Gerrymandering by Computer 526
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.
Death to Democracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Ugly (Score:5, Insightful)
Who, then, is really running the country? And how did they really get in office?
No, serious, I want to know. Because I'm starting to think that my voice really DOESN'T matter.
Damon,
not all states have partisan redistricting (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing new (Score:3, Insightful)
Surprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
How much longer until our vote is purely symbolic and has nothing left to do with reality?
Although in the article, they mainly focus on Texas, it's pretty clear that the whole system is being gamed and gamed hardest by the Republicans.
How's the job market in Europe these days, I wonder...
Career politicians. (Score:2, Insightful)
sweet merciful crap! (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder what you have to do to be conservative down there.
Also this makes me think that gerrymandering isn't the only threat to democracy in the states. It seems Michael Moore's claim that the Democrats and the Republicans are the same isn't so far off.
Re:The Perfect Government? (Score:5, Insightful)
Taxes.
The unproductive majority will claim that the wealthier minority must pay for all the social programs. Social programs, are, of course, not in conflict with your proposed amendment, because they aren't trying to control anyone's behaviour (other than "donations" to those programs by the wealthy minority).
Until the government restricts itself, or is restricted, to the specific powers granted it by We The People via the Constitution, we will always have a problem of tyranny - tyranny of the majority, tyranny of the lobbyists, or tyranny of one of the two major parties.
-paul
More frequent now (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite "whenever possible". At very least, redistricting has been historically confined to census cycles, by a sort of gentleman's agreement between the parties. The reason it's been in the news so much lately is a couple of Republican-controlled state legislatures (Texas, most notably) have escalated the process and begun redistricting more frequently.
No doubt the Democrats will follow suit as soon as they can. But the fact remains: this is a chain of events that didn't need to be set in motion.
Re:Independent electoral commission (Score:4, Insightful)
Are they "independent" like the NRA is to the RNC, or like the ACLU is to the DNC?
The problem is that these commissions are made up of people who are inevitably partisan, so what you end up with is only the illusion of independence, when in fact the party with the most adherents on the commission effectively draws the district boundaries to the benefit of its members, while making it look all nice and non-partisan. Not good: I'd rather have the honest appearance of partisanship and public pressure resulting from bad press than a hidden agenda and no accountability masquerading as an "independent commission."
In reality, there is no way to draw district boundaries in a "fair" way, because "fair" means different things to different people. The closest thing you can do is to permanently fix some method (algorithm) for drawing boundaries, which takes humans out of the loop forevermore; from that point forward, the rules of the game are at least known, so they don't change drastically every time a new party gets a 51% majority.
Summary, Congress is aristocracy (Score:4, Insightful)
If it wasn't for the need of Republicans to get seats in the House and Senate minorities would have been totally marginalized by Democrats. The Democrats speak a very good game of inclusion but they are in effect the party of exclusion. Gingrich and his cronies understood that and used it to their advantage.
The best solution to this would be to give each state X number of seats and then award those to the top X number of vote getters statewide. This would still protect the original intent of the framers of our Consititution and allow for more diverse people in office. It might finally allow a green or gasp, a libertarian, into the so called hallowed grounds.
People bitch and moan all the time about Presidential abuses but convienently ignore what goes on in the Senate (requirement of super majorities to vote is not in the Constitution - it is the exact fear the framers had - a government trapped by a militant minorty). Neither side will give up that power and hence they sell us out when making deals.
Whine about Electronic voting, Bush, and Diebold all you want. You really don't have a choice in who is elected to the House of Representatives... and apparently don't care.
Re:Ugly (Score:5, Insightful)
That is not the case.
The people you elect are elected to represent your best interests. To that effect, they may vote for things you (or the majority of people) don't like, but they are not there to represent your opinion, they're there to do what they think is best for the people they represent.
If they were there to represent your opinions, then we wouldn't need representatives at all, and we'd have referendum votes all the time.
Re:not all states have partisan redistricting (Score:3, Insightful)
they don't need to know who you plan to vote for to draw lines to their benefit.
the system itself, of using districts to 'bottleneck' the voting process causes this flaw. you could have a dozen areas, and overal a balanced voting population, and still wind up with a slight discrepency that puts more than 50% of the votes for A in one district, and have all the others be just below 50%. you'd wind up with 11/12 seats being B, and only 1 A. even though the population itself was evenly distributed, and the lines were almost perfectly "fair".
Gerrymandering is a tradition (Score:4, Insightful)
Where those lines are drawn can be key to who gets elected.
Let's use a simple example. If each representative represents 100 voters and you have 100 relatives that live in a 2-block square, the best district for you would be a shape specifying the exact size of that 2-block square where your relatives are. You can pretty much guarantee that all your relatives will vote for you, or at least most of your relatives won't vote for someone else. Thus you're a guaranteed winner.
What's wrong with that? Are you not going to represent the will and desires of those 100 people?
Any whining about gerrymandering is done by the people that lose out. In this case, it's the Democrats (usually) that are whining about gerrymandering, because they're starting to get voted out of office at the local level. In the past, the Republicans were whining about it because they were "drawn out" of the election process by the Dems.
Really, it's just a game of tactical advantage played by people on all sides. Advantage today turns into disadvantages tomorrow. Whiners today turn into brutal gerrymanderers of tomorrow.
That's how it is.
And "independent" councils are nothing of the kind. Anyone involved in the political process is a political actor, and are by definition not independent. They live, work, and eat with everyone else...it's just that everyone agrees not to complain too loudly when the "independents" favor one part or another.
We're not a democracy (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The Perfect Government? (Score:5, Insightful)
Our alleged Republic has a pretty good Constitution already. It's too bad that no one cares to obey it. With blatant violations against many items in the Bill of Rights (speech, search&seizure, rights retained by States and people, etc.) that people wholeheartedly support since each violation supports their own tyrannical pet peeve, the rights and responsibilities of liberty implied in that Constitution have been nickel-and-dimed away into insignificance.
This is similar to the current depraved state of the Congress, which has been destroyed by each voter thinking that although the Congress as a whole is terrible, that their own rep is wonderful.
Amending a document whose moral authority is lost, won't fix this problem. Either the population spontaneously starts to re-assert the primacy of Founder thinking as expressed in the Constitution, or the entire system is violently overthrown. I'm betting on the latter, and as the years pass and more and more people wipe their asses with that beloved document, then the more and more I come to hope and plan that the revolution happens.
After all, violently asserting that the Constitution is dead, would only be placing a marker above its gravesite, making it obvious that it is dead (at least in spirit). The Republic was long ago transformed into an Empire, and empires are not ruled by the force of law and culture, but by force of arms
You are correct in identifying that democracy is tyranny of the majority. You are wrong in desiring to let it loose. The prior Republic form of government gave men hope that this demon could be tamed, as well as the tyranny of the minority, autocracy. Men of good character desire neither.
Re:Independent electoral commission (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's that we don't assume that everyone is partisan. We have a long tradition of an independent civil service, which pretty much works most of the time. The members of the Electoral Commission are doing it as a career, they're not elected, or appointed by politicians. Keeping their jobs relies on them being non-partisan -- if they were elected or appointed they would have an incentive to be partisan.
The Boundary Committee publishes draft proposals and consults widely before finalising them. Of course, political parties try and persuade it to draw the districts one way or another, but they seem to be immune to that sort of pressure. They base their decisions purely on which are the natural clumps into which the population falls.
I don't hear people suggesting that the committee is biased. If this were widely believed, there would be an enormous scandal. The idea that there was any partisanship in the drawing of boundaries would in our eyes completely undermine the integrity of the election.
By the way, here are their web pages: Electoral Commission [electoralc...ion.gov.uk], Boundary Committee [boundarycommittee.org.uk]
Re:Gerrymandering is a tradition (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Death to Democracy (Score:2, Insightful)
but does it really matter? think about it for a second. if you could cast the deciding vote between democrat and republican in each and every local, state and federal election, is there a way that you could arrange your votes so as to effect a difference in your life? pathetic isn't it? if you are a white, middle class male you might as well not bother. you cannot change a damn thing with your vote even if you win! the sad fact is that there is little if any democracy remaining in this country for this and many other reasons (some of which i will highlight):
1. virtually all laws passed by us or our legislatures are now subject to a serious (as opposed to not a chance in hell) constitutional challange. for all practical purposes the courts must approve all laws we pass (with the exception of laws increasing taxation which seem to be immune from constitutional challenge).
2. what democratic power there is, has migrated from local governing bodies, where your vote had more weight, to national governing bodies where your vote doesn't even rise to the level of the proverbial drop in a pond.
3. over the last 50 years the matters which we or our elected representatives are allowed to vote upon has been steadily diminished. on the state level for instance we are no longer allowed to vote on wheather or not an employer can require a high school diploma for a janitor's job.
4. the media coupled with special interest groups now have a virtual veto power over progress. in a battle between those in favor of technological progress and those opposed, the ludites will always win.
the net result is that democracy is one of the least effective methods of effecting change. more effective methods are:
1. protest and civil disobedience (especially when it comes to preventing something from happening).
2. press and media control.
3. appointment of judges.
the battle is over. the liberals have won.
Apportion by Algorithm, Not Partisan Whims (Score:3, Insightful)
At least this forces the gerrymanderers to be smart enough to figure out how to exploit loopholes in the algorithm.
Re:Independent electoral commission (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's that we don't assume that everyone is partisan.
I'm from Canada (where we also have non-partisan electoral commissions) and I live in the US (where everything is partisan). In my experience both sides are right. In America people are born and bred thinking that everyone is partisan and everyone actually is partisan. In Canada, where people are born and bred thinking civil servants should be non-partisan, there are actually non-partisan civil servants.
It seems like Canada and the US each have a system that's suited to their respective culture. I think it will take a change in culture for the US to adopt the Canadian system (or vice-versa).
Re:More frequent now (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel bad for the voting public - I mean, you're setting it up so that the individual voters in the paired, "liberal" cities have little to no representation. Ignoring the overall effect, what is this doing to those people's rights?
Remnants of the Monarchy (Score:5, Insightful)
I mentioned how absurd this is to my father, who is a civil servant here (Sweden) and a historian. His answer was that the concept of a politically indepedent civil servant in Europe is actually a remnant of the monarchic roots: civil servants in European monarchies were traditionally loyal to the king, not to the houses of parlament. Even though the monarchy is reduced to a symbolic role (more so here than in the UK), the tradition of indepedence from the political process lives on.
America simply does not have this background: everything in American government is fundamentally political, so the concept of an _independent_ electoral commission is impossible.
Yet another great reason for term limits. (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it-how many problems could be solved if elected officials were more concerned with getting work done instead of getting re-elected! Do you really think that Fritz Hollings would have spent so much time passing bills for Disney if he hadn't needed their bribes, er, campaign donations, to get re-elected? Would we actually have a budget that could be passed if politicians worried about re-election weren't stuffing it with more pork than the country can afford?
Let's all stop wasting time fighting all of the problems caused by these corrupt scum, and just get laws passed to keep them from coming back!
Re:first derivative (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmmm... maybe there should be a law that requires election districts to have the minimum possible perimeter. :-)
I've wondered about a similar approach myself. The absolute minimum perimeter division into N zones may not be the best approach since the maps couldn't take into account things like rivers and highways that might be convenient to separate zones, nor would it factor in population density. However, it seems that it would be possible to specify rules that would lead to non-Gerrymanderable zones. For instance:
Of course I don't put it past politicians to screw up even something like this. They would probably wait till five minutes before the final selection and propose the most favorable map to themselves they could come up with that has 1 mile less perimeter than the map they stole from the other party the night before.
Re:Yet another great reason for term limits. (Score:2, Insightful)
All redistricting is done at the state level not the federal. It's the state legislature thats the problem.
Term Limits= Law of Unintended Consequence (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems that terms limits had the unintended consequence that instead of "getting work done" the pols simply became gridlocked. Now instead of compromise, we just get a big "Stuff it up your A**" by both sides.
The issue is best highlighted by a couple of recent examples. Dems voted overwhelmingly for Drivers' Licenses for undocumented workers and repubs against. Arnold says he doesn't like the law and the Dems fold like a card house and repeal the law that was signed into law weeks earlier. On the other side, the Repubs were hell bent on "cutting the waste" to balance the budget and were appalled at the idea of floating a 10 billion dollar bond that would balance the budget on paper, but would end up costing billions more in future debt payments. Arnie boy comes to town and proposes an even larger bond sale, 15 BiLLION, and the repubs can't sign on fast enough, while the Dems are now unsure about passing such a huge debt on to future generations.
Now the point of those two examples is that these term limited pols flip-flopped like fish outta water when it suited their interests. Someone worried about their reelection might have considered the ramifications of making their previous stance so blatantly transparent. With term limits, you just do or oppose whatever the hell you want because you know it's not your neck on the chopping block if you screw up.
Re:More frequent now (Score:3, Insightful)
What staggered me was how many people bought the Republican line as to why the redistricting was necessary. It was so baldly, on-its-face unsupportable that the only explanation I can come up with is that no one believed they would lie in such an audacious manner.
Their argument boiled down to: X percent (I think around 66%) of the population voted for Bush, a Republican. Yet there are more Democrats in the US Congress than Republican. Therefore the districts are obviously incorrect, Gerrymandered, and MUST be corrected immediately.
How many things wrong with this statement can we find? And don't forget - in the STATE Congress, Republicans outnumber Democrats by a rather large margin.
Yet a huge number of people bought it unquestioningly. (up to 50% at one point, IIRC) That's what terrifies me - that so few actually took the slightest moment to ponder a rationalization that simply had no relationship to reality at all. Either half of Texas truly knows *nothing* about Civics (that the Republican majority invalidated its own argument) or that they are simply willing to take ANY crap that comes out of their Representative's mouth without hesitation.
Sigh.
Re:The Perfect Government? (Score:3, Insightful)
A large number of countries have proportional representation.
- advantage: this sort of gerrymandering is totally impossible - the one (person/party) with the most votes wins.
- disadvantage: if corrupt politicians have the support of their party, they are a long way up their party's list and are almost guaranteed reelection
- side-effect: coalitions become normal. What you have to have is some cutoff where parties getting less than (say) 5% are out of luck, otherwise you get a mess like Israel where tiny parties in a coalition can blackmail the main parties.
You say that the US constitution is 'pretty good'. I am not totally convinced on this one - it is over 200 years old and probably needs beefing up a bit. The problem is: who would do that 'beefing'. With the current political climate the way it is, leaving it the way it is is probably the safest option, otherwise the party in power will use that power to cement that power (this is normal - all parties/politicians want power, what defines a democracy is what lengths they are prepared to go to).One thing has to be said though, a country where this sort of gerrymandering is going on can not be said to be a democracy. It is a self-perpetuating ogliarchy. This would not matter much to the rest of the world if we were talking about Upper-Volta, but it is the most powerful country in the world that is trying to copy the Roman empire and that affects everyone.
The article hopes that the supreme court will put it's foot down on this issue. Sorry - I will not be holding by breath. Rehnquist - in particular - and Thomas normally vote along party lines. Even if by some mischance, the Supreme Court stopped this, what would appear in it's place? Iowa shows that it can be done but who cares what Iowa does?
Re:A comprehensive discussion of gerrymandering... (Score:3, Insightful)
. . . which, of course, does not make it okay.
Re:Independent electoral commission (Score:2, Insightful)
-You can take the 100,000 conservatives, make a district that will almost surely elect a conservative representative, and make 4 "liberal" districts out of the rest of the city. Now you have 4 liberal seats and 1 conservative.
-You can take 80,000 people from a liberal neigborhood and 20,000 from the conservative neigborhood and call that a district, and repeat 5x. There is no district with a conservative majority, so all 5 seats go liberal.
-You can put 50,000 conservatives together with 50,000 liberals in 2 districts, and then the conservatives have a shot at winning 2 seats.
So, when you are out looking for 100,000 breathing people, which 100,00 do you chose? Do you see why you are a retard yet?
Re:The fair vote initiative (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Excerpts from OED:
No doubt that computers and demographics make it a lot more efficient.
One more argument for proportional representation (Score:3, Insightful)
So the problem is solved by just not existing...
Coming from such a country to the US, it's pretty bizarre how crappy and corrupt some of these things are done here.
NOT more frequent, and Republicans didn't start it (Score:3, Insightful)
In that session, Republican did press their advantage to gerrymander Texas congressional districts, just as the Democrats had done every decade they were in charge of Texas. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and to the victor goes the spoils. There are many things to dislike about gerrymandering, but the Supreme Court has ruled that it is prefectly legal and constitutional as long as its not done for the purpose of racial discrimination. Moreover, the new districts more accurately reflect the voting preferences of Texans as a whole.
Moreover, since when does a slanted piece by an unabashed liberal partisan [mediaresearch.org] complaining about the political opposition actually qualify as "stuff that matters"? Oh wait, this is Slashdot, and anything vaguely tech-related that bashes Bush or Republicans gets listed...
Re:It's too bad we can't just register republican. (Score:4, Insightful)
The article in the New Yorker points out that in a district that's been gerrymandered, the party for whom that district has been gerrymandered always wins the election, so the real election is the primary, not the general election. So really only about 1/6 of the voters in the district actually choose, and they're the most polarized voters.
So the point is, if your district has been gerrymandered, you should register as a member of the party for which the district has been gerrymandered, so that you get to be one of the 1/6th that vote. If everybody did this, the primary would be the general election, and the candidate would be accountable to the voters despite the gerrymandering.
term limits = worst idea of all time (Score:2, Insightful)
And term limits wont do a damn thing to fix the problem of gerrymandering. The reason all these seats are unchallenged is because there is a concentration of voters of one party or another in those districts. All term limits will do is you'll have different people holding these seats, but they'll still be of the same party, the partisanship will be just as bad and congressional representation will be just as out of touch with the actual population as it is now.
Finally, term limits restrict your choice to vote for whomever you want to. Why would anyone want to limit their own right to vote, the bedrock of any democracy or republic?
Re:Don't hold your breath (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Why did they buy it? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the same reason why support for the Florida recounts was almost precisely divided along party lines. It's hardly a coincidence that virtualy all Democrats believed that "hand recounts are the only way to be sure," while virtually all Republicans believed that "ballot tampering/theft and inconsistent counting of hanging/pregnant chads makes the hand recount actually less accurate, or at least more subjective, than the original machine tabulation." People believe what will get their canidates into power.
Not just DeLay (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't want to defend the practice of Gerrymandering, nor continuous redistricting BUT, this is definitely a case of "turnaround is fair play". The Republicans especcially in Texas have already had "the boot on the other foot" and this is payback time.
The current districts are a clear cut case of gerrymandering. In this last election 57% of Texas voters voted to send a Republican to the House of Representatives but the Democrats got the majority of Texas seats (17 out of 32) in the house. The current Democratic gerrymander gives the Democrats 3-4 seats beyond what would be "fair" by the popular vote. In the early '90's when the current districts were first put in place the Democrats managed to capture 70% of the house seats with only 1/2 of the vote. Micheal Barrone the author of the "American Political Almanac" called it ""The most partisan redistricting in the '90 cycle in the nation" in the Almanac he called it "the shrewdest gerrymander". To keep the post on-topic the Democratic gerrymander was implementied using a computer program, yet strangely the New Yorker didn't find that as newsworthy at the time. Here is a relevent quote from a journalism students story [ithaca.edu] (apparently the Dems screwing the Reps doesn't attract as much interest in the media) on using computers to gerrymander Texas: A scrupulously fair redistricting would give the Republicans 3-4 additional seats. The Republicans to be fair are engaging in their own bit of gerrymandering to "unfairly" pick up an additional 2-3 extra seats to give them a total pick-up of 6-7.
It's worth noting that those 2-3 extra seats aren't quite as aggressive as what the Democrats achieved throughout the 90's. In the 90's however, there was no comparable outcry from outraged defenders of representative democracy. Republican complaints didn't get any traction in the media. Most likely this is a case of the Republicans not playing the game as well as the Democrats - they fought the gerrymander but didn't go the the extra-ordinary lengths that the Dems did in this round. Perhaps they didn't think that the press would be as kind to them.