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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: 0, Offtopic) by GWRedDragon on Friday November 28 2014, @02:23PM
By using a single example, this makes it sound like only one side is responsible. The implication is that the Democrats would do way better if it weren't for skewed boundaries. This shows political bias on the part of the author; in reality both parties do it pretty much to the same extent.
[Insert witty message here]
(Score: 1) by TK-421 on Friday November 28 2014, @03:42PM
No mod points at the moment so I guess I'll comment.
Your point is right on in my opinion, both major parties are doing it. However I will add, that it doesn't bother me all that much. It isn't that I don't care, because I do. I just happen to be of the opinion that elections have consequences. If you (as a party) don't want to get gerrymandered then you had best be sure to listen to your constituents. I agree that there is an obvious advantage to be had with gerrymandering, but a party can lose that advantage pretty quick when they create a large delta between their actions and the will of the people.
(Score: 1) by jmorris on Friday November 28 2014, @04:05PM
Yea, look at CA and you would get exactly the opposite result. And that is the root of the problem, the wrong people are doing it now. For the last fifty years conservatives were bitchin' and moaning about gerrymandering but doing it out in the wilderness on the few and sparsely circulated conservative media. Now the majority of State legislatures are in Republican (not yet in Conservative hands but Progs stink with fear of that eventuality) control and they got to draw the districts in 2010.
Thank you President Obama. The Republican Party hasn't been this strong since Reconstruction.