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Gerrymandering has a long and unpopular history in the United States. It is the main reason that the country ranked 55th of 158 nations — last among Western democracies — in a 2017 index of voting fairness run by the Electoral Integrity Project
[...] Lawsuits fighting partisan gerrymandering are pending around the country, and a census planned for 2020 is expected to trigger nationwide redistricting. If the mathematicians succeed in laying out their case, it could influence how those maps are drawn.
[...] States such as Arizona and Iowa, which have independent or bipartisan commissions that oversee the creation of voting districts, fared much better. In a separate analysis, Daniel McGlone, a geographic-information-system data analyst at the technology firm Azavea in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ranked each state’s voting districts for compactness as a measure of gerrymandering, and found that Maryland had the most-gerrymandered districts. North Carolina came second. Nevada, Nebraska and Indiana were the least gerrymandered.
[...] In the summer of 2016, a bipartisan panel of retired judges met to see whether they could create a more representative set of voting districts for North Carolina. Their maps gave Mattingly a chance to test his index. The judges’ districts, he found, were less gerrymandered than in 75% of the computer-generated models — a sign of a well-drawn, representative map. By comparison, every one of the 24,000 computer-drawn districts was less gerrymandered than either the 2012 or 2016 voting districts drawn by state legislators
[...] Political scientist Nicholas Stephanopoulos at the University of Chicago, Illinois, takes a much simpler approach to measuring gerrymandering. He has developed what he calls an “efficiency gap”, which measures a state’s wasted votes: all those cast for a losing candidate in each district, and all those for the victor in excess of the proportion needed to win. If one party has lots of landslide victories and crushing losses compared with its rivals, this can be a sign of gerrymandering.
Note: Please try to keep the discussion on the topic of gerrymandering.
http://www.nature.com/news/the-mathematicians-who-want-to-save-democracy-1.22113
https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8796
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @01:03AM (6 children)
That's my fault.
I found TFA interesting and am really interested if the community has insights about the subject but, at the same time, I am fatigued with the typical off-topic political comments that seep into many stories. My hope was that most discussions would be on potential solutions and the inevitable political discussions could, at least, be a little more focused.
TFA does mention specific instances of both Rs and Ds gerrymandering, but I left those out of the summary.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday June 09 2017, @01:12AM (5 children)
I think there are many things that can be done about it. We could get rid of the districts altogether. What's the point? It's not like they actually represent us anyways, and the whole thing is just a sad illusive dance where we convince ourselves that we're represented and have freedom. Do it at the state level, even in California, for all the good it will do. Politics will still be as corrupt, because gerrymandering has nothing to do with the shit choices we are presented.
If the goal is to get X numbers into Congress, then we could just vote on X number of people. Your top choice, 2nd choice, and so on. It would be more work to vote, but the more districts you collapse into a single district, the less gerrymandering can be performed. In my mind, districts should be no smaller than counties, but they currently are. Specifically, a district should include multiple demographics, and at a county level it very well might. Making a district small enough that you can encircle a group of people that all vote one way, is just pure corruption at work.
When you combine all the votes you can see who was voted 1st from all voters most of the time, 2nd, and so on. There are plenty of other voting methods in use around the world to choose multiple parties at the same time.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @01:27AM
That's the problem in a nutshell. If districting could be fixed, then it could better represent regional preferences (that would presumably be drowned-out by large populations in urban areas).
(Score: 3, Informative) by realDonaldTrump on Friday June 09 2017, @02:46AM (1 child)
They tried that in Maine, they almost tried that in the great, great state of Maine. Ranked choice voting, they call it. They had an initiative. A referendum. And the voters of Maine said yes, we want ranked choice voting. But a court said no, don't even think about it. Don't go there. The Maine Supreme Court said no, that goes against the constitution. Violates the state constitution of Maine. That what the people voted for was unconstitutional. That what the majority of voters, the great voters of Maine, wanted, they can't have. Not unless they change their constitution. Folks, I'm telling you, the constitution is a huge, huge problem. The constitution and the courts. Big problems in Maine. Sad! #TRUMP2020 #MAGA
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by jmorris on Friday June 09 2017, @03:09AM
It is worse, remember when the CA Supreme Court ruled the California Constitution unconstitutional after the People voted to amend it? Good times.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Friday June 09 2017, @02:57AM
To an extent there is some truth to the assertion that the don't always represent us.
But without districts, every last one of them would be elected by the biggest City in the state.
Districts were an attempt to spread the influence, and avoid city-state structures that plagued Europe for centuries. Make them come home every two years and explain their actions to the farmer's.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Friday June 09 2017, @04:14AM
I agree that removing districts would eliminate Gerrymandering, however it creates its own problems.
If done right, districts can ensure proper representation of the cross-section of community across a state. For example, you'll want representatives from wealthy areas, poor areas, urban areas, rural areas, etc. The priorities of these groups do tend to be quite different, and if you removed districts from the equation you might end up failing to represent a significant part of your state.
In most countries, the drawing of district boundaries is left to a non-partisan government organisation. Typically, census data is used to help draw those boundaries based on demographics other than political affiliation