SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Gerrymandering is the practice of establishing a political advantage for a political 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?"
(Score: 1) by Nuke on Friday November 28 2014, @01:59PM
No, it is called gerrymandering. It is the word for this particular type of cheating just like "forging" is the word for another type of cheating. I don't know why you seem to think that "gerrymandering" sounds OK because it does not; perhaps it is the first time you have come across the word.
But gerrymandering is doing it deliberately. The same effect does happen a lot "accidentally". For example in the UK there are large industrial areas (eg the South Wales "Valleys" and the Black Country near Birmingham) containing many constituencies where the vast majority vote for the Labour party, but all those votes beyond 51% (say) are wasted. OTOH the Conservative party supporters are spread around more efficiently, only just topping the required majority in many constituencies.
In a different way a significant part of the UK population (~3%) voted for UKIP (the anti-EU party) at the last general election but got no seats in Parliament because UKIP supporters are spread around such that a majority is hard to achieve in any constituency. Probably, more people would vote for minority parties such as UKIP (and Green and Commie etc for that matter) if they thought their votes were not wasted in this way.
In the UK this was not originally deliberate, just a quirk of the demography. The situation could be solved by proportional representation, but the two main parties do not regard it as a problem that needs "solving". It suits them fine as things are.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Friday November 28 2014, @03:11PM
I suspect that this might also start getting a lot more attention in the national elections now that UKIP is on the rise and the recent independance vote in Scotland appears to have upset the balance for Labour (the Conservatives hardly ever poll well in Scottish seats). With the potential for even more parties sharing seats in Parliament and a greater risk of hung parliaments as a result, I'd expect the main parties to start looking into how they can consolidate their positions while they still can, and while they still hold the bulk of the councils this is one way they can do that.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!