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Mathematicians Study Effects of Gerrymandering On 2012 Election
HughPickens.com writes Gerrymandering is the practice of establishing a political advantage for a particular party by manipulating district boundaries to concentrate all your opponents' votes in a few districts while keeping your party's supporters as a majority in the remaining districts. For example, in North Carolina in 2012 Republicans ended up winning nine out of 13 congressional seats even though more North Carolinians voted for Democrats than Republicans statewide. Now Jessica Jones reports that researchers at Duke are studying the mathematical explanation for the discrepancy. Mathematicians Jonathan Mattingly and Christy Vaughn created a series of district maps using the same vote totals from 2012, but with different borders. Their work was governed by two principles of redistricting: a federal rule requires each district have roughly the same population and a state rule requires congressional districts to be compact. Using those principles as a guide, they created a mathematical algorithm to randomly redraw the boundaries of the state's 13 congressional districts. "We just used the actual vote counts from 2012 and just retabulated them under the different districtings," says Vaughn. "If someone voted for a particular candidate in the 2012 election and one of our redrawn maps assigned where they live to a new congressional district, we assumed that they would still vote for the same political party."
The results were startling. After re-running the election 100 times with a randomly drawn nonpartisan map each time, the average simulated election result was 7 or 8 U.S. House seats for the Democrats and 5 or 6 for Republicans. The maximum number of Republican seats that emerged from any of the simulations was eight. The actual outcome of the election — four Democratic representatives and nine Republicans – did not occur in any of the simulations. "If we really want our elections to reflect the will of the people, then I think we have to put in safeguards to protect our democracy so redistrictings don't end up so biased that they essentially fix the elections before they get started," says Mattingly. But North Carolina State Senator Bob Rucho is unimpressed. "I'm saying these maps aren't gerrymandered," says Rucho. "It was a matter of what the candidates actually was able to tell the voters and if the voters agreed with them. Why would you call that uncompetitive?"
The results were startling. After re-running the election 100 times with a randomly drawn nonpartisan map each time, the average simulated election result was 7 or 8 U.S. House seats for the Democrats and 5 or 6 for Republicans. The maximum number of Republican seats that emerged from any of the simulations was eight. The actual outcome of the election — four Democratic representatives and nine Republicans – did not occur in any of the simulations. "If we really want our elections to reflect the will of the people, then I think we have to put in safeguards to protect our democracy so redistrictings don't end up so biased that they essentially fix the elections before they get started," says Mattingly. But North Carolina State Senator Bob Rucho is unimpressed. "I'm saying these maps aren't gerrymandered," says Rucho. "It was a matter of what the candidates actually was able to tell the voters and if the voters agreed with them. Why would you call that uncompetitive?"
Not according to a comment by Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola University, in one of the linked articles and acknowledged by Mattingly - he did say that incorporating it might be an option for further research though. This was apparently a "proof of concept" with deliberately simple rules, but given the interest and positive feedback it seems to be generating I'd like to see what happens if this could be adapated to include a more complete set of rules, not to mention be adapted for other countries where this is a problem.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Anecdotal evidence? Germany, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and more use proportional representation systems to some extent. Hardly unstable countries.
If I could design a voting process, I would use the condorcet method and proportional representation.
Personally, I find it all to be a bunch of bullcrap. Have you seen those voting districts that are along, squiggly lines that wander all over the place?
Yeah, and you know what? One of the most famous ones is in North Carolina, the site of this study.
And guess who created it and why? Democrats did, in order to secure a minority voting block big enough to elect a black person to Congress. Ever since, it's been one of the most litigated districts in the U.S.
I'm always shocked at how many people don't realize that this is one of the primary LEGAL rationales for gerrymandering -- back in the 1980s and 1990s you even saw unholy alliances between minority leaders and conservative Republicans conspiring to create awkward districts in some states that would give each group what they wanted: the minorities got enough people together in a district to elect a minority to Congress, and the Republicans got to excise many of those annoying mostly Democratic minority voters from their districts.
We are still living with that legacy in many states, and I frankly have found news coverage in recent years of gerrymandering to be lacking in discussion of this issue. It's not all just Republicans who have taken control of state legislatures -- we've also had a committed effort for quite a few decades to segregate voter districts in such a way that would allow more minorities in Congress.
But of course that creates a problem, because it ends up disenfranching non-minority Democrats who get stuck in all the surrounding districts that can no longer elect a Democrat because a large portion of Democrats were deliberately removed from swing districts to create the minority-majority district.
So the Democrats end up in a Catch-22. If they want to promote Congressional "diversity," they can create districts where minorities get elected, but they can end up screwing themselves over in the process because then all the surrounding districts become more Republican and make it more difficult for Democrats to actually achieve an overall Congressional majority.
It's certainly not the only issue that has led to Republican majorities in Congress -- but it's one that's not often talked about, and it has had some significant effects.