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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!
"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?
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...
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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
Instant runoff is a bad system. Throwing away part of someone's preference is a sure way to record an inaccurate preference. You need to evaluate them all simultaneously not sequentially - a Condorcet method. A preference for 4th place over 5th is just as important as a preference for 1st place over 2nd. You can't throw away the former just because they were "low" numbers! You may think Al Gore and Ralph Nader both stink, but if you think Ralph stinks less, that should still count for something!
Constitutionally Correct
That's a really bad idea. If all the states were equal sizes, this would be arguably a good idea (I think candidate-centered elections are better than party-list, so I'd oppose it even then, but it would at least make some sense.)
As it is, states have between 1 and 53 representatives, so you get single member districts in several states, and huge party-list systems where most candidates are relatively unknown to the electorate in large states.
A better idea would be to expand the size of the House (may it, say, 5 times its current size), require districts to be of 4-7 members (set a floor of 4 or 5 members per state), and use a candidate-centered method that produces proportional results, like Single Transferrable Vote. You get the desirable features of proportional systems while at the same time keeping individual candidates directly accountable to the electorate.
"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).
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
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.
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.