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?"

Comments

Federal law has an effect, too

[Jay Maynard]

Did they take into account the Voting Rights Act provision that requires that minority voters be concentrated into districts that they have a good likelihood of winning? That alone has the effect of diluting minority strength elsewhere.

Re:Federal law has an effect, too

[Zocalo]

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.

Re:Federal law has an effect, too

[KermodeBear]

From Redrawing the Lines (just a site I found with a quick Google search, no special reason to pick it other than it is what I found):

Are states permitted to create new majority- minority districts?

States are permitted and sometimes required to create new majority-minority districts under the Voting Rights Act to avoid diluting minority voting strength during redistricting. States with significant minority population growth over the course of the last decade, for instance, may need to create new majority-minority districts to ensure that redistricting plans comply with the requirements of Section 2 of the Act. Plans that dilute minority voting strength by failing to create feasible majority-minority districts may be quickly challenged following adoption. Since Section 2 litigation can be both costly and time- consuming, officials in many states set out to draw plans that fairly reflect minority voting strength at the beginning of the redistricting process. The need to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to avoid minority vote dilution can serve as a compelling justification for both preserving and creating new majority-minority districts, which helps protect these districts from constitutional attack.

From Cornell University, we have:

Vote Dilution

Section 2 of the VRA, codified at 42 U.S.C. 1973, prohibits drawing election districts in ways that improperly dilute minorities’ voting power. This prohibition applies to states, counties, cities, school districts, and any other governmental unit that holds elections. Two typical forms of vote dilution involve “cracking” a minority community between several election districts, and “submerging” minority communities in multi-member districts. Cracking occurs when election officials split a single minority community into enough different election districts that even if the community voted as a bloc, it could not influence any single districts’ elections. Alternately, election officials might dilute a minority community’s voting power by submerging it in a multi-member district with enough non-minority voters to routinely defeat the minority community’s chosen candidates. See Gerrymandering.

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? Give me big squares, randomly generated with approval from a set of judges or something like that, and get the god damned legislators out of the district drawing business. I don't care who it "hurts" or "helps", it is ridiculous to have some of the districts that we do.

Re:Federal law has an effect, too

[Jay Maynard]

That part of the Voting Rights Act wasn't struck down.

Re:Federal law has an effect, too

[AthanasiusKircher]

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.

Re:Federal law has an effect, too

[AthanasiusKircher]

They're only required to gerrymander minority districts if they have a history suppressing minority votes.

False. Legislators are required to draw districts in such a way that minority votes will NOT be diluted. Thus, if they are forced to redraw districts (say, due to new allocations of the number of representatives after a census), they are REQUIRED to take minority distribution into account and produce a new set of districts which will not negatively affect minority voters.

It has been easier for these issues to end up in the courts in places that have a history of suppressing minority votes -- but the restrictions are binding on all states, regardless of past wrongs.

Re:Federal law has an effect, too

[phantomfive]

Give me big squares, randomly generated with approval from a set of judges or something like that

California tried the non-paratisan judge trick. The leading party stacked the panel of judges to favor them.

Re:Federal law has an effect, too

[nbauman]

You ought to be shocked at the original purpose of those laws: Segregationist states in the former Confederacy were preventing blacks from registering to vote (which also kept them off juries), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... by methods including killing them if they tried to as late as 1963 vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... In 2000, the Florida Secretary of State eliminated enough black voters from the voting rolls, by falsely accusing them of being felons, to give the vote, and the presidency, to George W. Bush. http://www.gregpalast.com/flor... So black voters are denied the right to vote, in violation of the constitution, even today. That's the purpose of the picture ID laws.

Racism benefited the Democratic Party, while the Democratic Party was the party of racism. When the Democratic Party tried to reform itself, by giving constitutional rights to blacks, the Republican Party opportunistically took their place as the party of racism. Good for the Republicans, bad for America.

Re:Federal law has an effect, too

[nbauman]

When did the Republican Party become the party of racism? Was it when they supplied the necessary votes to pass the Civil Rights Act by voting for it in higher percentages than the Democrats? Or was it when Richard Nixon implemented the "Southern Strategy" of actually enforcing the desegregation of schools, especially in the South?

According to John Dean, in a series of articles for FindlLaw about his experience in the Republican party, it happened when some win-at-any-cost Republican strategists decided that there was a large lower-class religious population in the South, who were already being manipulated by preachers, who could also be manipulated by Republicans.

Re:Federal law has an effect, too

[nbauman]

So, you are saying that, by desegregating the schools in the south, the Republican Party under Richard Nixon was demonstrating its racism?

John Dean, a Republican, was talking about the Republican Party after Nixon. Nixon's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, was Pat Moynihan, a liberal.

Dean said that after the Democratic Party stopped supporting Southern racism, the Republican Party (after Nixon) adopted a strategy of taking their place, by appealing to white racist Southerners.

I can't find Dean's old articles on FindLaw, and Findlaw may have been deleted them after FindLaw changed its format, or Dean may have deleted them after he collected them into his book.

I would suggest that you examine the results of the policies of both the Republicans and the Democrats to determine which party is truly racist. Democrats pursue policies which trap minorities (and others) in poverty while increasing the wealth and power of those who already have it.

Since I read the Wall Street Journal editorial page for 30 years, I have examined those arguments in great detail. The WSJ used to argue that free-market policies, lowering taxes and restricting government, would lead to prosperity, which would trickle down to the poor. They also used to argue that government handouts to the poor, like unemployment insurance, minimum wage, unions, public housing, welfare, free health care, and free education, would give them a disincentive to work and make them lazy. On the other hand, when the rich are born into trust funds, and never have to work a day in their lives, that gives them an incentive to become job creators, like Hank Rearden and Bill Gates.

This was in contrast to the news section of the WSJ, which regularly reported how the conservative policies of the editorial page weren't working as predicted.

When Democrats control the government, the gap between white and black income almost invariably widens. When republicans control the government it usually narrows.

While that is what conservative economists predict based on theory, and that is what they believe without (or in spite of) empirical evidence, I am not aware of any data to prove it. I'd like to see the data.

"I'm saying these maps aren't gerrymandered,"

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok well that settles it then!

Stop this stupid First past the Post system

[Teun]

Start using a democratic system where every vote is equal, it's called Proportional Representation and works very well.

It would also be the end of the two party systems.

Re:Stop this stupid First past the Post system

[Chrisq]

Start using a democratic system where every vote is equal, it's called Proportional Representation and works very well.

It would also be the end of the two party systems.

Personally I agree but the likelihood of it happening is very small. The chances of someone who has just won by the fisrt past the post system voting for a change is very low!

Re:Stop this stupid First past the Post system

[Jason Levine]

Start using a democratic system where every vote is equal, it's called Proportional Representation and works very well.

It would also be the end of the two party systems.

Personally I agree but the likelihood of it happening is very small. The chances of someone who has just won by the fisrt past the post system voting for a change is very low!

Not just a politician who won first past the post, but both major parties. Changing the voting system would require one or both of the major parties supporting the change. However, both parties know that they gain power in the current system. Yes, the Democrats lost this round of elections, but wait a few years and the Republicans will be kicked out and replaced by Democrats - who will be kicked out a few years later in favor of Republicans. Repeat ad infinitum.

Why would they support a change that would let some upstart third party gain enough power to unseat their power sharing arrangement? Or worse, allow a few third parties to arise and push Democrats and Republicans to the sidelines instead of sharing the spotlight?

Re:Stop this stupid First past the Post system

[Carewolf]

first past the post isn't what's doing that, not having instant runoff style ballots is.

Yes it is. With proportional voting a minor party with 15% in every district would get one candidate in a state of 11 districts like this case. In a two party system, aka first past the post, they would get none.

Subdistrict data available?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is subdistrict voting data available, or did they just assume a uniform voting pattern across each current district? In the latter case, what they're doing is resampling which tends to average things out, so their result isn't surprising and their conclusion is invalid.

Don't hear that it's just the Republicans at this

[Bruce66423]

Whilst the Republicans have played this game well in recent years, it's not that long ago that the Democrats were at it equally successfully, and in many states they still do it. Which is not to suggest that it's a good thing - but let's not get partisan about it.

The senator is right

[DCFC]

He does politics for a living and has succeeded in a competitive domain, we should listen.

The issue is that Gerrymandered seats are safer, the elected official *is* communicating with voters, but the electorate he must worry most about is his own party in the primaries.

If you have a seat that is safe for one party then you get elected by activists of that party, not voters in general which leads to people getting elected from both parties who would never win on their own merits if they had to "communicate" with a more representative portion of the electorate.

They don't get re-elected by doing a good job, they get it by convincing activist members of their own party that they "represented our values".

They don't get fired by screwing up, but because some faction of their own party, be it unions, Tea party, some religious or ethnic group don't like them or because they sleep with someone that causes a fuss.

So the surprise is not that elected official are less than the best, the surprise is that they know such advanced maths as "some numbers are bigger than others" and that grasp foreign politics well enough to know that the Queen of England isn't a New York bar.

Re:What Does This Mean

[TheRaven64]

They created an algorithm that constructed constituency boundaries randomly, but in such a way that obeyed the rules. They constructed 100 such random maps. The average of these had 7-8 Democrat seats, 5-6 Republican seats. The actual results were 9 Republican, 4 Democrat, using maps drawn up by the Republicans (note: TFA didn't say what the results would have been with the previous set of maps, which had been drawn up by the Democrats). This means that, although the Republicans lost the popular vote in the state, and they lost the geographically weighted vote according to 100 randomly drawn electoral maps, they still ended up winning the state overall.

PR works well? Where?

[Bruce66423]

Whilst it is possible to see Germany as having had a stable governmental system despite PR, in most other countries it has caused substantial instability, to the extent that in many countries PR is tweeked to reduce its impact, e.g. Greece where the party with the most votes gets an extra tranche of MPs. By contrast Belgium's record of 18 months without a government as a result of PR should be a warning to us all.

The great virtue of 'first past the post' is that it forces parties to appeal to a wider group than their obvious supporters; know nothing tea partiers mashed up with business advocates are lined up against a mixture of union placemen and minority activists. The process of coalesce has got to occur somewhere; the belief that it is best done in the spotlight of publicity of the floor of the legislature is somewhat unproven, at best. Certainly the collapse of both the Weimar Republic and the French 4th Republic are usually blamed on their use of PR; I remain to be convinced its the optimal solution.

Re:PR works well? Where?

[dkf]

By contrast Belgium's record of 18 months without a government as a result of PR should be a warning to us all.

Those who hope for a reduction of government meddling in their affairs will see it as a sign of true hope: the sky didn't fall in, despite the fact that the politicians couldn't agree on the most basic thing of all. Throwing them all out of office and only then starting work on the replacement would in fact be just fine...

Re:PR works well? Where?

[daveewart]

The great virtue of 'first past the post' is that it forces parties to appeal to a wider group than their obvious supporters...

I'm not sure that's necessarily true, but what FPTP does do is push everything towards a two-party state. This is why you get, effectively, extremists on both sides. Case in point: UK and USA. Minor parties are pushed out, moderate viewpoints are ignored. FPTP directly leads to "Us v. Them" contests.

In fact, thinking more about your first point: I don't think it's quite true. FPTP encourages parties to talk negatively about their opponents rather than push their own positive points.

Re:PR works well? Where?

[Teun]

Similar happens in The Netherlands, many months with lengthy negotiations to find a majority coalition.

It's typically during these periods we have the most stable system :)

The German tweak is a 5% minimum threshold to get into the parliament, only recognised minorities are exempted.

Re:PR works well? Where?

[Trepidity]

The great virtue of 'first past the post' is that it forces parties to appeal to a wider group than their obvious supporters

With the increase of uncompetitive districts in the U.S., I think this is no longer the case. The real decision-making in many districts happens in the caucuses or primaries (depending on the state), not in the general election. And in those cases it's typically a narrow slice of grassroots party activists, jockeying with party establishment insiders and major donors, who select the candidate.

Re:PR works well? Where?

[Anonymous Coward]

> By contrast Belgium's record of 18 months without a government as a result of PR should be a warning to us all.

Does not really matter in Belgium. During absence of federal government, we still got - for 10e6 people country - more than six parliaments, 3 regional governments and 3 linguistic community having a lot of power. Power is split in so many parts that losing one does not matter.

Not having a government during the peak of the economical crisis was actually good: nothing stupid done, debt stabilized, ...

Re:PR works well? Where?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:PR works well? Where?

[ichabod801]

You're confusing two separate things: proportional representation and parliamentary systems. The two are typically combined, but there is nothing necessary about that. If the U.S. elected Congress through proportional representation, but continued to elect the President through popular vote (er, I mean the Electoral College), you would have the multiple parties of proportional representation without the instability of having to form a coalition government.

Re:PR works well? Where?

[pjt33]

By contrast Belgium's record of 18 months without a government as a result of PR should be a warning to us all.

A warning or an incentive?

Gerrymandering has internal effects too...

[Shadow of Eternity]

Actually if anything they're more serious than the external ones. In an ordinary district the candidates from each major party have to compete for a majority of voters. In a gerrymandered "safe" district the other side is never going to win in the first place so the real contest isn't between each side but rather during the primary to see who's can be more extreme.

Creates False Impressions of Opinion Majority

[retroworks]

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.

Re:How is that startling?

[plover]

Gerrymandering has a long, proud tradition in U.S. politics. I wouldn't be surprised if it resulted in advantage to one side about half the time.

It seems that political power is self-limiting. One side will occupy Congress for a while, until the other side gets fed up and makes a switch. As long as one party doesn't control the whole Congress plus the presidency, gridlock keeps us safe from most of the excesses of either side. It's only when one side runs the whole show that it's time to worry.

Re:Math

[plover]

You don't have to lower the math standards any, you just have to fail to raise them for the next 20 years. Even then it won't matter, because so many people are so bad at statistics and estimating, even when they know better.

Re:States too are districts

[dkf]

In federal elections, state borders can be considered as districts causing the same kinds of distortions.

Maybe, but the effects are less severe because state lines are enormously more difficult to change for short-term political advantage. State-level gerrymandering requires sustained visible policies that affect migration and/or birth rates over decades.

Faulty assumption

[the-matt-mobile]

Looks like this study makes the same faulty assumption that the news media does - that a voter can be counted on only to vote for the candidate of their preferred party. Those other candidates they magically transferred votes for didn't actually run in those districts, so saying one democrat is the same as another and one republican is the same as another - a fashionable and fun cynical fiction for sure - is just not true.

Not just Republicans....

[Rick Zeman]

...as TFA seems to imply. In the People's Republic of Maryland, the Democrats managed to gerrymander wacko-conservative Western MD into laughably liberal Montgomery County in an effort to dilute the conservative's strength.

All politicians suck.

Re:Not just Republicans....

[phantomfive]

The biggest problem is:
Those politicians who are not willing to bend the rules through gerrymandering ultimately lose to those who do. It's like Darwinist evolution pressure in favor of corrupt politicians.

Re:I don't recall such interest in gerrymandering

[zraider]

Well, quite frankly, there wasn't any. When Republicans win, the media and academia dutifully explain to us how the election was bought and paid for, surely also the result of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement. Oh, yeah gerrymandering too. The election was stolen! Our democracy is crumbling! Peter Jennings once even told us that a Republican win was the result of voters throwing a "temper tantrum".

When Democrats win, they get a misty tear in their eye as they are overcome with pride that the will of the people has prevailed, democracy has been saved, and their party now has a clear mandate.

Morons, all of them.

Re:How is that startling?

[Trepidity]

Duke is a private university. And its main external funding comes from a rich industrialist's foundation.

There is an open source solution

[readin]

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.

Re:Except...

[readin]

"recognizing communities" is the heart of gerrymandering. Any gerrymandering algorithm should be forbidden from doing so.

Unintentional Gerrymandering

[zraider]

Meanwhile, some other academics tried something similar and came up with a different result, which they describe as "unintentional gerrymandering". Essentially, Democrats dominate in urban areas and Republicans in rural areas, in a way that ends up inefficiently concentrating Democratic votes.

See: http://www-personal.umich.edu/...

Re:How is that startling?

[marauder68]

What's really startling (not really) is the fact gerrymandering is worse in blue states than red ones, but we only ever hear (on this site) that it's all the evil republicans while the democrats are the poor victims.

Re:How is that startling?

[readin]

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 requirements also include obvious stuff like how spread out or compact districts must be, how many can be disconnected, etc.

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.

Re: How is that startling?

[marauder68]

And which side do you fear? The Republicrats or the Demoblicans?

Both, if you're smart.

Re:How is that startling?

[dave420]

Don't get between a partisan idiot and their argument or you might get your sanity bitten off.

Needless complexity or necessary evil?

[Dominare]

I'm sure I'm being incredibly naive, but what's wrong with a plain old popular vote? I don't know why there's always this obsession with districts, electoral colleges, all of that bollocks. If you get the most votes you get the job, why must that be complicated? I'm not trying to be facetious here I'm honestly curious.

Re:How is that startling?

[Z00L00K]

Just change to a proportional election system instead. Let the percentage of votes decide how many seats a party will get.

It will of course invite other parties to the election party as well.

Re:What Does This Mean

[AthanasiusKircher]

This means that, although the Republicans lost the popular vote in the state, and they lost the geographically weighted vote according to 100 randomly drawn electoral maps, they still ended up winning the state overall.

This is true, and I have absolutely no doubt that there is some serious manipulation going on in drawing districts, as there has been by both parties for centuries.

That said, there's quite a big gap of logic in one of the assumptions of this study. From TFS:

"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."

To what extent is this assumption valid, though? The model appears based on the assumption that ALL voters are "straight-ticket" types who just vote Republican or Democrat mindlessly.

In other words, it doesn't take into account whether (1) a voter might actually care about a specific candidate and what he/she says, (2) a voter might actually respond to campaign advertising or other candidate promotions, (3) for incumbents, a voter might actually continue to vote for an incumbent is he/she is perceived to have served well. (Stats generally show that incumbents have a huge advantage in elections -- voters prefer to vote for familiar names.)

Without controlling for such factors (e.g., by looking at previous election vote counts and comparing how "faithful" voters are to a particular party over the course of a number of elections), this study is SERIOUSLY flawed.

Also, candidates run campaigns according to the rules that are in place. They may visit areas in their district because they have to win those areas and make promises they might not otherwise make because those areas are in their district. If the district lines were drawn differently, they would probably campaign differently.

This strikes me as flawed as those who get into arguments about how Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election. (To be clear, I definitely was never a Bush fan, but I'm interested in rational argument, not fantasies.)

Anyhow, Gore and Bush weren't campaigning to win the popular vote across the country. They were campaigning to win the electoral college vote, which required strategy based on regions and state boundaries. To come back later and say, "But, but... Gore should have won because he got the popular vote" is like some idiot saying, "I know I lost Monopoly, but I had the most properties -- if you changed the rules to allow me to build houses based on the number of properties I own rather than the number of monopolies I had, I could have won!" So what? Those aren't the rules of the game.

The rules of the game may be stupid (and are in the case of gerrymandered districts). But the players choose strategies based on them. The voters may respond to such strategies. None of this appears to have been considered in this model.

Re:How is that startling?

[Anonymous Coward]

Duke is also the university that suspended their Lacrosse team because a bunch of leftwing idiots wanted them to. It is thta part of South Carolina that got gerrymandered into the North.

Re:Stuff like this.

[whistlingtony]

You don't vote because you're lazy and don't want to fight. And frankly, half the reason we're in this mess is because of people like you.

Re:How is that startling?

[macsimcon]

I don’t think you understand how this works. The states draw their own districts, which explains Republicans’ desire over the last several years to capture as many state legislatures as possible.

You’re actually making the OP’s point: Democrats lost so many seats in the House this year BECAUSE of the Republicans’ gerrymandering. Without it, Republicans lose votes each year, as the will of the voters is actually expressed.

Re:How is that startling?

[anegg]

I live in a very liberal state. The powerful majority engages in gerrymandering in order to prevent an "unfortunate outcome" arising from concentrations of conservative voters. So, for example, the county I live in, which is about 50-50 conservative/liberal, is divided in half for federal elections; half is districted with the very liberal county to the west, and half with the very liberal county to our east. The idea that the party with the popular majority doesn't really have to gerrymander seems to ignore the reality that any political party that is in power wants to stay in power and will take whatever legal steps it can to do so. Oh, and the powerful liberals are just as wealthy (if not more so) as the conservatives in my state.

Section 2 of the voting rights act REQUIRES D gerr

[raymorris]

> If I'm wrong, please do show me this mass D gerrymandering that's going on.... Or did go on.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act _requires_ that districts be gerrymandered such that demographic groups which are a _minority_ of the population make up a _majority_ of the voters in those districts. When states fail to gerrymander for democrats ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H black people, the federal government intervenes and forces gerrymandered districts. This is not new.

Fairness in the US system

[ITRambo]

Nice study. However, 21st century US systems are set up to benefit those in power, or their corporate sponsors. Redistricting is not going to change to be more fair.

Re:How is that startling?

[I'm New Around Here]

How about the district formerly represented by Barney Frank in Massachusetts? It even has the gerrymander look to it.

http://sisu.typepad.com/.a/6a0...

Re:How is that startling?

[ATMAvatar]

It's true that a winner-take-all system essentially hands votes to the "opposing party" if you vote for a third party.

However, in a proportional system, the party you vote for will actually get a proportional number of seats (as you might expect). That third party which is useless to vote for now because they only get 5% of the votes (and hence, zero seats) would suddenly get 5% of the seats.

Keep in mind that even with our winner-take-all system, there is a small percentage of votes for third parties every election. Now those parties would be invited to the table. Once people see that, they might actually starting to vote for the parties they want, knowing that their votes would actually work towards increased influence for their chosen party.

However, that is unlikely to happen in the US, as it works against the interests of those parties in power, and we can't have that.

Re:Section 2 of the voting rights act REQUIRES D g

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How is that startling?

[timelorde]

How about where I live:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/109938/marylands-3rd-district-americas-most-gerrymandered-congressional-district

Re:Don't hear that it's just the Republicans at th

[I'm New Around Here]

I love comments like this. Tell me what is right wing about these positions:
nationalizing health care
right to abortion
paid college tuition
open borders/immigration amnesty
regulation of business, to a detrimental level
union empowerment
higher taxes on the rich
more social programs for the poor

These might not all be top line items for the US Democratic Party, but they are top line items for prominent members of the party, and solid planks in the party platform.

It seems that the only thing that can make a party left wing is if it advocates that the ownership of the land should be in the hands of the people, and ownership of industry should be in the hands of the workers.

Re:How is that startling?

[MachineShedFred]

So we'd be voting for a party rather than an individual with his or her own ideas? That's a step backwards.

Extremists have nowhere to go

[Bruce66423]

"This is why you get, effectively, extremists on both sides." They always exist, but in a FPTP system must vote for 'their' party come what may. The effect is to weaken the power of those extremists unless they represent a large enough group as to endanger one of the main party's chance of winning specific constituencies. This is what is happening atm with UKIP; they are perceived as endangering the Tories, so Cameron is being forced to play to their tune; the same is true of the National Front in France. By contrast Muslim voters in the UK have largely been forced to remain voting for the major parties, which is helpful in encouraging integration.

The pathological case of PR taken to its logical extent is Switzerland where the same parties have formed the government in the same proportions since forever. The voters have almost no impact on government policy, except via referendums which often go against government policy, which is not a healthy way to run a country because it means your representatives are not being representative.

Re:Don't hear that it's just the Republicans at th

[I'm New Around Here]

I have no idea what you are talking about. I'd be perfectly happy with both main parties being dismantled under RICO statutes and their power going to the next 10 parties on various ballots. My sig isn't just for shits and giggles.

The caveat of "The Democrats are *slightly* less rightwing" doesn't begin to explain the policy differences between a left wing party and a right wing party.

The reason for my post above is that I have seen that argument made, that both parties are far right wing, just one is slightly less so, and it makes no sense. Unless the centrist party is the Communist Party, and the left wing parties are Anarchy and Local Warlord, there is no reasonable argument that the US Democratic Party is, in the poster's own words, "extremely right wing".

By the way, regarding my comment about ownership of the land and industry being in the hands of the people and workers, I would also be fine with that system, provided it was not corrupted by the ones in charge. If everyone had to get their hands dirty in the field and factory, living by the motto "If you don't work, you don't eat" we would be much better off as a people. The government might collapse, but I really wouldn't miss it.

Re:How is that startling?

[gtall]

Hmmm...how about social security and medicare, should that be handled by the states so that poor states get shafted...well, their older citizens will. That will cause a migration to a few states and leave rest to the wilderness. How about OSHA and workplace safety regulations? Each state is going to produce their own? FDA? Each state will have its own? The list goes on. We have these government agencies to regulate those well-adjusted nice companies that will cut grannies throat if they thought they could increase their profit by doing so. A collection of polyglot regulatory agencies is how we got the current insurance industry. These are those nice, well-meaning companies that want to cherry pick the healthy people and only insure them.

So your libertarian utopia is an academic exercise in futility.

Re: How is that startling?

[OzPeter]

I prefer to refer to the de facto one party system we have as being run by Demoncrats.

That unfortunately sounds like one of Rush's talking points.

Actually now that I think about it .. it was one of Michael Savages catch phrases.

Re:How is that startling?

[quantaman]

What's really startling (not really) is the fact gerrymandering is worse in blue states than red ones, but we only ever hear (on this site) that it's all the evil republicans while the democrats are the poor victims.

You have any evidence for that not startling fact? I have no doubt that both parties do it but the Republicans have always seemed to be particularly egregious when it comes to electioneering.

Re:How is that startling?

[LynnwoodRooster]

How do you capture State legislatures, other than with a majority of the State vote?

Re:How is that startling?

[drfred79]

California had such a problem with Democratic gerrymandering (no state seats are essentially Republican regardless of the large swaths of the public that vote Republican) that they had to create a state district commission to try and fix it.

Re:How is that startling?

[dasunt]

Why not include a census question asking people what neighbors they feel they are closest to?

That way, with a few simple rules, it's possible to calculate census areas which are culturally distinct. So a major urban area won't dilute a rural area, a black majority-area won't be diluted by being split up into multiple districts, etc.

Re:What Does This Mean

[Hognoxious]

To what extent is this assumption valid, though? The model appears based on the assumption that ALL voters are "straight-ticket" types who just vote Republican or Democrat mindlessly.

It's based on the weaker assumption that the number within each ward who change won't be significant. Or more accurately the net number.

Re:How is that startling?

[CaptainLard]

What's really startling (not really) is the fact gerrymandering is worse in blue states than red ones,

Is it? Did you run a similar model on the other 49 states and find that mathematical districting favors republicans 51% of the time? If you could provide your method and data it would certainly illuminate the conversation.

Or are we just taking one line blanket statements at face value now (as the +5 indicates)? AKA the campaign commercial debate style.

Ten most gerrymandered districts

[kenh]

Enjoy - from The Washington Post

Re:Ten most gerrymandered districts

[SETY]

Mod Up. This is the #1 problem in the USA. Fix this and many, many other problems with government will magically disappear.

Re:How is that startling?

[SuricouRaven]

And you aren't now? The vast majority of US politics is party politics. It's really quite convenient - one look at the letter beside a politicians name and you can know with a high degree of reliability their positions on everything from gay marriage to gun control to taxation to immigration to environmental protection to healthcare to forign policy. It doesnt matter that these issues have little to no connection - everything is conveniently bundled up into the 'republican package' and the 'democrat package.'

Re: How is that startling?

[ranton]

You could still vote for individuals. When they hand out seats to the parties based on proportions, the individuals with the most votes in that party would get the seats.

Re: How is that startling?

[kenh]

Go here - http://www.washingtonpost.com/... - and talk about how the worst Republian-drawn districts are so much worse than the worst Democrat-drawn district.

Both parties have been doing it for years, and every election the losers complain about gerrymandering the other party did.

Re:How is that startling?

[Bartles]

Would you count Tom Steyer and George Soros in that crowd or do you only have a problem with people that help to get Republicans elected? Who is really being obtuse here?

Re: How is that startling?

[Bartles]

Holy shit. You are deliberately obtuse, Colonel Klink.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-16-secretary-state-democrats_x.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_of_State_Project

http://ballotpedia.org/Secretary_of_State_Project

And of course only places like the Washington Times would report it. The Major national papers are just a unofficial wing of the Democratic party and wothey sork to suppress embarrassing things like this.

Re:How is that startling?

[Bartles]

Haha, so is Harvard. And you think being private, that somehow makes it biased towards Republicans? You idiot.

Re:Don't hear that it's just the Republicans at th

[Solandri]

Senators can't be gerrymandered because they represent the entire state. A pre-set geographic boundary which (usually) can't be changed. Gerrymandering happens after each Census (2010, 2000, 1990, 1980, etc) when the House seats are reapportioned and redrawn to be relatively equal in population.

If you want a recent Democrat example, just look at California. In the 2014 House elections, Democrat candidates got 57.7% of the votes relative to Republicans (4.06m vs 2.98m). Yet they won 73.6% of the races (39 of 53). Of the 9 races where the winner got fewer than 57.7% of the votes, Democrats won 8, Republicans just 1.

Anyway, this is nothing new. The term Gerrymandering dates back to 1812. Letting the State legislatures draw the election districts is literally letting the foxes guard the henhouse (gerrymandering isn't just about helping your own party, it's also about making "safe" districts so incumbents have an easier time getting re-elected). In the 1990 election, California ended up with a Democrat-controlled legislature and a Republican governor. The Democrats gerrymandered the districts, and the governor vetoed it. The boundaries ended up being drawn by the State Supreme Court, and for the next 8 years California had probably the fairest elections in its history.

There were two California ballot initiatives in 1990 for taking control of redrawing the districts away from the legislature. They were both winning until about a month before the election. Basically every special interest out there realized fairer districts would add unpredictability by increasing the chances of incumbents losing. So they all ran ads against them (including several groups I had previously thought were "honest" like the Sierra Club and NOW). And both initiatives were defeated.

Re:How is that startling?

[mspohr]

Austin, Texas is the most liberal city in Texas. You would think they would have a liberal, progressive representative but not true.
The Texas Republicans have split Austin's votes as part of six different districts (some of which stretch for 50 miles). The result is that Austin has six Republican representatives, none of which represent the views of Austin. Austin is the largest city in the US without a congressional district anchor.

Sortocracy is the only answer

[Baldrson]

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:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it.

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.

In Soviet America....

[Celarent Darii]

In Soviet America, voters don't chose their representatives, rather the representatives choose their voters.

Stalin is reported to have said that he takes little account of who votes, but rather it is he who counts the votes that matters. Politics in American have done him proud... it matters not who votes, but where you vote that counts. One vote in a swing state is worth thousands of votes in the so called "safe states". In fact with most districts there isn't even a meaningful contest.

Tyranny by definition is rule without mandate. When less than 50% of the people vote, and of them not all the votes have equal political value, then I think it is safe to state that the USA has perhaps crossed the line into tyranny.

Yet some tyrannies can be quite nice to live in.

Re: How is that startling?

[DigiShaman]

So preventing voter fraud is now "electioneering"?! Well fuck yeah, I'm all in favor of it. If you can't provide ID (DL, passport, etc), you shouldn't be alowed to vote. If the "poor" can at least eat and travel in America, obtaining proper ID is completely doable. So fucking get ID!

Re:How is that startling?

[reve_etrange]

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.

Re: How is that startling?

[riverat1]

You'd get more sympathy from me if there was enough voter fraud to worry about. The fact is that since 2000 out of 100's of millions of votes cast there have been less than 50 cases of attempted voter fraud of the kind that voter ID would prevent. To illustrate how miniscule that is lets assume they're only catching 1 out of 100 cases of voter fraud than that there were 5,000 cases and that there were 500 million votes cast (it's got to way more than that). That would give you a fraud percentage of 0.01%. In person voter fraud is not a problem.

Hint: Dems oppose most of that list

[Uberbah]

I love comments like these because they show how wingers have created an alternate reality for themselves where facts need not apply.

I love comments like this. Tell me what is right wing about these positions:

Tell me you've paid an iota of attention to what the Democrats have been doing for the last 30 years?

nationalizing health care

You mean far better care for far less money? Not only did Democrats take Single Payer off the table before negotiations began, top Democrats (Obama, Reid, Baucus, Pelsoi) killed the Public Option. If, on the other hand, you're referring to Obomneycare....yeah, that's a right wing, market based plan. First cooked up by the Heritage Foundation in the 90's - something both Obamabots and wingers have an allergic reaction to remembering.

paid college tuition

Where. Nothing has been done nationally, and tuition will have about doubled under Brown.

open borders/immigration amnesty

Obama deported immigrants at a rate far higher than Bush, before pulling a mini-Reagan when it was politically meaningless.

regulation of business, to a detrimental level

On some planet where Democrats haven't continued deregulating businesses? Reagan-Bush sent 800 bankers to jail over the S&L fraud; Obama hasn't prosecuted a single banker for a crisis 70 times as large. If, again, you're referring to Obomneycare, take it up with these guys.

union empowerment

"Empowered" right out of their teaching jobs with RTTT, which is Bush's NCLB on steroids. Sin taxes on union health insurance, something Obama attacked McCain for wanting to do in '08. Killed EFCA. Auto bailout gutted the union by forcing new employees to work for far less money than existing workers - and why support a union if you aren't going to get anything out of it?

higher taxes on the rich

Most of Bush tax cuts were extended, and they keep wanting to cut corporate tax rates.

more social programs for the poor

They just cut 9 billion in food stamps in the last farm bill. And who do you think "ended welfare as we know it" in the 90's, President Dole?