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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?"
Besides the effect on lawmaking (or failure to pass laws under gridlock), gerrymandering gives people on both sides of issues a sense of majority. "I won in a landslide, I must be right", combined with polarized news programming, has been demonstrated to make people dumber. Harvard Business Review has an interesting article this week on opinion reinforcement and groupthink this week [ https://hbr.org/2014/11/making... ], which compares focus groups from liberal Boulder CO USA and conservative Colorado Springs USA. The researchers documented the negative effects of grouping like-minded people in political discussions. I think gerrymandering has the same effect on political intelligence. Their own conservatism or liberalism appears validated by landslide elections in their districts.
Gently reply
Each state should create a competitive contract and to build a re-districting computer program. The requirements for the program should include
* The only data fed to the program is geographic markers the will provide convenient district borders (railroad lines, roads, rivers, county and city borders, etc.) and the number of people within each section. No other demographic data (age, race, previous voting patterns, income, etc.) will be input into the program
* the program will be completed 2 years before the redistricting and be open source so that anyone can inspect it and run it and get the same result
* the program will take a random seed as input and will generate different results based on that seed.
The geographic data will also be made public 2 years in advance of the redistricting
When the census data comes out it will be published as well.
On the big day they'll hold a lotto-type drawing to select the random seed. At that point anyone - researchers, journalists, some kid in his basement - can run the program and know the result before it is even published by the government. If the result isn't what everyone else expects we'll know there was funny business.
The program will be fair because the kind of data that allows gerrymandering simply won't be permitted as input. Any sneaky attempts to use something like population density as a proxy will be something anyone can find and complain about in the open source code. Neither party will be able look at the results ahead of time, see that by chance it gives a slight advantage to their opponents, and scuttle the process because the outcome won't be available until the random seed is drawn.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
North Carolina, in fact, has a very famously gerrymandered district for this reason ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina%27s_12th_congressional_district ); and I'm sure the simulation ignored that detail.
If a state has ten districts, and 10% of the population is black, under current federal law, they have to do their best to give blacks a majority vote in one district. But that generally means that nine of that states representatives can completely ignore the black vote. It seems to me that the world would be a better place if black voters made up 10% of each district's population: they could swing the election in any of those districts, and each representative would have a very strong reason to listen to their concerns.
Sortocracy is sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them. It is the only political system that allows people to escape bad governance: People can vote with their feet.
Any attempt to "reform the political process" is doomed for the reason pointed out by Machiavellli:
Any system that does not allow people to experience a new order of things by voluntary assortation is doomed to the political equivalent of theocracy: Imposing a single social theory on unwilling human experimental subjects. You must allow for consent to experimental treatment of human subjects and you must allow for control groups to evidence causality.
There is going to be a revolution.
Seastead this.
It's true that politicians from both parties are responsible for gerrymandering. That's why, in California, we took redistricting out of the hands of politicians entirely. Legislators from both parties fought the measure - but they failed. I hope other states follow suit - the results have already been positive for representation in California, with many more competitive races (including some between candidates from the same party).
With the citizen's redistricting committee and open primaries, we may even have third party candidates start to win local elections.
.: Semper Absurda