Gerrymandering and a cure for it – the shortest splitline algorithm

Isn&#x27;t gerrymandering a much more complex problem than that makes it out to be? I&#x27;ve always thought the problem was that it&#x27;s actually difficult to even come up with a definition of what fair is. For instance, do you want each district to be as representative of the population as possible? Or do you want the house of representatives to be as representative of the population as possible? I suspect that you can&#x27;t have both. For instance, if you have a state that is 60&#x2F;40, then do you want each district to be 60&#x2F;40? Or if it has ten representatives&#x2F;districts, do you want 6 reps of one party and 4 of the other? What is districting even supposed to aim for? I don&#x27;t think there is one reasonable answer to this question, which is why I think any attempt to answer this question for all states is doomed to fail.<p>The only way I can think of to get both is to increase the number of representatives. The House of Representatives was originally supposed to scale with the size of the population, and they eventually put a stop to that. If they had continued, then we&#x27;d have a house with a makeup that matches national polling much more closely than it does now, and gerrymandering wouldn&#x27;t be as much of a problem. Isn&#x27;t it true that as you add more representatives, gerrymandering distortions lessen?

The goal isn&#x27;t pretty lines.<p>The goal is maximal competitiveness. Which boosts voter participation. Which gives legitimacy to the results.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;California_Citizens_Redistricting_Commission" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;California_Citizens_Redistrict...</a><p><i>&quot;While the long-term results will bear out over time, independent studies by the Public Policy Institute of California, the National Journal, and Ballotpedia have shown that California now has some of the most competitive districts in the nation, creating opportunities for new elected officials.[12][13][14]&quot;</i>

Gerrymandering gets attention because it is malicious misrepresentation, but unintentional misrepresentation is just as bad. Voting is a flawed system that will always give some voters more voice than others.<p>- The people who voted for the loser will not be represented (one of the reasons minorities are underrepresented).<p>- The need of local representation is illusory. Make a list of all the political issues you care about. How many of them are local?<p>- The effect of a bi-cameral legislature means that in the Senate, voters in Wyoming have over 60x the voting power of voters in California.<p>- Voting itself is irrational under a cost&#x2F;benefit analysis. So by definition, the least rational citizens are picking candidates.<p>- Name recognition is huge for elections, meaning money will always effect elections.<p>- Candidates suffer self-selection bias (as well as others). To run, you need to be good at public speaking (fear of public speaking is one of the most common fear in America), look a certain way (no tattoos or piercings allowed), and have a lust for power.<p>Representation is a math problem. The only solution is random sampling. Replace Congress with 1 house made up of 1,000 randomly sampled citizens and we will have true representation.

This is an elegant solution with a lot of good properties: Equal population balancing, politically unbiased, reasonably understandable by the layman, typically geographically compact districts. But where&#x27;s the discussion of the desirable and undesirable properties in a districting algorithm and how this algorithm achieves or doesn&#x27;t achieve these properties?<p>specialist already mentioned maximal competetiveness, ROFISH mentioned clustering due to natural features. Is regional or ethnic representation important, or is it an undesirable bias? How about travel distance (either for voters or campaigners)? I&#x27;m sure you guys can think of others you&#x27;d like to see or to avoid. Feel free to suggest some, I&#x27;m curious.<p>There is a little more information at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rangevoting.org&#x2F;SplitLR.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rangevoting.org&#x2F;SplitLR.html</a> but did I miss the real weighing of the tradeoffs and advocacy for this particular method above all others?<p>Edit: Found a discussion of the theoretical issues at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rangevoting.org&#x2F;TheorDistrict.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rangevoting.org&#x2F;TheorDistrict.html</a> which touches on some, but not all of the points raised.

This is no more a cure for gerrymandering than Condorcet voting is a cure for the various ills of the two-party system. Until you have a plan to implement this algorithm in the current political system, you&#x27;re just solving sudokus and crosswords.

The problem with gerrymandering isn&#x27;t that people aren&#x27;t capable of drawing simple lines to split states into districts.

Here&#x27;s a better algorithmic non-gerrymandered districting, solving for compactness: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bdistricting.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bdistricting.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;</a>

Gerrymandering is an intentional act carried out by politicians, not one of happenstance. It&#x27;s not something that can be cured with algorithms.

The Redistricting Game[1] is an interesting approach to teaching about how gerrymandering works.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redistrictinggame.org&#x2F;game&#x2F;launchgame.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redistrictinggame.org&#x2F;game&#x2F;launchgame.php</a>

I&#x27;m concerned with the stability of the district borders. Because of the way this algorithm seems to like to slice through cities, it seems like minor changes in neighborhood density of a city is likely to significantly change the angle of the bisecting line, thus shifting large areas of the outlying region from one district to another.<p>This is bad for two reasons.<p>First, it seems a big weakness of democracy is voter ignorance. Throwing people repeatedly from one district to another, so they don&#x27;t have time to learn the issues relevant to their district and the record of their representatives, will exacerbate the problem.<p>Second, the system can be gamed. It looks to me like approving or denying the construction of a large apartment complex near the center of a city can be used as a tool to push lines one direction or another. So approving that big apartment building in the city will increase population in that region, tending to tighten the angle made around it, thus freeing some voters from that district and pushing them into a neighboring one. Indeed, since the algorithm is recursive, this could have big follow-on effects subsequent iterations.

One problem with this: it makes sense that district lines could be along natural (rivers, lakes, mountains) or political (towns, county) lines. Trusting a simple line algorithm may bisect a town down the middle.

A while back, I was friends with someone who was a forensic accountant and former state senator. She talked about gerrymandering quite a bit. She&#x27;d say &quot;you don&#x27;t choose your representatives, they choose you.&quot;<p>She said both parties cooperated in drawing safe seats for everybody, and claimed that most of the people in our state congress were corrupt. Anyone who didn&#x27;t play along with the graft would find their district redrawn out from under them, if the timing made that possible.<p>This actually happened to another friend who was a former state house member. The two of them were instrumental in revealing the corrupt activities of state House Speaker Jim Black, who ended up serving time in prison.

I think this is fascinating even if it will never happen. It&#x27;s important to keep in mind the nominal and actual result of human drawn district boundaries (&quot;gerrymandering&quot; is a pejorative).<p>In theory, human drawn district boundaries can create districts which are more homogenous so that, for example, a state with a few representatives and a few defined geographic or political divisions can divide things up in a way that makes sense. For example, it would seem odd for Las Vegas to be split into multiple districts in vast barren Nevada (it isn&#x27;t -- LV is the smallest district).<p>What happens in practice is: &quot;Contrary to one popular misconception about the practice, the point of gerrymandering isn&#x27;t to draw yourself a collection of overwhelmingly safe seats. Rather, it&#x27;s to give your opponents a small number of safe seats, while drawing yourself a larger number of seats that are not quite as safe, but that you can expect to win comfortably.&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;wonkblog&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;15&#x2F;americas-most-gerrymandered-congressional-districts&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;wonkblog&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;15&#x2F;am...</a>

Splitline doesnt honor community or geographic boundaries. I&#x27;d suggest a modification that honors zipcode boundaries. The USPS has figured out basic units already.

It is pretty... but vastly oversimplifies the problem. If we are ever going to get something for real it needs to take into account real problems. Talking about things like actual operation of elections, not producing high numbers of different ballots because of splitting of districts.<p>For something to really work it is going to need to take into account things like existing political, and probably some physical, boundaries.

I&#x27;d love to get rid of gerrymandering. I live in a massively gerrymandered district where the representative can very safely ignore the area where I live.<p>This algorithm appears to have some interesting results though. Check out Maryland: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rangevoting.org&#x2F;Splitline2009&#x2F;md.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rangevoting.org&#x2F;Splitline2009&#x2F;md.png</a>

That seems to be a very oversimple approach. Cities are the most obvious problem. You kind of want a population center to have a single congressmen representing it. Mathematically, you want districts to be fairly compact. There have a been several Operations Research papers that try to do things in a more practical way.<p>Also, a greedy approach (split in half, repeat) seems weird to me.

Technology can be used to help with this problem. Take a look at the maps from CommonCensus:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;commoncensus.org&#x2F;maps.php#local_maps" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;commoncensus.org&#x2F;maps.php#local_maps</a><p>First people &quot;vote&quot; for the boundaries of their neighborhood and then congressional districts are created using these neighborhoods as atomic.

The author of this site seems to think that in the ideal world, districts would be decided up with clear straight lines.<p>This is not the case. Districts should represent distinct groups of people. Ideally, with well drawn districts, political representation will be accurate to the popular vote.<p>I&#x27;d recommend you all read the following article if you haven&#x27;t yet.<p>I think if you wanted to solve districts algorithmically, you would need a neural network.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;wonkblog&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;01&#x2F;this-is-the-best-explanation-of-gerrymandering-you-will-ever-see&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;wonkblog&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;01&#x2F;th...</a>

Similar to this other algo:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bdistricting.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bdistricting.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;</a>

Although I don&#x27;t necessarily disagree with this concept, I am not sure it is well refined. I noticed, looking at a certain city, that even with this shortest splitline the city was still rather split by more or less ethnically demographic lines.

Another more obvious solution is to get rid of congressional districts and then apportion the seats down the list of highest vote getters to lowest vote getters until there are no more seats (across the entire state).

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A</a><p>this explains it quite well.

Gerrymandering has more to do with Simpson&#x27;s paradox. Look it up :)

This describes it quite well.

Doesn&#x27;t gerrymandering mostly carve out a lot of districts for black congressmen who otherwise wouldn&#x27;t have districts? I think that&#x27;s kinda what it boils down to in America. There are conservative areas adjacent to and mixed with majority black areas and they want different representation.

gerrymandering is good--for the electorate. why?<p>Because gerrymandering increases homogeneity. A gerrymandered district is more homogeneous--the voters are more alike than they were before. In general.<p>Homogeneity in general increases unity. A more homogeneous district means the voters in general share more common interests. If the voters share more common interests then it is easier for them to elect and hold accountable a politician who can represent their common interests.<p>Of course if you want the corporations to have more control over the government, and you want the people to have less control, then gerrymandering is indeed bad.

gerry mandering is a symptom of democracy not the problem.<p>democracy is the problem, or rather it is a form of self governance which presents many dillemas.<p>historically , we know the bigger and more mature a democracy gets , the more it ages into socially defunct patterns of corruption , lowest common denominator, the decay of ethics, and embedded social passivity.<p>the solution to &#x27;gerrymandering&#x27; is the end of our current democratic system, not some 2 bit claim that an algorithm is a solution to a symptom of a bigger problem .