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posted by on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the careful-plotting dept.

The Washington Post reports Supreme Court rules race improperly dominated N.C. redistricting efforts

The Supreme Court ruled [May 22] that North Carolina's Republican-controlled legislature relied on racial gerrymandering when drawing the state's congressional districts, a decision that could make it easier to challenge other state redistricting plans.

The decision continued a trend at the court, where justices have found that racial considerations improperly tainted redistricting decisions by GOP-led legislatures in Virginia, Alabama, and North Carolina. Some cases involved congressional districts, others legislative districts.

[...] [The justices] were unanimous in rejecting one of the districts and split 5 to 3 on the other.

AlterNet reports

Republican legislators used surgical precision to pack black voters into just two districts, the tentacular 1st and the snake-like 12th. The lower court found that these districts targeted voters on the basis of race in violation of the constitution, a move that effectively prevented black voters from electing their preferred candidates in neighboring seats. map

[...] This now-invalidated congressional map was one of, if not the very most, aggressive partisan gerrymanders in modern history. North Carolina is a relatively evenly divided swing state--Donald Trump won it by just 3 points last year--yet these lines offered Republicans 10 safe districts while creating three lopsidedly Democratic seats. Amazingly, all 10 Republican districts hit a perfect sweet spot with GOP support between 55 and 60 percent, a level that is high enough to be secure yet spreads around Republican voters just carefully enough to ensure the maximum number of GOP seats possible.


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  • (Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday May 26 2017, @01:52PM (5 children)

    by FakeBeldin (3360) on Friday May 26 2017, @01:52PM (#515954) Journal

    Sure. hexagons would fill areas much more efficiently. My point was not to glorify any particular polygon, but point out that current congressional districts often look more like knotted up pasta than polygons. This is inappropriate in my view.

    This is inherent in any form of system-enforced geographical distribution of political power (i.e., districts).
    Using regular polygons is blatantly unfair: the 1000 square miles of desert with one voter gets 2 seats in the house, while the urban area with 4 towns and 1.5 million voters gets one seat.

    So, in any system that is based on geographical districts, the size and shape of those districts will be tweaked. There are benign reasons for that and there are malicious reasons for that, but since voters aren't uniformly distributed and since the boundaries of the election (i.e. the state or municipality) aren't perfectly fitting to polygons, the size and shape of districts needs to be tweaked. That problem is completely avoided with proportional representation: x% of the votes gets you x% of the seats. Every. Single. Time.

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  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday May 26 2017, @05:30PM (2 children)

    Sure. hexagons would fill areas much more efficiently. My point was not to glorify any particular polygon, but point out that current congressional districts often look more like knotted up pasta than polygons. This is inappropriate in my view.

    This is inherent in any form of system-enforced geographical distribution of political power (i.e., districts).
    Using regular polygons is blatantly unfair: the 1000 square miles of desert with one voter gets 2 seats in the house, while the urban area with 4 towns and 1.5 million voters gets one seat.

    I'm not sure if you're being deliberately obtuse or if you just don't realize how redistricting/gerrymandering has worked in the U.S. [govtrack.us]

    So, in any system that is based on geographical districts, the size and shape of those districts will be tweaked. There are benign reasons for that and there are malicious reasons for that, but since voters aren't uniformly distributed and since the boundaries of the election (i.e. the state or municipality) aren't perfectly fitting to polygons, the size and shape of districts needs to be tweaked. That problem is completely avoided with proportional representation: x% of the votes gets you x% of the seats. Every. Single. Time.

    I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're ignorant. In the U.S. congressional districts are divided *by population* and not by geography. The issues I mentioned WRT regular polygons wasn't a suggestion that such polygons be of equal area, but rather that they are of created in as compact and normalized a fashion as possible, without any consideration of *who* lives in those areas.

    In too many places, congressional districts have been drawn to divide members of the party(ies) not favored by the state legislatures in order to create districts where, regardless of how they vote, they are always a minority in that district.

    As such, when drawing district boundaries, intentionally splitting areas which would seem to create the most compact and normalized districts, in order to limit the voting blocs for specific parties, is malicious.

    I've often thought that proportional representation in our legislative bodies was a good idea. Not because I necessarily think a parliamentary system would be superior (I think that the separation of the legislative and executive branches is an excellent idea, which is lacking in parliamentary systems), but because it would allow more diverse voices into our legislative processes and the national debate.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
    • (Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday May 26 2017, @06:16PM (1 child)

      by FakeBeldin (3360) on Friday May 26 2017, @06:16PM (#516057) Journal

      I'm not sure if you're being deliberately obtuse or if you just don't realize how redistricting/gerrymandering has worked in the U.S.

      Neither, actually - I was talking about the implications of districting. These hold for the USA and for any other country that uses districting.

      I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're ignorant.

      Thanks! Unfortunately, I'm not ignorant, so sorry about that.

      I was talking about theory, you're talking about practice.

      In a nutshell, when districting anywhere (including in the USA):
      1. population size per district does not mandate a certain structure. Districts may be rotated, moved, or squished in one direction and elongated in another.
      2. Since voters are not uniformly distributed and since the borders are not nice straight lines, any zoning algorithm will make some arbitrary choices.

      For an example, see this image [wp.com]. Uniform density of voters, 4 districts, every voter voting purple or green. The most obvious point of this picture is to illustrate how choosing districts carefully can determine the result. But: the key thing for this discussion is this: it is impossible to say any of these divisions is intrinsically wrong. Sure, the bottom right looks fishy - but that doesn't mean that this must never be allowed to happen anywhere. In fact, I'm sure it's possible to come up with example settings that embed this division of voters where each of the districting options depicted leads to the most fair districts in the rest of the setting.

      For example, say this image depicts the city centre, and outside the city centre voter density varies. Now if you start creating your districts from the city centre, you might get districts like shown in the top row of the picture. However, in case this is the last part of the state to be districted, you could conceivably end up with the lower right division.

      I think that the separation of the legislative and executive branches is an excellent idea, which is lacking in parliamentary systems

      The UK (to name but one) must be doing it wrong then [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday May 26 2017, @07:16PM

        I suspect that we may be in violent agreement here.

        My concern WRT redistricting is one of the deliberate, active weakening of one voting bloc to benefit another.

        There are many ways to look at that issue. My primary point is that *preferring* regular shapes (or reasonable combinations thereof) for districts can limit (but certainly not eliminate) attempts to create district boundaries that favor one group over another.

        My (albeit limited) understanding is that in most parliamentary systems (and I thought this of the UK as well, but I could be wrong), was that the majority party (or coalition) in the legislature populated the executive roles from within its own ranks and those folks retained their seats in the legislative branch (i.e., the current Prime Minister [wikipedia.org] remains the MP for Maidenhead [wikipedia.org]).

        In the U.S, by contrast, Jeff Sessions [wikipedia.org] was required to resign his legislative post as a Senator from Alabama, before he could take on his role as the U.S. Attorney General.

        As such, Theresa May (the head of the U.K.'s executive) will cast votes on legislation in parliament as the MP for Maidenhead. In the U.S., with the (extremely rare) exception of the Vice President casting tie-breaking votes in the Senate, no executive branch member *ever* votes on legislation.

        --
        No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @04:46AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @04:46AM (#516301)

    The rural area is getting screwed. Politicians find it easy to ignore the needs of the rural population. Going by area fixes it.

    If you are in an urban area and want more say, you can move. Now, you might say rural people should move, but this is harmful. Cities are unable to support themselves for food and water. It all has to be trucked in. This adds pollution that usually isn't even counted toward the city causing it. (the least-polluting is smallish cities with short commutes, not urban or true rural) Having people in urban areas is a disadvantage in war; they make easy targets.

    Anyway, you can't measure population well. It is estimated that California unjustly has an extra 5 seats in the house due to non-citizens being counted; this is a motivation to support crime. There is always a fight over counting the homeless.

    It's no good to have people drawing the lines either. If you use county lines, people will redraw the counties.

    A specified algorithm is decent, yet hard to get right. An easier solution is to make a contest out of it, specifying only a way to judge the contest entries.

    • (Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Saturday May 27 2017, @02:48PM

      by FakeBeldin (3360) on Saturday May 27 2017, @02:48PM (#516426) Journal

      I'm just going to focus on one part of your reply that flummoxed me:

      Anyway, you can't measure population well. It is estimated that California unjustly has an extra 5 seats in the house due to non-citizens being counted;

      What? That's impossible. They must know who is allowed to vote. If they know this, then they can infer the total number of eligible voters.
      Now I'll grant that that's a lower bound for the total number of inhabitants of the state, but:
      1. does that matter? I.e.: is the number of seats in the house dependent on total number of voters or that of inhabitants?
      2. If the latter: there are surely ways to extrapolate from total number of voters to total number of inhabitants in a better way.
      (2a. If the latter: why don't you abolish that and use the total number of voters instead?
                    Since using inhabitants should basically be scaling the number of voters, it doesn't matter so much, so you can use that unfudged
                    number officially, and use an official scaling factor which will apply equally to all. )