article fails to mention is that your vote is only worth so much depending on what state you live in. Remember, in the US, we elect through the electoral college which generally means (technically, the electors do not have to vote by what the people vote with an exception of a few states) your vote is counted within the state and not within the nation. So, how much is your vote worth? At the extreme ends, Wyoming, which has the least number of people for a state gets 3 electoral votes for about 500,000 people (0.0006%), whereas California has 55 for 38 million people (0.00001%).
Therefore, for every 1 vote for a Republican in Wyoming, 60 votes for a Democrat in California are needed to cancel each other out. And this mathematician wants to make it more "fair" by giving more votes to smaller states?
From the summary: The problem is that the population isn't evenly divided by the number of seats in the House (435).
This statement could be interpreted a couple different ways but the literal mathematical interpretation is wrong.
If you just want to figure out how many people should be represented by each seat in the house then you can get a number that is accurate to less than one person.
The problem is that you don't want congressional districts to cross state lines but state populations are not integral multiples of the district size that would give equal representations.
The article explains this in more detail but the basic idea is that based based on equal representation a state should have a fractional number of seats but this number gets rounded up or down to give each state an integral number of seats. This rounding meaning that some congressional districts have slightly more people and others have slightly less.
Did he mention Washington, DC in his mathematical formula?
I have long thought the House should be larger. It is meant to be representative, but the sheer size of each district now means that entire populations go ignored. Think of a conservative enclave in a Democratic district, or vice versa. For example, the wealthy town of Grosse Point Shores is in a very liberal Detroit district. Do you think their views are taken seriously?
I understand the cost involved - just the buildings alone will be a fortune. But consider how hard it is now for your representative to stay in touch with his or her constituency. The average size of a Congressional district is just below 650,000! That is three times what it was at the turn of the last century. Considering the minimum was set at 30,000, the current sizes are way out of whack compared to the probable intent.
With 650,000 constituents,it really is no surprise how important campaign donations have become. Worried about lobbiests and PAC's? Well, here is the root of the problem. Yours is a voice in the crowd.
Is gerry Mandering, we need a good mathematical formula for detirmining the SHAPE of the districts not who gets what.
1. Divide each state into a grid of 1 mile by 1 mile "chunks"
2. Find the population of each "chunk" using census data.
3. Start in the Northern-West corner and start adding blocks to the district moving west to east and dropping down one row and changing direction each time you drop down.
"Drop down, change direction and increase speed" Lurr from Anthology on Interest 2: Futurama
4. When your population count hits what 1 representative can represent, start a new district.
5. Repeat
6. ????
7. Profit from special interest kickbacks and pork barrel spending.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
If we dispense with the notion that each vote should be one and start using fractions for voting, a lot of these rounding related issues should be easy to fix. California can have 54 representatives with a vote of 0.97 (say) and Idaho can have 5 reps. with a vote of 1.07 etc., so that population count of a State balances nicely with overall weight of representation. A lot of artificiality in our voting system is introduced by the rounding error of integer votes.
I think we should add a third house, composed of a random sample of people across the entire country. The term is three months, and the only way to come back to the seat is to be (miraculously) drawn again. The job would be to listen to time-limited debates (without involving themselves in the debate), and brainstorming a set of questions they would like answered for the second round of the debate.
At the end, every law needs a majority vote in this new house in order to pass. Constitutional amendments require a 2/3rds or 3/4ths vote in order to pass.
If you can't convince a random sample (including people of all national origins, races, religions, sexual orientations, etc.) that a law is a good idea, it simply doesn't pass. The limited term and not being directly involved in the debate (only listening and then X rounds of questions) means that politics and political shenanigans are reduced to a minimum.
We also give this house the ability to override Presidental veto and Presdiential pardon/commutation. If 2/3rds of this house (alone) agrees that the President should not have vetoed a law or pardoned someone, then the President's action is null and void (i.e.: law passes, or person still goes to jail for obstruction of justice)
What do you think?
For those that don't want to read ( Me included :) ) can hear an audio interview with Diane Rehm.
The ultimate goal of science is to unify all forces of nature to a single law that can be silk-screened onto a T-shirt.
Just have the number of people in the house of representatives change?
Say, give every 500,000 people 1 representative no matter what, or something to that effect.
Dr Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia wrote a really interesting book that devotes some time to this subject, called A More Perfect Constitution. He talks about the gerrymandering (fixing districts so the incumbent, or at least the same party, always wins) that goes on, and proposes some interesting solutions, including making the House 1000 members to be more representative of the actual population. This, he says, would have the effect of producing smaller constituencies, require less money for someone to run for office, and invite more non-politicians into the process. It was a fairly easy read, and he provides historical perspective on why the Constitution is the way it is, and what we might do to make it better. One of his primary arguments in the book is that it is a living document, meant to be changed over time - that the founders never intended it to be so static for so long.
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
When districts are redrawn after the next census, if your state has a population calling for 4 and 9/13th seats in House of Reps...
[scene: 5 representatives from state X being sworn in.]
Congratulations! Now Mr. Representative #5, your honor, if you would just step this way...
[off stage: chain saw noises]
this problem is even more evident in the european union, look at the "relative influence" table on the right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_in_the_European_Parliament
After all, when do politicians not listen to reasoned scientific argument? Oh, shit, wait...
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I almost can't even be bothered to write a reply about what the real problem is. It is so obvious to anyone who lives in a multi-party democracy. The way the Unites States elects its congresspeople is a big failure that results in two-party hegemony. The whole system needs to be overhauled. The small congressional districts where only one candidate gets chosen should be scrapped. Each state should become one voting district and all the congressional seats of the state should be allocated using the proportional D'Hondt method. This would make it possible for third parties to become viable and the "winner takes it all" silliness would be replaced with almost accurate representation of the political opinions of the people.
http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html
No affiliation - was just googling up some pictures to support my own (lesser) ideas for simple geometric rules to limit gerrymandering.
"Waaaah. The number of Representatives isn't MATHEMATICALLY PRECISE!!!!" Waaaaaah!"
Compared to WHAT??? The SENATE??? Where Alaska gets as much representation as New York or Texas? Good Move. Oh, and then he says it favours big states...
Hello! Reality calling! The SENATE is the OTHER HALF of the legislative branch - and it favours small states - by A LOT. So, frankly, I think the TINY big state bias in the house is VERY small potatoes compared to the obscenity of the Senate.
senate. SENATE! Ha! WTF is this? Rome?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Multi-member electorates.
OK, maybe that's two. And seriously, letting party hacks control the electoral system?
"Using his method for populations in 2000, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Utah and Mississippi would each gain one seat; Texas, New York, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina would lose one; and California would lose three. "That could very well freak people out," says Edelman."
So, basically "red" states would gain seats and "blue" states would lose them?
At a quick glance, though, it does seem he has a point: Montanta has almost a million citizens per seat, while most states are around 700k.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population
I never realized that electoral votes are different than the number of representatives. With a minimum of 3 per state, some states have 1 vote per 200k +/- while populous states have 1 vote per 600k+/-. THAT is a system I'd like to see overhauled. Give each state one electoral vote per seat, or abolish it all together.
Even better, abolish the "one man, one vote" system. That's great as long as there are 2 parties, but to actually get accurate results you either need N-1 "approval" votes per N choices, or have the voters rank their choices and do instant runoffs until someone wins Otherwise you can have a situation in which 79% of the people like 4 candidates and hate 1, and then split their votes among those 4 and the one they hate withs with 21% of the vote.
Comparatively, to equal the level of representation in France, we'd have to have nearly 3,000 people in the House, which is roughly the number of delegates to the National People's Congress in China and they seem to be doing just fine. Granted, it's much easier to count unanimous votes...
Warren D. Smith, the Princeton math Ph.D. who was featured in a recent article on Range Voting, has looked at this issue. http://rangevoting.org/Apportion.html http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html
I'm surprised the article could discuss the mathematics of this without bringing up the Alabama paradox of 1880. It's an interesting example of how, using otherwise correct and normal mathematical distribution, increasing the number of seats in the House can actually decrease the representatives for a specific state.
As with the many complaints over video-poker style electronic voting machines, here is one more example of yes, we have the technology lets use it for something. Really, running through 380+ iterations to find some functional minimum is nice, but to label this functional minimum with a title of "Least Unfair" is a good shot of hubris on the mathematicians part. Remember, good government runs with; "A Day, A Dollar, A Pencil, A Paper" His method just blows out of the water a citizens ability to understand the process entirely. May as well pull it out of a hat and tell the people that FSM created a magic formula... just for the Good Olde USA, cause FSM is just that kind of noodly-good kinda deity.
Why does each state have to have an integer number of representatives? Why can't you just take the perfect number of citizens per district and divide the country up so each voting district is exactly that size, even if it has to cross state borders. With regards exact methods of election, the system used in the state in which the largest part of the district is found would be used. Thus each district is exactly the right size and everyone is represented equally.
Another solution would be forced resettlement of randomly chosen citizens from one state to another so as to make up the numbers exactly, which would probably be easier from an administrative standpoint.
The way to eliminate gerrymandering is to eliminate geographic districts. My former US Rep, Tom Delay, never represented me, but he was my "Representative" because of where I live. I propose that voters self select who represents them without regard to geographic boundaries.
There are approximately 200 million eligible voters in the US. Divide by 435 Reps and you get about 500,000 voters per Rep. Somewhere between 50% and 70% of the eligible voters actually vote, so 100 million votes are cast. The winners in each election should get on average 250,000 votes, or more. So, instead of selecting among just a few candidates based on geography, instead allow any eligible voter to vote for any candidate regardless of where they live. Those candidates who get more than 250,000 votes are elected. The number of Reps would vary from year to year, but so what. The election should use the Single Transferable Ballot system so that people are willing to support candidates that might not win without fear of throwing their vote away.
No more gerrymandering. No more worries about big states vs little ones. No more voting against candidates like Tom Delay rather than for a candidate that would actually represent me.
while your proposed system is unfeasible due to geography (square mile units? maybe that will work in Kansas, but not states with variations in geography-a major determiner of population distrobution), the main point of your post is well made...
I agree completely, we need to draw congressional districts objectively. gerrymandering completely subverts the original (and very progressive) ideas about how the House should function. It's the most directly democratic part of the Federal Gov't.
regarding TFA's proposed solution, if the math works out that it's more fair, then I support it. i've seen a few posts above debating the math, but a compromise could be reached.
the main problem is that whenever a new proposal like this comes along, dem's and gop's game the system to see if the new proposal will be good or bad for them, and then create rhetoric to support whatever helps their side. it's understandable...partys try to maintain their power.
as a democrat, i'm confident that if truly done fairly, any objective system will favor the dem's in the long run. the overwhelming majority of american citizens are more left-leaning on policy issues when you remove the political rhetoric (polls and personal experience bear that out), but the problem is, less than half of our citizens vote
Thank you Dave Raggett
Won't these people just think of the TUBES!? PLEASE!?
"Shall not exceed" is not the same thing as "shall be"; X <=Y is very different than X = Y.
As a result of Wesberry v Sanders, the whole concept of "One man, one vote" was applied to the districts within states. However, look at underpopulated states, such as, I don't know, Wyoming. Los Angeles alone probably has about 7.5 times more the amount of people than the entire state of Wyoming. California has > 67 times more people than Wyoming. But Cali does not have 67 seats in the House. States like Wyoming, Rhode Island, etc. have low populations, but still get 1 vote. This means the way it is now, states such as Cali, NY, etc. get UNDERrepresented. So no, people do not have equal representation, but if we were to have equal representation, then there'd be about 600 people in the House. And people complain that bills don't get pushed through fast enough with 435...
The simplest is that for every pair of adjacent states, a maximum of one Congressional district may cross the state line. Now everyone can get identical representation.
That might require tweaking the Constitution though. So let's say we want to minimize the total unfairness. For each person in the USA, your weight in Congress is 1/n where n is the number of people in your district. Ideally your weight should be 435/N where N is the number of people in the USA. Let's call (1/n-435/N)^2 is the unfairness of your weight being that. Let's make our rule be that we want to minimize the the sum of how much unfairness over the whole country.
Unlike his rule this would say that you shouldn't keep hitting one large state repeatedly (eg California. Unlike his rule, this is generally going to give a unique answer.
If you replace squaring with raising to the 4th, 6th, etc you will get rules that come closer and closer to his rule. But again, all with the advantage that they generally give a unique answer. The limit of these rules would give you his rule, but again with the advantage of giving a unique answer.
The current method tends to favor big states
Yeah, and the current method of allocating senate seats is favoring little states big time. That's one of the reasons our agricultural policies are so messed up and why the little states are getting money from the big states.
There's nothing to be "corrected" here, at least not until the allocation of senate seats is changed substantially.
Every 10 years, from 1791 until 1911, Congress did not merely rearrange the deck chairs, they made the deck bigger - that's why we have the decennial census, to see how many congress-critters we need as well as deciding where the districts are to be. But in 1920 Congress just stopped making itself bigger - apparently deciding that it was in their interest to concentrate power in as few people as they could get away with.
So the solution to the reapportionment problem is not just one of how to divide up the electorate into 435 somewhat equally-sized chunks, but also (and, in my opinion, much more importantly) to return to changing the number, as well as the size, of those chunks.
Mudge
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice, they're not.
Tweaking the Meth........
Very insightful! I've been saying this for a long time now. When the 17th Amendment was ratified, populists thought that direct election of US Senators would be a great move for democracy! Instead, they shot themselves in the foot. Do you really think your Senator cares a fig about your opinion? You're one among millions. Back when s/he was accountable to the state's legislature though, you can be darn sure he paid attention to their few dozen opinions. Losing the support of any one legislator was significant.
Making Senators into super-Representatives was just silly. The House has a 2-year term because the electorate is fickle. Senators have a 6-year term because (in theory) your legislators are wise enough to make more thoughtful decisions. If we trust them enough to make laws for the state, can't we trust them enough to select Senators? But no, now we are stuck with our fickle decisions for 6 whole years - and 6 years after they make dumb decisions they can be sure we've forgotten about them, so they are even less accountable than ever!
Increase the House membership to 1000, and repeal the 17th Amendment. Those are the two best things we could do to "fix" the Congress in a relatively easy manner.
Constitutionally Correct
"To prevent gerrymandering, have independent boundary commissions to redistrict after every census."
This won't solve anything, because census data is not very accurate. The Constitution only authorizes Congress to require that numbers of people be collected. Other information, such as race, income, or any other measurement are voluntary. Many people either do not provide additional information, or deliberately mis-represent the data. I for one only provide the data is required by the Constitution, because I feel that census data is often mis-used, and there are many privacy issues with census questions. It also doesn't collect information in regards to homeless people (the census bureau estimates), and there is no adjustment for illegal aliens (people here illegally can fill out the census data and skew the numbers).
I mean, isn't democracy supposed to be that the most people decide and the rest live with it? I mean, even if one state can single-handedly decide the future of the entire nation, that's a feature, not a bug, right?
Or is the system in place now some sort of device to avoid a need of separating the country into smaller parts?
The idea that this can be appealed because of "one man one vote" is goofy - it's in the Constitution itself, not a separate statute. Otherwise the entire Electoral College system would be gone in a puff of logic. But that system was designed into the Constitution by the Framers themselves. They had a political reality in which they lived. It CAN be changed but you'll need an amendment to do that or a new Constitutional Convention, a scary thought in these times. I doubt we could find enough people who even understood the idea of "sacred honor" to measure up to the originals. Sigh. I won't even THINK about the media....
The "one person, one vote" debate at the national level is misguided. Rather than adding more members to argue over things that the federal government shouldn't be involved in anyway, I'd prefer to see a higher percentage of our tax dollars collected and spent by the states. Then the issue of unfair representation at the federal level becomes less of a concern, and more attention can be focussed on local representatives solving local problems. Let the feds concentrate on foreign policy and national defense, rather than things like education or health care which are better managed closer to home.
I was scanning the comments hoping someone mentioned this.
That's just an excuse to keep the current system in place.
My high school government teacher had a brilliant exercise for us: he gave us a map of Indiana with info on how each county voted (i.e. Democrat/Republican, to keep it simple). Then he assigned every student a party and everyone could draw districts such that their party would win ALL 10 seats.
The idea is to divide and conquer. By splitting up the opposing party's strong areas and absorbing pieces of them into your party's areas, you could essentially neutralize them.
The take home lesson is that whichever party is in power when the census is completed and redistricting happens is at a big advantage and they DO use it.
So sure, technically the representative is elected by the people in their district, but that district is no longer cohesive and is totally arbitrary (where arbitrary = convenient for the party that drew it).
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
The New Hampshire House has 375 to 400 members. NH House of Representatives They are each paid $200 a year.
New Hampshire has a population of 1,315,000. New Hampshire Quick Facts
In such a system, where do you think the real power lies?
a) with the executive and the 24 member New Hampshire Senate
b) with the House committees
c) the party leadership
d) the permanent committee staff and the New Hampshire lobbyist
e) the individual members of the House.
Didn't the founding fathers already think of this? And didn't they come up with a little something called the "Senate"?
ps - That quote wasn't directly responding to this post, but was raised elsewhere. Sue me for not threading well, but we're a bit all over in this topic already.
Political power is still power. It is safer to divide it among many than to concentrate it among the few.
there's something very wrong with your elections.
as long as something like this is possible : Elected officials voting for representatives that are not even in attendance! (Texas) ...
very handy...
The current system, with all of its perceived unfairness, will NEVER be changed because it is impossible to imagine any objective change (if one could find one) satisfactory to enough of the whinging, worthless class of people that live on politics, both inside and outside the beltway.
EVEN IF A SYSTEM WAS DEVELOPED BY SOMEONE UTTERLY OBJECTIVELY (and who with any credibility at that level of political events is considered objective?), some troglodytes in the basement of the GOP or the DNC would crunch the numbers in all conceivable situations and find that there MIGHT be a 0.0001% advantage to the other side, causing said party to throw its entire weight and propoganda engine against such a plan.
It's the reason the Constitution is similarly safe. Most people at least dimly perceive that it's better to have something less than perfect, than to let slimy politicoes unlock the cabinet and "improve" (dry-hump) it until it disintegrates and loses all value.
-Styopa
Any poly-sci major will tell you that the main purpose of elections is to grant the governing body "legitimacy". The idea is that if you say people voted for the government, people are more willing to accept governmental authority (if people didn't accept governmental authority, the government would not have any power). Since most people do not have a complete enough understanding of discrete mathematics to understand this problem, it will not grant the government any additional legitimacy and is therefore completely useless.
As a side note, I would like to take this opportunity to complain that people too frequently equate democracy with freedom. There is nothing about a democracy that means that it increases your level of freedom. People in this country could vote to take away all my money and forcibly sterilize me, and it would be no less of an infringement on my basic freedoms than if some psychopath broke into my house, stole everything I had and cut my balls off.
So how should one allocate the fractional parts?
Easy. Forced deportation.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
what is the whining all about? The House may be slightly favoring large states due to fractional rounding. Look at the Senate. A state with like 2 million people has 2 senators. A state with like 35 million people ALSO has 2 senators. The gap is actually an entire order of magnitude.
So it's entirely possible for senators that represent like 70% of the population, but with only 50% of the voting power.
A fairer way will be proportional allocation by party based on vote share (say if green party has 7% of votes, they get 7% of whichever seats in question) as opposed to the current winner-takes-all-system on a seat-by-seat basis, which only favors a duopoly.
Big states are big to begin with because people WANT to live there. Don't punish people for the choice of a metropolitan lifestyle by stripping away at their electoral clout.
The smallest state should get a single Representative. Then that state's population should be used as the unit to determine how many Representatives each state should get. Since Wyoming is the smallest at 493,782, California should get 69 (rounding up) for its 33,871,648 people. Sure it would give out a little more than 435 Reps, but 435 is an arbitrary number chosen a century ago because that's how many they had then.
In fact, the House should have a lot more Representatives. Americans have no sense of the actual scale of groups greater than about 30,000 people, no way to relate to those groups any differently than at the 30,000 size - which is the minimum district size according to the Constitution. So really a Rep should go to each 30,000 people, which would be at least 10,000 Reps for our 300M people (more, because of rounding, but no more than 50 extras, which is insignificant against 10,000). But if that's too many, the Reps should go to each 30,000 eligible voters, which is about 250M people, or maybe each 30,000 registered voters, which is about 200M, or really most appropriately to each 30,000 actual voters. Assigning them that way would solve a lot of problems at once, because it would actually incent states and their parties to get people out to vote, to score more representation by voting more fully. Which seems perfectly fair, and would probably settle at about 150M voters getting 5,000 Reps.
Who should all be required to stay in their home districts for 2/3 of the weeks of each year, from where they'll vote by secure line. Each state can have office space in DC to accommodate up to 1/2 of their Reps at a time, though at most only 1/3 will be allowed there, which they can timeshare - regardless of Party or who they dislike.
The House needs cleaning. The only fair way is to drop the arbitrary limits, and scale representation back down to where the Reps are able, and required, to relate to their constitutents.
--
make install -not war
it's the senate- here in california we have 2 senators like everyone else, but the largest population by far in the US, if the senate were to be divided fairly by population we would have 12 seats in the senate not 2 (as we have 12% of the us population)
It seems to me that all these technical attempts miss a couple of points.
... and the one who gets most votes wins. Making it more complicated can only play into the hands of special interest groups and will be abused, as the voting machine debacle illustrates.
First of all, democracy has to be simple enough that common people can easily understand it in order to avoid the risk of political elitism, where a small group is able to play on a system that most don't understand. And secondly, the system must be seen to be 'clearly fair' by those same, common people.
And based on those criteria, I think the best way would be simple, proportional votes, or whatever the term is. It ought to be easy - you have candidates 1, 2, 3,
I know, of course, that things are not as simple as that in the real world, and that there are significant downsides to such a simple method, but isn't it at least better than the current system? Haven't we in the past seen candidates who got the most actual votes and still lost? That can't be right, I think. What ever problems may arise from a simple, direct voting system, I am sure they can be solved in better ways. Perhaps it is as simple as limiting the power of the president a bit more.
I'm trying to decide if you didn't read my post, or didn't understand it.
You seem to think that people don't vote because they don't care... Either outcome would be just fine with them. That's typically false. People don't vote because they don't believe it will help them. Both candidates are lairs, and it isn't going to impact the non-voter's daily life in a good way regardless of candidate... So they think (and thus, don't vote).
I think you're setting up a straw man argument, whether you know it or not. Potential voters are the people who are capable of voting and who are capable of being convinced to vote. Nobody else are voters (or potential voters). Everybody else is irrelevant to this discussion. Greater "voter turnout" would be nice, true. But again, it's irrelevant here.
Gerrymandering happens when politicians in office draw boundaries around potential voters; nothing more, nothing less.
You mean non-voters? Of course they aren't represented! They didn't vote! They wouldn't have voted regardless, whether the district is gerrymandered or not. These people are a non-issue except in extremely rare cases.
Gerrymandering makes this worse. Granted it would still happen, but it would be a fairer set of incumbents in office.
This is painful to try to disect. Please proof-read.
Reverse gerrymandering? Who wants that? That's not beneficial to the politicians or the voters.
This is hard to follow. Between missing letters, missing words, missing punctuation, misspelled words, incorrect grammar, and run-on sentences, I only believe I know what you mean.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I belong to the Presbyterian church, whose organization of assemblies of governing bodies ("presbyteries") is the model for our system of representative State and Federal bodies (cf. Presyterian Polity).
I have been at a General Assembly (the top-level assembly of representatives) where thousands of voting members were in attendance. The group was able to easily conduct its business without any computer technology. As is done in Congress, the docket was determined before the meeting began. Each issue was allotted a fixed amount of time for presentation of arguments, questions, and counter-arguments. The various sides to the debate put their best people forward to argue their case, so it wasn't 4,000 people all trying to talk. Voting members were issued hand-held voting placards, which were small cardboard signs on a stick about 1 foot long. When a vote was called, members raised their placards to indicate yea or nay. It was very easy to see. If the vote was close, the individual votes were counted. If not, the motion was simply declared for the majority.
If 4,000 people can discuss and vote without any computer assistance whatsoever, we should be able to easily accommodate 10,000 people in Congress. The current capitol building could be used for ceremonial purposes, and a new, more utilitarian building could be built to do the day-to-day business.
It certainly could be done.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
This is a common theme isnt it?
A problem is either new/unheard of; in which the messenger is a "conspiracy nut"
or it is old/heard of; in which case its "nothing to see here, our outrage is spent, move on, whiners!"
Trouble is there isnt an intermediate phase! you know, where people actually do something!
See the ongoing primaries-electoral-fraud reactions. Its either; you're a kook, or "so what, it's always been like this" (and any remaining complaints are put down with "run for congress then")
I could cry, if only I hadnt done what everyone else has, and shut down my concern for truth, justice, beauty, honour, integrity, hope and positive change.... this is progress to some out there I guess.
If we ever get to a point where 100% of the population has high speed internet, and we've figured out how to vote online without any fraud, I'm all for doing away with both the house and senate and just going with a "real" democracy... it'll never happen since those that want seats in power and all the corruption that comes with it won't ever let it happen, but we can dream can't we?
The founding fathers knew this. When they setup congress the House and Senate were created to make sure the smaller states did not get short shrift. All states get equal representation in the Senate. The House provided a way to give the states a measure of representation based on population.
The posts complaining about gerrymandering have more of a point that trying to reallocate how the House is allocated. And if you want a really big problem that needs to be addressed then look no further than the electoral college. Of course that one depends on which side you fell on in the last couple of elections.
I knew a bit about the history of representation before, and have thought for some time that we should increase the number of reps in the House, but even just skimming the home page was informative.
Constitutionally Correct
Get rid of the 16th and 17th amendments, and the States would again be the primary entity of governance, as they were intended.
Constitutionally Correct
Didn't you take civics in high school? The Senate isn't designed to give fairness to the people of a state. It's designed to give fairness to the state as a sovereign political unit. The people of Wyoming have just as much right to be Wyomingites as the people of California to be Californians, despite the fact that there are far fewer of them. If national policy were a purely popular matter, that right would be overridden by the will (tyranny) of the majority. The government of the United States follows a republican, not democratic, model, and its institutions (like Congress) are designed to reflect that and save us from the effects of too much democracy. Majority will, sure, but protective of minorities as well!
Constitutionally Correct
You just don't get it.
Californians, by virtue of their numbers, overpower Wyomingites. WY residents needs extra representation as a safeguard against the majority. Giving WYites collectively the same power as CAns collectively does that. In the Senate, the state is given equal representation, not the people of the state. The Senate is the voice of the states--as sovereign entities--in the federal union, regardless of their population, and serves to ensure that the distinctive cultures/characters/needs of 50 disparate units is served and preserved and is not quashed simply because another is bigger. A state is (theoretically) a voluntary member of the union--if WY were a separate country, CA (nor any other state) would have any ability to affect it, regardless of numbers, right? Why would WY willingly subject itself to a system where its needs would be continually overpowered by others?
You're really concerned about the ability of 3 WY congresscritters to "impose their lifestyle" on CA, which has over 50? Seriously? That "65x power" talk is great sensationalist hype, but it's just that - hype. Face it, Senate "overrepresentation" is a defensive measure. WY is never going to change CA by virtue of its "awesome federal influence". Pffft.
Continuing to harp about the inequity of 2:500,000 to 2:36,000,000 just displays your ignorance of the fundamental character of the American system. Pure democracy is not a good in and of itself. The Founders understood that. (Two wolves and a sheep take a vote on what to have for dinner. How well does that democratic system work for ya now?) I thank God the US is a republican and not a democratic model. I know the "official US line" is about "exporting democracy" as you might say, but that really perplexes me. If anything, it would be better to export republicanism. In many cases, it is probably best to leave well enough alone!
If you can come up with a decent argument against the rationale of the Federalist Papers, by all means present it. I'll listen. I haven't seen one yet, and I even admit the FP are not perfect.
Constitutionally Correct
The issue isn't about the states that get their single guaranteed rep; there's no way to take them below 1. The imbalance, such as it may be, is more of a "does this state get it's 3d, or does that state get it's 23d".
Frankly, given the compromise of equal representation in the Senate, I don't think it's a problem that what rounding happens in the house happens as fractional extra representatives for the larger states--and I'm a rabid small-states right guy.
hawk
Now, if they cannot explain this reasoning to the point that the population can agree with them, then they stand a good chance of being booted in the next elections.
Unfortunately, gerrymandering throws a rather large wrench in your argument. In practice, the effect of gerrymandering is preservation of the status quo. Why? Because the borders are re-drawn by the existing representatives, who have a vested interest in being re-elected and thus an incentive to re-apportion the vote. "Here, I'll trade you this neighborhood of people who like you better than me for one of your neighborhoods that likes me but not you, and we'll both have an easier race!"
In my state, this has led to a scenario where very few districts are even remotely competitive, taking any real choice from the general populace and placing it in the party establishment and primary election, and encouraging the phenomenon of self-serving politicians, who can get away with all kinds of shenanigans while being perfectly assured of re-election, because the primary arbiter of their re-election is the approval of their party leadership and being nominated to run, not their constituents.
Gerrymandering + partisan poltics = self-serving politicians-for-life - transparency - accountability, at least on the state and congressional level.
Significant progress in election reform will be difficult until re-districting is in the hands of an impartial third party.
As for directly-elected politicians serving their office, that's absolute lunacy. The founding fathers intended for Congress to be directly accountable to the people, which is why they spend close to half of their terms campaigning for re-election. The Senate was intended as the more stable body looking out for everyone's long-term interests and ignoring the passing fancies of the democratic mob while acting as appointed representatives of the government of their states, but the 17th Amendment blew that right out of the water. Direct election of Senators is a horrible, horrible idea, and we're continuing to pay the price today-- every time a Senator publicly jumps into a controversial issue with knee-jerk pandering, blame the 17th.
Come to think of it, that's a plausible reason why I strongly dislike so very many of the current crop of Presidential wannabes.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
The redistricting body should be composed of members of parties who received the least representation in the last election. Don't let the foxes guard the henhouse.
Maybe this would force the Duopoly to make voting more fair, so that Greens/Libertarians/Constitutionalists could get elected, just so that the Ds/Rs would have a chance of a member on the districting board!
Constitutionally Correct
If you find any of those sites that includes 3rd party candidates, please post it. I discovered the 3rd party movement through one like that back in 2000. I don't remember seeing any in 2004, and none for 2008 yet either.
Constitutionally Correct