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Gerrymandering has a long and unpopular history in the United States. It is the main reason that the country ranked 55th of 158 nations — last among Western democracies — in a 2017 index of voting fairness run by the Electoral Integrity Project
[...] Lawsuits fighting partisan gerrymandering are pending around the country, and a census planned for 2020 is expected to trigger nationwide redistricting. If the mathematicians succeed in laying out their case, it could influence how those maps are drawn.
[...] States such as Arizona and Iowa, which have independent or bipartisan commissions that oversee the creation of voting districts, fared much better. In a separate analysis, Daniel McGlone, a geographic-information-system data analyst at the technology firm Azavea in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ranked each state’s voting districts for compactness as a measure of gerrymandering, and found that Maryland had the most-gerrymandered districts. North Carolina came second. Nevada, Nebraska and Indiana were the least gerrymandered.
[...] In the summer of 2016, a bipartisan panel of retired judges met to see whether they could create a more representative set of voting districts for North Carolina. Their maps gave Mattingly a chance to test his index. The judges’ districts, he found, were less gerrymandered than in 75% of the computer-generated models — a sign of a well-drawn, representative map. By comparison, every one of the 24,000 computer-drawn districts was less gerrymandered than either the 2012 or 2016 voting districts drawn by state legislators
[...] Political scientist Nicholas Stephanopoulos at the University of Chicago, Illinois, takes a much simpler approach to measuring gerrymandering. He has developed what he calls an “efficiency gap”, which measures a state’s wasted votes: all those cast for a losing candidate in each district, and all those for the victor in excess of the proportion needed to win. If one party has lots of landslide victories and crushing losses compared with its rivals, this can be a sign of gerrymandering.
Note: Please try to keep the discussion on the topic of gerrymandering.
http://www.nature.com/news/the-mathematicians-who-want-to-save-democracy-1.22113
https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8796
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday June 09 2017, @02:41AM (3 children)
Attempting to stop gerrymandering is like making water not wet by government decree. By definition, any group of people tasked with drawing the lines that will decide elections is a political group. Appoint all the "bipartisan commissions" you want, wait twenty years and every single one will be fully populated with partisan hacks as the parties figure out how to get their hand picked people appointed. Because it is too important not to do so, since you can be assured the other side is doing it and you can't unilaterally disarm.
Even if you wanted to you can't avoid political influence on district drawing. The only way you might would be a computer algorithm designed to seek certain agreed to goals. But since the SCOTUS requires a Goldilocks (but not exactly specified) amount of racism in map drawing, no computer could be tasked with such a thing, it requires specificity and it would cause riots to openly speak of any exact quantity of "required racism". So no, you can't do it with computers. And as I noted, any system based on people will attract politicians.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @02:54AM (2 children)
Twenty years of better than the status quo would be a step in the right direction.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday June 09 2017, @03:02AM (1 child)
Not really, because then you would still have the process totally outside the influence of elected officials and voters, leaving pure naked party vs party battles and any attempt to reverse the decision to remove district drawing from the hands of elected officials would be condemned by which ever side was winning at the moment as 'a despicable attempt to politicize district line drawing and turn back the clock to the horrible days of yore.' Beware of temporary fixes that leave things worse in the long run. Most of our problems stem from that sort of short time horizon thinking, not thinking past the next election cycle.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @03:37AM
Perfect should not be the enemy of good.
TFA mentions multiple approaches that reduce gerrymandering and it certainly isn't impossible to beat the current system.
If you are worried about politicians, then select random people as we do for jury duty; use an algorithm; randomly generate districts; put in judicial or executive checks; etc.