That picture is great: by basically eliminating the geography it makes the math clear. If someone understands this picture, it will be easy to get a good idea about the more complicated real-world cases.
It's not a great picture. For one thing, it's unnecessarily provocative (Title: "How to Steal an Election") and not-so-subtly partisan: The use of blue for the 'natural' winner and red for the 'thief' is clearly meant to echo (and comment on) contemporary U.S. politics.
Yes, gerrymandering happens, and yes, it currently disproportionately benefits the GOP: Some lucky wave election timing put them in charge of more states during the post-2000 and post-2010 Census redistricting. But the benefit they get over their popular vote share is on par with the benefit the Democrats saw in the '90's[1].
And the benefit isn't that great. It's good for maybe 8 seats[2], far short of the 30 seats Democrats would need to swing to regain the majority.
The problem for Democrats in the House is that their districts are too natural: It makes sense to put urban voters with similar needs and issues into Congressional districts with each other, rather than diluting their influence with very different suburban areas. The Voting Rights Act even made concentrating minority votes to create majority-minority districts mandatory in some areas. But the result is winning Chicago wards 95-5 while losing out in the 'burbs 55-45. To have a chance at consistently winning the House, Democrats need to draw districts that look an awful lot like the 5-0 image in that picture. Practically and politically, that's a non-starter. That's why ITT and elsewhere you see calls for multicandidate districts, proportional statewide representation, etc. It's not to "fix" gerrymandering, it's to fix the "problem" of concentrated Democratic votes.
Furhtermore, the unit is "precinct", not "voter", so the starting input is already subject to gerrymandering.
And the chart ignores the reality that districting serves an important purpose: to give minorities (however defined) a non-zero voice in the representative body.
I thought that "make sure the black people have a vote" thing was a pretty clever way to disenfranchise them. One vote has very little power and you have sequestered most of the constituents behind that one vote, so the people with actual power (the majority of the other representatives) don't have to worry about them.
I am amazed that people still consider it a good thing. Or that they ever considered it a good thing.
This is a great way to teach gerrymandering. It also illustrates the problem with 'Party X is evil, Party Y is not.'
Political parties (stripping away all else) are groups of people who identify with one another. Take that one step further, and they're groups of people that identify with one another and believe their group is the best one to represent the whole.
Or, if you are less idealistic, they want to win (I subscribe to the idea that they want to win because they think their way is the best way and they like the power).
Once you believe those few things, it's easy to understand why politicians aren't evil, they're just vested in their group; in the same way you'd be vested in your group of friends vs. some random sampling of people you met on the street.
Does this make our current set of political problems insurmountable? No; we just have to mold the system so that no one party can have absolute control even if they control the central government. Maybe by delegating a small set of powers to the central government and keeping most governing done at the local level. Maybe we could call it a constitutional republic?
One slight correction to your "less idealistic view": It's not just (or at all) that one party believes they are the best to represent the whole, it's that they believe the other(s) are HARMFUL.
Ergo, disempowering that other voice is in everyones best interests.
While people can often do "evil" things (manipulative, etc), they usually do them for "good" reasons, at least according to their internal rationalizations. [citation needed :) ]
maybe we should just set up states. half blue, half red. each get to do what they want, and everyone blue or red moves to blue or red state. We come back in 50 years, and see what's up. The blue states are spending gobs on tuition and everyone is still stupid, and the red states, I don't know someone help. I'm colorblind
The US _has_ been mostly self-sorting for decades now. It's one of the reasons politics is so polarized right now and Congress is incapable of governing without a looming emergency.
It's never as easy as just looking at the outcomes. As with any type of sociology, it's not possible to force large sets of people to do identical things for valid control+experimental groups.
Methods of taxation, tax rates, size of state government, expectations of government services, natural resources, macroeconomic conditions, talent of the population, and natural economic benefits all distinguish different states. There's really no effective way to control for the large variety of conditions across many states.
Other ways:
Limit the proportion of seats a party can contest to 50% so no party can control the government and will depend on other parties. Force each party to setup a voting platform so citizens in the district can vote bindingly on individual bills. The district will have two votes, one is the representative and the other is proportional vote depending on how many citizens in that district voting for that specific bill. (Can be partial vote e.g 63%)
I'd heard the term before but never looked into it – it was useful to have something to prompt me (partially because this article doesn't even mention what it is). It's when the government manipulates electorates to increase their chances of being re-elected. As someone in the UK this is something I've wondered about a lot over the last year.
If you don't follow UK politics, we have a government that was elected with 51% of the seats on 36.9% of the votes.
I found this article which explains some of the mechanisms used to manipulate the outcome of these elections.
UK election outcomes have nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything to do with being a multi-party democracy using a FPTP electoral system, which tends to boost the representation of leading parties at the expense of smaller parties. Indeed, you'd actually need gerrymandering for such a system to have any hope of returning seats broadly in proportion to vote share.
(the conspiracy theory about disenfranchisement advanced by the blog article is orthogonal to the tendency of the FPTP electoral system to distort shares of actual votes. It's also a little difficult to take seriously an argument which suggests that a short-lived poll tax abolished in 1991 would be a significant factor in the 2015 election. Especially when the party that enacted it spent 13 of the intervening years out of power, with the electoral system and distribution of voters heavily favouring their rivals at the time. The article is equally ludicrous in suggesting Labour would be disadvantaged by a fraction of voters in strongly Labour-supporting boroughs being under financial pressure to relocate)
You don't have to use FPTP to distort: There's been plenty of debate in Spain, which uses the D'Hondt method. There have always been more than two healthy parties, but ultimately only two get major representation, just like in an FPTP system. And unless we are applying the system to the entire country (which is not how it works), there's still a boost to regional parties.
A decade ago we saw two parties with pretty much the same number of votes, one of Catalonian nationalists, and a typical european leftist party. But the nationalists all got their votes in the same region, gaining very healthy representation overall, while the other party got less than a 5th of the seats, because all their voters do not live in the same place.
What we have to face is that ultimately, the way people are represented is an aesthetic, values-based choice. This doesn't mean that there isn't such thing as partisan gerrymandering (because there is), but that even if we let a computer decide representation, there's still more than one algorithm that is unaware of party affiliation, and each will favor different ideologies in different situations.
The moment I finished my comment I actually thought to myself - "hmmm, FPTP is the problem here" (which I was saying even well before the last election).
The gerrymandering is interesting though, and there's another video link in this thread that explains how you can use it to try to fix this issue (as you said).
> UK election outcomes have nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything to do with
> being a multi-party democracy using a FPTP electoral system, which tends to boost
> the representation of leading parties at the expense of smaller parties.
More precisely, FPTP tends to boost the representation of leading national _and local_ parties (the latter being best exemplified by the SNP) at the expense of smaller national parties. Small local parties are usually toast anyway even in proportional systems due to thresholds.
During the 2015 elections the system worked exactly as designed, by favoring parties that are strong in one or more nations of the UK at the expense of parties that are a bit meh in all of them.
FPTP is heavily biased though - you end up in a situation where there's little point voting the way you want, because it won't be effective.
Take the Greens, 3.8% of the vote with 0.15% of the final representation. And I bet that 3.8% would actually have been higher if people had felt like they wouldn't be throwing away their vote.
I understand your sentiment, but I think "bit meh" is maybe a little uncharitable. Half of my voting life has been in NZ (mixed member proportional) and the other half in the UK (FPTP) – so I have a reasonable understanding of the drawbacks of the systems.
The better example would have been UKIP 12.7% of the total votes, and 0.2%(1) of the total MPs, compared to SNP 4.7% of the total votes and 8.6%(56) of the total MPs.
It's just a shame that the Lib Dems wasted the chance for a more proportional voting system on a referendum for an unliked semi-proportional system (AV) that would have favoured them.
"you end up in a situation where there's little point voting the way you want, because it won't be effective."
How much of that situation is due precisely to that mindset?
It seems like circular logic to me.
10 Why not vote for the guy you want to win?
20 Because he won't get enough votes
30 Why won't he get enough votes?
40 Because not enough people will vote for him.
50 So why don't more people vote for him?
60 goto 20
FPTP is arguably broken, but people engaging in "tactical voting" isn't helping matters. You're supposed to vote for who you want to win, period.
Voting for "who you want to win, period" doesn't help in FPTP. Then you just get vote splitting - the majority of the population would prefer either of parties A and B to party C, but they have different favourites, so A and B each get 30% of the vote, while C gets 40%. So the party most of the population hates wins.
Tactical voting is IMO preferable to this outcome.
Really? I'm in an area where one of the seats was hotly contested. I, like thousands of others swapped votes on a website where we pledged to vote on behalf of other people.
My local candidate narrowly won (the one I voted for, not the one I chose) – had a number of us not swapped votes, maybe that wouldn't have happened. For me that's a bit of a win of tactical voting - at least people were able to have some influence.
Another thing to note is that party voting and candidate voting are all rolled together. I actually wanted my local guy to win, but I didn't want to vote for him because I wanted to vote for a different party.
Out of curiosity - usually party candidates deeply reflect their party platform. Under what circumstances would you want to vote for a party but not their representative candidate?
The leadership of the Greens are/were most closely aligned with my values – certainly at the time when the Blairites were still heading up the Labour party. So I wanted to vote Green as the party.
My local Labour representative, however, is a pretty good person to have looking out for the area. He was born and raised in the estates opposite my house - to a working class immigrant family, no less. In his time representing the area he's done a lot of good and he has a lot of experience. For me, that's all good - but his party values of continued austerity and benefit cuts don't sit well with me.
your conundrum is that you have a distinctly minority opinion, but you would like to influence the outcome "more than your share"? so, instead of advocating unequal income distribution, you favor unequal outcome?
Erm, no, not in the slightest – well, I think not in the slightest – I'm going to be totally honest, I don't really understand all of your comment.
But I don't want to influence the outcome "more than my share". I'd like everyone to have an equal share of influence. More than anything I'd like the political process to be one that everyone is engaged in and ultimately moves the country in a direction that is good for everyone.
Beyond strategic reasons mentioned elsewhere, the main ones are (a) local candidate of desired party is unqualified/unpopular/etc and (b) local candidate of less desired party is more qualified/more popular/etc. (Seeing as "popularity" is, for better or worse, a pretty important quality in a political candidate; this includes "I went to the same high school as candidate X, they seem like a good person.")
This happens easily in more-than-two party systems like Canada or the U.K. Since each party overlaps with another a bit on certain issues, and many voters only seem to feel strongly about a few issues, those voters are ideologically okay with more than one party. Even if they have a "favourite" party, they will consider the candidates of those other parties as well.
It could also have the effect of making the main parties vulnerable to an "insurgency" from activist elements through the leadership elections and candidate selection.
We already have systems like Condorcet voting that make tactical voting unnecessary. As usual, the hard part is getting them implemented; I'm not optimistic.
If you want a real 'travesty' why are you focusing on The Greens rather than UKIP? UKIP got 3.5 times the votes that the Greens got, but got just as many seats as the Greens did. And the same argument about the votes likely being even higher if people weren't afraid of throwing their vote away could also be made.
Yet you don't hear too many people complaining about that outcome.
Yup. I think that's wrong too. I'm no fan of UKIP, but with so little influence after being the preferred party of 12.7% of the voters something surely isn't right.
It's also worth remembering that FPTP is designed to encourage strong single party governments over large multi party coalitions.
Whether you think that is a reasonable goal is a case of personal perspective imo. I dislike the position that implies FPTP is a flat out inferior system rather than one which has some advantages and some disadvantages (as do all other systems).
Weak coalition governments like Italy has had in much of recent history are what you can end up with with purely proportional voting, and they have some serious problems of their own.
I think FPTP with a STV type of system is nice - you can still vote for who you want to, without having to vote tactically, but there's still going to be a stronger result.
I've seem a number of comments about that 36.9% - I had a quick look and it is actually higher than the Labour win in 2005 (35.2%) which had a lower turnout as well.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is a manufactured issue used by people who refuse to accept election results they don't like, and they use to it delegitimize the outcome.
You'll find that the same people who go on about it are the same people who think George W Bush stole the 2000 election.
My experience is that people go on about it all across the spectrum, including lots of people who not only don't think George W. Bush did steal the 2000 election, but who would have thought it was a good and justified thing if he had.
Gerrymandering is a real issue and a real thing that really effects election results, and, simultaneously, an effective distraction from the more serious problem of representation caused by FPTP in single-member districts. So, not only is it a popular target of the disaffected, its something the disaffected are redirected to vent their anger at by both sides of the partisan duopoly in different times and places, because while it is a real thing, none of the methods used to attack it fundamentally change the structures reinforcing the partisan duopoly, and in any given condition certain of the methods for fighting it will reinforce the position of one side or the other of that duopoly against the other within the basic duopoly-reinforcing structure.
To anyone interested in the subject, I'd strongly recommend playing the Redistricting Game [0] which takes you through many of the processes outlined in the article
In the UK under FPTP atleast, I can imagine there is also an effect or reverse gerrymandering or similar.
When it comes round to elections, generally the result of the majority of seats is already known, so they're classified by parties into stronghold (ours), stronghold (theirs), marginal.
When your located within a Labour stronghold, your unlikely to see as much pro-Conservative media, as they are better off spending their time campaigning in marginals and defending their reputations in existing strongholds.
Surely, this effect simply compounds strongholds, making them even harder to change hands overtime, without a significant event to cause the public opinion to shift significantly (e.g. the Scottish independence referendum).
The only way to fix such a problem, would be to randomise the boundaries each election, but this would cause various extra complexities.
This leads to a situation whereby elected representatives are assigned local constituencies, rather than having any particular link. Or atleast that's the argument which is always returned when people suggest a full PR system.
Personally I think larger multi-member constituencies under STV provide the best compromise.
Alternatively, by switching to popular vote, this problem, and many other problems could be avoided entirely. Above all things, is it fair that a voter in Massachusetts has exactly zero (and I mean exactly zero, not their fair 1/3.2e8 share) say over the election, while a voter in Ohio carries a lot of weight?
There's a very good reason why we don't use the popular vote for Presidential elections.
It's precisely because without the electoral college, small states would receive zero attention on national politics.
Why would anyone spend time courting votes anywhere north of New York when there's a much bigger payoff to be had working the rest of the eastern seaboard and the west coast?
To use your examples of Massachusetts and Ohio, why waste time on a campaign stop in Boston when you can hit Columbus? Columbus has a much larger population and one can also hit Detroit and Indianapolis in the same day to maximize their face time with the public.
Going to a popular vote will have consequences that people really need to thing about.
Your response only makes sense if people identify on a state level.
Do voters in Ithaca, NY feel like they got attention when candidates visit New York City? How about Spokane, WA vs Seattle, WA?
When the US could tightly tie state views to voters, the electoral college MIGHT have made some sense, but now the issues are regional at best (coal belt, bible belt, etc), and not based on states. Now we're allowing a minority of the country to disproportionally influence elections (and legislation via the Senate).
To use your counterexample - Why stop in Boston indeed if you can hit Columbus? What difference does that make? I'm less worried about candidates _visiting_ places (because what good does that do?) and more about them being accountable to voters.
You are right about the consequences, but there are consequences to the system now.
> To use your examples of Massachusetts and Ohio, why waste time on a campaign stop in Boston when you can hit Columbus? Columbus has a much larger population and one can also hit Detroit and Indianapolis in the same day to maximize their face time with the public.
As opposed to the current system, where...why waste time on a campaign stop in Boston when you can hit Columbus? Ohio is a swing state and MA has voted Democratic for decades.
The point of a democracy is to represent actual human beings, not shapes on a map.
> The point of a Republic is to temper the temporary fashions in political thinking with adherence to inviolable principles.
That's arguably the point of a constitutional representative democracy as composed to an unlimited-powers direct democracy; as both of those are within the scope of systems to which the label "Republic" applies (as are many others), its a pretty odd notion to consider it the point of "a Republic" in any general sense, though it might be the point of the particular design of a particular republic.
No, the point of a republic is to abolish the monarchy. That's literally all the word means, in practice. It has nothing to do with granting more political power to people in Wyoming or Rhode Island than people in New York.
There are certain fundamental principles that this country was founded on, but some things were just 18th century political concessions.
This logic confounds me. Is there some inherent reason to disproportionately focus our national choices on the areas of the country with the fewest people (rural areas)?
I've lived in both the most rural and urban parts of the US, and it's clear that the current system massively discounts the will of people in urban areas in this stated endeavor of providing some kind of rural / urban "balance".
Depending on what you consider urban, the US is roughly split 80% urban, 20% rural.
To me, it seems unlikely that a ground effort in rural America would be completely neglected in a proportional system. If a party did neglect the ~20% of rural voters, it would seem to put itself at a disadvantage to other parties, especially given the lower relative cost of rural media markets.
We see the same problem with the Senate, where populous states such as Texas and California stand at a remarkable disadvantage to Montana and Wyoming in terms of representation. The voice of a constituent in Wyoming is 66 times that of one in California.
If you look at the United States as a collection of State governments, it makes perfect sense. I'm surprised you are confounded by that logic.
It was actually the most controversial issue during the Constitutional Convention (See "The Great Compromise"). And read up on the Federalist vs. Anti-Federalist debates.
One of the main points is to not give all federal power to the top 9-10 states. Otherwise you end up with the situation where a few large cities are deciding things at the national level and there is no representation for rural areas.
As an extremely over-simplified example, imagine urban voters voting to outlaw tractors because "Tractors emit huge amounts pollution and nobody I know even uses a tractor! Those dirty farmers that I hear use them are dirtying up our air!"
I don't see the composition of the Senate as a problem. I see it as balance. More populous states get greater representation in the House. The Senate serves to prevent more populous states from steamrolling less populous states.
Since the passage of the 17th amendment, Senators don't represent states, they represent people. And some of those people have vastly disproportionate representation by Senators.
I'm well aware of the reason it was created that way. I just don't think it makes sense in an era where 3/4 of the states are just arbitrarily chosen chunks of land rather than formerly sovereign entities.
In my view, talking about how much representation a state deserves doesn't even make sense. People should decide elections, not some semi-arbitrary geographical boundaries. In the house, people are fairly represented. In the senate, people in smaller states are unfairly over-represented.
It's a feature like an "install our app" popup on every random mobile site is a feature. Someone thought it was a good idea and did it intentionally, but I think it's awful and was done for bad reasons.
Moreso than in the Senate, but beyond that, not actually fairly by most reasonable standards. Monatana's Congressional district has a little under a million people, each of Rhode Islands two districts has a little over a half-million. So the division into states creates an almost 2:1 advantage in representation for Rhode Islanders compared to Montanans in the House.
Now, that's not as lopsided as the 66:1 advantage Wyomingans have over Californians when it comes to representation in the Senate, but its not exactly equal representation, either.
That might have been the rationale when it was originally introduced, but for the most part it has the opposite effect now, apart from a few very select "swing" states. Convince ~50k voters in Florida to switch allegiance and you win the state, and probably win the electoral college. Convince ~150k voters in Arkansas - a large proportion of that state's electorate - to switch allegiance and (i)it wouldn't affect who wins the state and (ii)it probably wouldn't affect who becomes President even if it turned blue.
Just because it means that local concerns in a couple of large states aren't going to be much of a factor in the presidency (Texas is more likely to freeze over than vote Democrat in the next election) doesn't mean that very many people in smaller states benefit from the electoral system.
There's the Senate to ensure that smaller states get their say in national politics.
Gerrymandering of Congressional districts could only affect the Presidential election results in two small states, Nebraska and Maine.
Eliminating the Electoral College and moving to a nationwide popular vote for President would have essentially no effect on the motivation to gerrymander.
On the other hand, if all 50 states allowed each Congressional district to choose its own elector (and presumably elected the other two statewide), it would represent a massive shift in favor of the GOP, and gerrymandering would have very little to do with it. Instead, the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas would be decisive.
Gerrymandering has more to do with local elections than presidential -- unless you're suggesting that the outlines of the states are 200 year old conspiracies by and against parties that didn't even exist yet.
There's a referendum of public opinion after every election. Gore won his presidential election by about half a percent. We talked about it, but interest fizzled out.
If, in the future, that margin grows to a number that people care about, we can change the rules. The NPVIC* is probably the most direct way for that to happen.
Diagrams, information, graphs and abstract graphical representation of said information in various states, intellectually stimulating. Seems about right.
The guidelines do say most things about politics don't belong, but I feel like this would not fall into that. Is that your concern? I think the guidelines are broad enough that the opposite question needs to be asked.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Ho...