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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 dry on Friday June 09 2017, @05:26AM (4 children)
Why is #4 even a thing? If the districts are drawn impartially and roughly equal in population, it should reflect the demographics. You might have 4 districts in the urban centre and 6 districts in the rural area if that's how the population is spread out. And who's to say that next election those Republican voters won't be voting for a different party?
I guess not being American slows my understanding of American politics but just the idea of politics being involved in something so important to democracy just seems crazy. Here in Canada, there are 2 of age citizens that aren't allowed to vote, the head of Elections Canada and their assistant. And the one time I remember an accusation of gerrymandering, in a Provincial election, there was such an outcry that it was fixed pretty quick (Gracies finger if you feel like Googling).
The population does seem to want to go to proportional representation here, the last Federal Election, the winners promised (and broke it) no more first past the post elections and here in BC, the next government seems like it'll be the ones in favour of proportional representation. The election was close enough to a tie that the 3 greens (16% of the vote in total) have control. Previous referendums also came in at just below the 60% threshold that the government set.
The problem with proportional representation, from the politicians view, is no clear winners and the parties having to work together, which to many voters sounds great.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Friday June 09 2017, @08:27AM
Not to mention it would clear a path for the growth of third parties, which our current political powers would really hate.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday June 09 2017, @01:53PM (1 child)
You must not be familiar with Simpson's paradox [wikipedia.org]. Basically, arbitrary divisions of data can significantly alter or reverse trends in data. And it depends on what you mean by "reflect the demographics." If you mean that an elected representative should likely represent the majority of his/her district? Yes, I suppose that's trivially so. If you mean that elected representatives from the state as a whole reflect the demographics of the state as a whole, then no, that's not guaranteed even with an "impartial metric."
That's certainly true. But I think the issue is that even if voters just vote straight "party line" in every election according to how they're registered, it's definitely possible for a state to have, say, 60% or even 70% of registered voters from party X, but to have 80% of state representatives consistently come from party Y, EVEN with relatively "impartially drawn" compact districts.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday June 09 2017, @02:00PM
To be clear, what I said in my last paragraph about what was "possible" doesn't mean it's likely for a distribution to be so skewed. My broader point is that compact districts don't guarantee proportional representation. And as long as criterion (4) is a priority for politicians (and it obviously is, or we wouldn't have a term to describe "gerrymandering" in a negative sense), there's no objective "neutral" solution/algorithm that always can satisfy the desired criteria for drawing district boundaries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @05:18PM
You make that sound like it's a bad thing.