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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: 2) by kaszz on Friday November 28 2014, @05:13PM
So USA will fall when there's an external stress on its system that is huge enough.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 28 2014, @07:38PM
The fall of the US may happen regardless of how well governed it is. A meteor strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs would easily kill off our civilization. But, if it is badly governed, a fall is more likely. If the government is corrupt enough, it could fall without any external stress. Why did South Vietnam fall? How could the commies of North Vietnam defeat the superior and stronger capitalist system of South Vietnam? One explanation is that their capitalist system wasn't so great after all. Many weak nations practice crony capitalism. South Vietnam was so weak that even with US help they lost. The Republic of China is another case, their government confined to the island of Taiwan. How did they blow it, and lose the faith of the Chinese people? As Chiang Kai-shek, their leader in the period around WWII wrote, they failed not because of external enemies, but rot from within.
If we're going to consult our swarm intelligence by holding elections, we should listen. But many among us aren't listening, not to scientific warnings about Climate Change and other perils, not to good ideas that might disrupt an existing business model, not to the idea of tapping those who merit it, and not to voting results. The only listening some do is the backhanded sort of creating propaganda to drown out the factual messages. It's dangerous.
I've heard what one CEO of a medium sized company thought. He didn't qualify for the position of CEO out of any merit, he inherited it from his father. He was an average idiot. One time he gave a little speech to all of management at a dinner after hours in which he said that Global Warming was not real, but if it was, then good because he thought it would be good for the company's business! He also complained that he would have made more money if he'd sold the company and invested in the stock market. But, he explained that he stayed with the company so us peons would all have jobs. Patted himself on the back for being such a nice, great guy, helping out the little man. Was oblivious to his own arrogance and patronizing tone. That is the kind of fool we have running many of our companies. Most of the time getting it very wrong results in nothing of serious consequence, but often enough the result is disaster. For instance, Fukushima would not have happened had it not been for corrupt management who, out of greed, actively pressured and silenced honest engineers.