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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: 1) by yankprintster on Friday November 28 2014, @06:32PM
There are ten Congressional Districts in Washington State. The 2011 Redistricting Commission, made up of two Democrats, two Republicans, and an independent chair, redrew the districts to make them safer for all incumbents (regardless of party). The compromise they came up with was to make a single district, the 1st, a competitive swing district that could potentially go to either Party. The other nine districts were essentially locked in to always favor the incumbents.
I ran as a Republican in the 2nd District (one of which has a Democratic incumbent).
My results in the 2nd in 2014: 39.43%
Republican challenger results in the 2nd in 2012: 38.86%
Probably close enough to be considered statistically a tie. So the 2nd was designed such that it is approximately 60% Democratic and 40% Republican, almost always guaranteeing a Democratic win. (And the Districts that have a Republican incumbent, have similar results, just the other way around.)
Incumbents already had the advantage of strong name recognition, and just the fact that they are incumbents allows them to claim experience at doing the job. Giving them an additional 10% vote advantage seems to go way too far.