The upcoming fight over redistributing is likely to decide our country for the next ten years.<p>On one hand, republicans have waged a legal campaign against the voting rights act, drafted various pieces of legislation aimed at disenfranchising minorities and college students, and chosen for their attorney general a prosecutor who viewed mintority voter registration a felonious offense. This isn't mentioning a president who has not wavered from the view that the 3 million vote margin he lost the popular vote by is the byproduct of fraud.<p>On the other hand, you have a former president and possibly the most popular/powerful politician in America signal this will be his primary focus, an opposition party looking to expand use of the efficiency gap metric as a tool for enforcing fairness, and possibly a justice system willing to step embrace these concepts (the wisc. decision). Not to mention a motivated and very angry base.
Can I just point out that <i>every</i> time a gerrymandering article is posted to hacker news, the thread is quickly overwhelmed by people professing various forms of proportional representation?<p>This is striking me as becoming close to Wolfram Derangement Syndrome, and I think it's bad for the quality of discourse on this subject.<p>Just to sketch out the brief reasons why, let's first accept that the gerrymandering conversation is about the United States. As such, we have to accept the reality of the United States Constitution. Finally, most arguments about gerrymandering are focused more on <i>federal</i> districts, as in the districts that make up the House of Representatives.<p>Given all that, talking about proportional representation is a complete waste of time, and it gets in the way of having constructive conversation about this subject. It is constitutionally <i>impossible</i> to disband the House of Representatives and switch to proportional representation. It will not happen. Arguments about how it should happen are completely irrelevant to the gerrymandering subject, and counterproductive. For people that know this, arguments about proportional representation are not all that different than hijacking threads and trolling - the only difference being the high likelihood that people are not educated enough civically to understand that proportional representation is impossible on the Federal level.<p>Every time I see a thread here I really do look forward to reading thoughts that are actually about gerrymandering and solving gerrymandering - I would like to see more focus on those subjects rather than the completely unrelated subject of proportional representation.<p>One caveat - many people don't realize this, but some state constitutions DO theoretically allow proportional representation for STATE governments. That's worth exploring.
I do find the focus on compactness and contiguousness kind of strange. There was a recent image[1] going around that describes how gerrymandering works, and what struck me is that having three completely blue districts and two completely red districts is considered "most fair", in that every voter in the district feels completely represented.<p>In reality, voters are more scrambled than that - so if you try to retain that "most fair" sense, then you are by definition going to have extremely non-compact, non-contiguous districts.<p>You can get back to more compactness by making some voters "unrepresented" (meaning, a representative other than the one they voted for). As long as that balances out between parties, then you're okay (which is what the "efficiency gap" is all about).<p>But by itself non-compactness is not a guarantee that the district is unfair. It's really just an indication, that <i>so far</i>, it probably means that the district drawers were up to shenanigans. It's just not <i>necessarily</i> so. You may <i>want</i> to get more creative with district shapes to help more voters feel represented.<p>By the way, I should point out again that there are plenty of other weird tradeoffs like this. For instance, Schwarzenegger was recently complaining about "non-competitive" districts, while others regularly complain that the Federal house districts are not very representative of the voting population as a whole. These two aims are actually in tension with one another! The "most fair" scenario above is about as non-competitive as you can get.<p>[1] <a href="http://i.imgur.com/jK8VFZx.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/jK8VFZx.jpg</a>
<i>[...] a need for expert witnesses who understand the mathematical concepts applicable to gerrymandering. To meet that need, she’s spearheaded the creation of a five-day summer program at Tufts that aims to train mathematicians to do just that</i><p><i>[...] over 900 people have indicated their interest by signing up for a mailing list</i><p><a href="http://tufts.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7aa8ab22ea62&id=a979bdf71d" rel="nofollow">http://tufts.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7...</a>
This isn't really a new thing. From a professor at the University of Florida (@ElectProject) who specializes in this sort of thing:<p><pre><code> "Math prof claims she's invented new form of compactness, which Mexico has used for decades
& programmed into our DistrictBuilder software"
</code></pre>
<a href="https://twitter.com/ElectProject/status/834570289728147457" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ElectProject/status/834570289728147457</a>
There have been a number of attempts to automatically do redistricting using Operations Research techniques. Here's one such slide deck, using integer programming.<p><a href="http://www.illc.uva.nl/COST-IC1205/documents/Caen-2014-Slides/Scozarri.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.illc.uva.nl/COST-IC1205/documents/Caen-2014-Slide...</a>
I've been having the amusing thought lately that one possible solution is perhaps making the system a bit more chaotic. Maybe with the safety of levels through tricameralism or maybe even tetracameralism.<p>So.. in the house of rep districts you allow for popular vote to recall reps and also to hold popular referendum in said districts on whether to split them. If people are upset enough with their representation and can get enough to vote to spit the district then the district is split. This would intensify the situation some however you enable merging so when the popular will exists to merge then there is the chance as well.<p>A lower level would exist under the house of representatives in which instead of people in the district voting for that lower rep, people from a random generated district that votes differently would have the ability to vote someone in. Essentially San Fransisco would be able to vote for a lower rep in some random super conservative district and vice versa. The entire point of the lower rep is to essentially troll the house of rep. We'd give them powers such as being able to call for a town hall meeting twice a year, a direct debate twice a year, petitions without the usual required permits, an an ability to freedom of information act everything the house rep does.<p>The upper end of the tetracameral system would be two senators appointed by the state legislature prior to the 17th amendment restoring some state power. The mid level would be directly elected senators, however states would gain a few more based on population.<p>Nonetheless, the districts portion is what I wanted to cover but felt I'd share most of the idea so there would be more background around the concept. The ideal would be both on the state level and federal level, the lower houses would be open to recall and open to popular vote for district splitting or merging. With a lower house rep voted on by outside parties to try to curtail silo thinking. While the upper chamber returns state interests back to the federal government; some populist sentiment I personally feel needs to be curtailed and think our biggest constitutional mistake was that of the 17th amendment.<p>It'll never happen of course. But it's fun to think about.
<i>Bouncing things off of diverse audiences has taught me things I didn’t already know about how rhetorically accessible different ideas are. This is well-known to educators: Once you achieve a certain level of expertise, it can be hard to find the difficult spots and the reasoning anymore because they’re so familiar to you.</i><p>A lot of the Dunning-Kruger problem in the Programming field is due to this. I think that Programming has a number of problems with training and making information accessible to its practitioners. Furthermore, I think many of these problems have tribal and sub-cultural elements to them. (Along language community lines, not ethnic ones.)
I've said before that after long thought I think the right way to deal with gerrymandering is to increase the number of districts (and therefor make them smaller). The primary problem is how would we fit all those extra people on the Hill? Also that I imagine there would be some muathmateically based demographic issues due to the center of the country getting more seats than the coasts which could be offset in a few different ways.<p>The size of my district is larger than most states! It was also gerrymandered in 2003 by the R's seeking to regain territory from D's who had a suprising grip in Texas up until the late 90's.
This computer programmer solved gerrymandering in his spare time<p>By Christopher Ingraham June 3, 2014<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/03/this-computer-programmer-solved-gerrymandering-in-his-spare-time/?utm_term=.615f246b5f38" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/03/this-...</a>
I recently saw an illuminating video about how Robert Mercer, a billionaire quantitative wall st. trader and computer scientist, not only backed Trump with $15 million, but madeover his whole team. Mercer's analytics companies, which make him money faster than Warren Buffet, were set to the task of winning the election.<p>Not to mention Peter Thiel.<p>Now, we don't know how they did it, but I can only imagine that with deep learning, etc, this is only going to get worse.<p>Shameless plug for the video. I doubt it'll get traction on HN, but it was 100% a wakeup call for me.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719646" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719646</a><p>Now I recognize it for what it is. Its a techno-hyper-capitalist power grab.
What is wrong with gerrymandering?<p>It is a political solution to political problem. It pushes decisions locally (to the "laboratories of democracy"). It is responsive to "We The People" but with a built in delaying mechanism to smooth out changes. It generally leads to competitive (but not toss-up) districts (the goal is to get as many seats as possible so huge margins are wasteful).<p>What's not to like?