Gerrymandering by Computer

jefu writes "In the latest New Yorker there is an excellent article on redistricting and gerrymandering (more permanent URL). It discusses how recent gerrymandering is being done with the aid of computers. It also discusses how redistricting is polarizing voters and is making many seats in the House of Representatives 'safe seats' which effectively gives incumbents a permanent seat. It is not hard to see how this also tends to leave our 'elected' representatives in a position where voter input is less important to them than things like lobbying." Few articles about gerrymandering really get into how ugly and blatant it is.

Hmm

[Evil Adrian]

Would have been nice to define a not-often-used word in the article so we all don't have to dig...

To divide (a geographic area) into voting districts so as to give unfair advantage to one party in elections. (Link [reference.com].)

Give me my karma, baby.

A comprehensive discussion of gerrymandering...

[tcopeland]

...including nice charts and graphs can be found here on FraudFactor [fraudfactor.com].

From the examples given in the FraudFactor article, both sides seem guilty of gerrymandering whenever possible.

Re:Who is Gerry Mander?

[lactose_incarnate]

Word History: "An official statement of the returns of voters for senators give[s] twenty nine friends of peace, and eleven gerrymanders." So reported the May 12, 1813, edition of the Massachusetts Spy. A gerrymander sounds like a strange political beast, which it is, considered from a historical perspective. This beast was named by combining the word salamander, "a small lizardlike amphibian," with the last name of Elbridge Gerry, a former governor of Massachusettsa state noted for its varied, often colorful political fauna. Gerry (whose name, incidentally, was pronounced with a hard g, though gerrymander is now commonly pronounced with a soft g) was immortalized in this word because an election district created by members of his party in 1812 looked like a salamander. According to one version of gerrymander's coining, the shape of the district attracted the eye of the painter Gilbert Stuart, who noticed it on a map in a newspaper editor's office. Stuart decorated the outline of the district with a head, wings, and claws and then said to the editor, "That will do for a salamander!" "Gerrymander!" came the reply. The word is first recorded in April 1812 in reference to the creature or its caricature, but it soon came to mean not only "the action of shaping a district to gain political advantage" but also "any representative elected from such a district by that method." Within the same year gerrymander was also recorded as a verb.

Source: The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright (C) 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Re:Who is Gerry Mander?

[AEton]

Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts from 1810-12, signed a law that blatantly redrew districts to give his party an advantage (think 90% in one district of the opposition, 55% of your own party in the other x districts -- if you work the math out, it's a safe way for the ruling party to increase its representation.) Here's the link and a picture of the "Gerry Mander" editorial cartoon which we still remember: http://www2.uiuc.edu/ro/observer/archive/vol11/iss ue5/gerry.html [uiuc.edu]

Doing this stuff by computer is -scary-. It means that it's no more than an afterthought for a lawmaker to manipulate the rules of the electoral system.

At the same time, even "safe" incumbents have to do case work and at least occasionally vote the way their constituency wants; otherwise, the media will notice, the citizens will notice, and they'll get kicked out of office. We often underestimate the intelligence of the average voter.

Used for Evil...or Good? Depends on Perspective

[cyranoVR]

Ugly and blatant, perhaps. But many minority representatives (both State and Federal) would not have been / would not be elected without redistricting.

All sorts of interesting articles and view points available via Google [google.com].

Here is an interesting page [state.wi.us] with a lot of resources on the subject.

Re:Nothing new

[IntlHarvester]

Generally, recent demographic change has made gerrymandering easier, not harder. There's a lot more income segregation in where people live than there used to be. That makes it easy to slice up suburban districts that include the 'right' kinds of voters.

Also, in some cases the only way you could make a "fair" district is through gerrymandering. I live in a sensibly-shaped district, and my congresswoman generally wins with 90% of the vote.

Re:Independent electoral commission

[CarlDenny]

According the the articale (gasp) it seems Iowa agrees with you, as that's what they're doing. Four of five seats were reasonably competitive last election, so it seems to have worked out.

Hopefully the courts will end up mandating such commissions...and they can really maintain their independence. I think they'll probably stay mostly independent, but it'll take a few more court cases.

Colorado

[wmspringer]

From the article:
>While Texas was shifting its districts, the governing Republicans in Colorado did their own mid-cycle reapportionment, to solidify their hold
>on the one House seat in the state that produced a close election in 2002. (Legal challenges to the new Texas and Colorado districts are
>now pending.)

Background for this: In 2002, there were 4 republican seats, 2 democratic seats, and 1 intensely competetive seat (the republican won by 121 votes) In 2003, in the last 3 days of the session, republicans pushed through a redistricting which would essentially have guaranteed that 5 seats will remain republican until the next redistricting. Challenges were immediately filed on both legal and constitutional grounds; the legal case (in federal court) has been on hold pending the outcome of the constitutional case.

Before the Colorado Supreme Court, the democrats argued that the redistricting was unconstitutional; the republicans argued that not only did they have the right to redistrict, but AG Ken Salazar (the plantiff) didn't have the right to sue the state he works for. The court found 5-2 that the redistricting was unconstitutional and 7-0 that the AG has the duty to challenge laws he feels violate the Constitution.

Because the ruling was based in the Colorado constitution, it may or may not affect rulings in other redistrictings.

Re:Independent electoral commission

[Waffle Iron]

In Canada, as in the UK, the lines are drawn based on population, not politics. Each candidate has 100,000 or thereabouts, people in their riding.

How much more fair do you want?

The number of people per district isn't the issue, it's the composition of each district. For example, even when all districts have exact equal populations, you can rig the process. You adjust the boundaries of the districts so that most of the districts have a mild majority of voters aligned with your party, and the rest have almost 100% opposition voters. If done right, you could end up with most of the seats even if fewer people actually vote for your party.

Example with 4 districts and 20 voters: (xxxoo xxxoo xxxoo ooooo). The party with 45% of the vote gets 75% of the seats.

One symptom of this process is an increasing fractal dimension of the districts (the ratio of district boundary to its area). You get this when a district is drawn with an amoeba-like shape to try to select for neighborhoods with certain pockets of voters.

Ok, Captain Retard, I will explain it then

[Hamster Lover]

First, the commissions are made up of three people:

A judge, chosen by the Chief Justice of each Province or Territory, who acts as chairperson and two civil servants chosen by the Speaker of the House. In practice, many commission members, aside from the chairpersons, have been university professors or non-elected officials of legislative assemblies. N.B. Sitting members of Parliament, the Provincial Legislatures or the Senate are not permitted by law to be members.

Second, the commissions hold hearings that the public is entitled and encouraged to attend. There is a specific Parliamentary committee that forwards complaints and suggestions to the commissions, but the commission is under no obligation to consider them. The commssions are required to draw boundaries based upon population density, mainly, but other factors are considered.

After forty years of an independent commission, a certain amount of trial and error and fine tuning has resulted in a process that is indeed independent and effective. I cannot recall a single instance where boundary disputes were referred to a court for resolution.

Racial Gerrymandering

[toddmr]

An aspect that I haven't seen commented on here is Racial Gerrymandering. Even if you disallow using partisan information, you can achieve the same results if your state has a large percentage of African-American (AA) voters. And in the Southern states where the Voting Rights Act is in effect, there is somewhat of a loose requirement of not diluting AA vote strength. This will, in all instances, cause the creation of a number of majority AA districts, which always will elect a Democrat. And it makes the surrounding districts "bleached" or overwhelmingly white, which tend to elect GOP candidates. Assume that AA voters vote Democrat 90% of the time. And note that isn't a racial stereotype. Any political scientist or political professional will tell you that it's an historical fact for at least 20 years. Knowing that a census block is 90% AA, you can safely assume that the voters will go overwhelmingly Democratic. It is also notable that voters' tend to cluster by partisanship. In the city I live in, GOP voters live overwhelmingly in the suburbs and a few intown neighborhoods with high average home value and average income. White Dems cluster in certain other intown neighborhoods and near the large University in town. AA voters live predominantly on the southside. Without knowing partisan voting behavior, I can still draw GOP and DEM districts in my sleep. FWIW, I work in politics professionally and have been using computers for redistricting for 12 years.

Re:Hmm

[Zeinfeld]

Would have been nice to define a not-often-used word in the article so we all don't have to dig...

The term comes from an election (in Chicago?) where the mayor (Gerry) came up with a set of fixed boundaries, one of which was in the shape of a salamander (lizard). Hence gerymander.

Any experienced pol will tall you that this type of trickery has a much bigger impact on an election than outright fixing of the polls. The way to cheat is by fixing the rules and by keeping opposing voters from the polls. During seggregation that is exactly how they stopped black people voting in Missisippi, any black man who dared to vote was liable to be lynched. The KKK and the police would man roadblocks to keep blacks from the polls and then there were the litteracy tests.

One of the big impacts on the Florida outcome was the state law that prohibits someone who has ever been convicted of a fellony from ever voting. This is another holdover from seggragation, litteracy tests were struck down but not felony disenfranchisement even though the intent (and effect) was largely the same - disproportionately disenfranchise black voters.

Click on my sig and you will see an article by a UK journalist who is one of the few who reported on this aspect of the Florida fix at the time the fix was in.

The answer BTW is not to try to fix the system to make it harder to gerrymander, change the electoral system to Single Transferable Vote and multi-member constituencies. That way you also create a way for the minor parties to be represented. With the increasing corruption of the Republican party Democrats should seriously consider this even if only as a self-interested move.

Regardless, there is a better way to get Tom DeLay and King George out of office. Get so many voters to the polls to vote against them that it does not matter how they try to rig the vote, they fail.

Re:A comprehensive discussion of gerrymandering...

[pizzaman100]

One good way to minimize gerrymandering is to create compact districts [heartland.org]. This is a requirement that districts be roughly uniform in shape (like a hexagon or circle). This doesn't prevent all gerrymandering, but makes it much more difficult. Typically gerrymandered districst are easy to spot, because they come in odd shapes [tucsonweekly.com].

Elegant solution

[fiannaFailMan]

For presidential elections this isn't much use, but for congressional and state assembly elections it would be ideal and would help to negate some of the effects of gerrymanderring.

Single Transferable Voting [wikipedia.org], aka Proportional Representation.

This simulataneously removes the problem of voters voting against their consciences for fear of wasting their vote. In the PR system, no votes are wasted. It has been used in Ireland [aceproject.org] and other European countries for quite some time now, and the constitution is designed to allow for coalition governments. Just about all of the smaller parties have been players in coalition governments at one time or another.

Re:Independent electoral commission

[Jardine]

Canadian voters are a lot less loyal to a particular party. The most recent election I voted in was a local election. In local elections, people don't run as a particular party. They all run as independants. The election before that was the Ontario election. This time the Liberal Party won the majority of the seats. The 2 previous elections before that, the PC Party won the majority of seats. The election before those, the NDP won the majority of seats.

Re:The fair vote initiative

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

That is trivially easy to stop, any party which does not manage x% (x should be somewhere around 4-6) gets nothing. I am not sure what the rules are like in Italy, in Germany x=5. France has a different system.

Germany has had stable government since the last war. After the mid 50's or so, there were 3 parties around. 2 big ones and a small one. The first real changes of government were when the small one changed sides which it did some time around 1970 and back again in 1981. Now there is another small party around which means the larger main party can more or less choose their partner. Works as designed.

Italy traditionally had instable coalitions which had one main aim - keeping the communists out of government. After the Soviet Union fell, the communists finally formed a government for a while. I would not call Italy's political system a success, a system where the same party has a perpetual lease on power (the Christian Democrats, now defunct and having been replaced by Berlusconi's people) just breeds corruption. The CDs were in bed with Mafia-like organisations for years.

Re:Hmm

[Zeinfeld]

Actually, if you read other less biased sources than this one, you will see there is an entirely different side to the Texas redistricting story. New district lines were not created after the last census due to partisan disagreements between the politacal parties in Texas. A judge arbitrated the existing boundaries.

You miss out one little detail, the judge had thrown out the map previously because it flunked the civil rights issue. So much for your 'less biased sources'.

I don't quite remember the numbers (read too lazy to look up) but the Texas legislature had PREVIOUSLY been gerrymandered to benefit the Democrats to the extreme that they now have a 3-4 congressional seat advantage, despite the fact that the state consistently votes overwhelmingly Republican.

That is not the result of gerrymandering, it is the result of incumbency. Texas has been Democratic for decades. The recent GOP advances came in the wake of a long tenure by Democrats. DeLay and cronies are upset that voters do not want to trade their existing democrats in for republicans to do his bidding.

Given the corrupt way the bill was forced through - changing the rules to fit the deed there is no moral reason the courts should defer to the legislature on this one.

If it had gone the other way ...

[mec]

It has gone the other way in the past. In 1960, the Democratic margin of victory in Illinois was smaller than the amount of vote fraud that went on in Chicago. Nixon chose to concede the election rather than put the country through a constitutional crisis -- perhaps the only decent thing he ever did in his public career.

You're right, though. The New York Times sponsored a post-election recount of the paper ballots (yay paper ballots). Theie study came out with the result that the NY Times didn't want to see, so they barely mentioned that their study had finished, and that, according to their count, Bush got more votes.

A pox on both their houses.