A Proposal to End the Practice of Gerrymandering
Definition: Gerrymandering is a practice of political corruption that attempts to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating geographic boundaries to create partisan, incumbent-protected, and neutral districts. (reference: Wikipedia)
Across the nation, America’s politicos are currently engaged in the artful redrawing of congressional district boundaries for their own benefit. Thus, the voting public is once again faced with the brazen practice of political corruption by its alleged representatives.
The practice of gerrymandering is technically legal, and indeed, will soon celebrate its 200th anniversary in this country. However, it remains the case that, as it is a method of rigging elections to secure office holders against the judgment of the voters, it is a crime against democracy. It is time to end it.
But how can this be done? While it is apparent that weird district shapes are clearly contrived by conspiracies of politicians desiring to disenfranchise the electorate, what objective standard is there for assigning fair boundaries?
In fact there is a standard. The degree of contrivance behind the design of a set of districts is directly related to the oddness of the shapes employed to reach the election-rigging objective. There is a precise mathematical way to measure such malformation. That is, if you take the square of the perimeter of any shape, and divide it by the shape’s area, you arrive at a number, which can be called its irregularity. For example the irregularity of any square, regardless of its size, equals 16 (because (4s)2/s2 = 16.) On the other hand, the irregularity of a rectangle whose long side is 10 times the length of its short side is 48.4 (because (22s)2/10s2 = 48.4.) The odder and more contrived the shape, the higher will be its irregularity.
Now congressional districts need to have equal population sizes, so the task of dividing a state fairly is more complicated than simply slicing it up into low-irregularity shapes. Still, there is a solution which can be objectively ascertained that does accomplish the goal of creating equal population districts with the minimum total irregularity. This can be found either by humans or computers.
Dr. Zubrin,
I’m a big fan, but asking politicians to put the national good above self interest won’t get the legislation passed. This will go nowhere until conditions exist where it serves both national and self interest.
P.S. – We’ll design something better on Mars!
Cynicism aside, the system was originally used for political advantage but has devolved into guarenteed seats in Congress based on the color of one’s skin. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) is an incredibly ignorant, self-centered, black racist politician, but thanks to gerrymandering she is immune from being voted out of office.
Texas congressional lines are drawn by republicans. Her district is a collection of no-mans land for republicans.
I’m quite happy to see totally unassailable “black” or “Hispanic” seats. It means that the reliably Democratic minority vote concentration has been quarantined off for a typically buffoonish and ineffective race hustler, while the majority population outside those districts has been carved up to benefit Republicans.
Imagine a town that is 30% black, 70% white, and 45% Republican vs 55% Democrat. If it were divided into three districts, I’d much rather see two reliable Republicans each pulling 55% in their gerrymandered districts, and a braying communist jackass like Rep. Lee pulling 90% in her 80% black district, than give up three more equal districts to moderate Democrats.
Thankfully, there are laws in place that would prevent that from happening. Also, whites are the minority in Texas.
The idea is good, but the Federal Judiciary won’t allow it.
They currently require minority districts, no matter how insane the gerrymandering gets (see Illinois Congressional district 4)(http://pajamasmedia.com/zombie/2010/11/11/the-top-ten-most-gerrymandered-congressional-districts-in-the-united-states/?singlepage=true)
Those are really two very funny words when placed so near each other: “politics” and “fairness.” Maybe if the Godless left didn’t follow their gospel by saint Saul Alinsky dedicated to Saran
That was supposed to be dedicated to “Satan.” I did notice two other “very funny when placed near each other” words: “politics” and “corruption.”
Perhaps a penchant for redundancy here?
I’ve been advocating a system like this be put in place for several years now. I didn’t know there was a math term “irregularity” but it is exactly what needs to be done. I described it as forcing the districts to be minimum perimeter for maximum area. Of course that would mean circular districts if you did not take into account coastal areas nor irregular state boundaries. With computers we can do that in a timely manner.
I think the only way we can get such a system put in place would be a state constitutional initiative. No politician that I know of is going to take a chance on losing his/her safe seat. Convincing voters to do something logical is a hard sell too. To many people have a vested interest in maintaining the current system.
At a slightly higher level of sophistication, I would also add in score penalties for districts that crossed ranges of hills, bodies of water, or county (and possible municipal) boundaries.
Circular districts don’t pack together without leaving gaps in between.
Minimum perimeter, alone, is enough, along with population. Everywhere has to be in some district, so “circular” districts are silly. Sort of Hex shaped districts would be the more likely outcome, but the issue would become one of how to “score” different plans:
Sum all the perimeters for the districts. Take the census based populations for each district; create an average (sum of pop/# districts). For every district, find the square of the difference in that district population from the average, and add this pop-diff(^2) to the perimeter sum.
Smallest perimeter sum total “wins” the $1 000 000 prize money given to any person or organization who first submits that re-districting plan.
Anybody can submit a plan for a $100 (or $1000?) evaluation fee, stating their own evaluation. The lowest total perimeter sum + pop-diff total should be the new plan of districts.
The current system is fine. It’s the only influence state legislators have on congress.
True, but it leaves the voters with no influence on Cogress. I like this proposal a great deal. I have tried to think of a way one party can subvert the process in their favor, but I can’t. Let me propose that you run a contest with a $100 grand prize or an opportunity to vote an unlimited number of times in the next Chicago election (but everyone already has that opportunity). The contest would be for the best scheme a party could employ to defeat your proposal. The judges would offer their rationale as to how your proposal would defeat the contestant’s scheme and discard their entry. If there is a winner, you cough up a C-note and adapt your proposal to defeat the winner’s scheme, then re-run the contest. You may gin up enough interest with the contest to gain support for your proposal’s consideration, at least for some given state. Don’t count on Illinois though, if it were not for corrupt politicians, they would have no politicians at all.
If that’s your goal, the far better solution is to repeal the 17th Amendment and return control of the Senate to the state legislatures. The Founders definitely knew what they were doing.
When, FINALLY, Republicans have the opportunity to drive the Democ-rats to hell for a decade they should take it!
I can’t wait to see the districts which will do exactly that. It’s time to put The Scum into the same position The Scum has been putting America into for a century!
Davind, you seem to imply that Democrats are scum, that republicans are “other”. Sorry to trample on your sense of propriety, but I find “republicans” who gain the trust of the voters on one set of promises, then once in office, follow a different set of promises to be far more worthy of the descriptor “scum” than a democrat who promises scummy legialation then delivers on that promise.
There’s barely a nickels’ difference between the donkey and the elephant these days. What is needed is a clear distinction between career politicians and public SERVANTS. Few politicians truly have the goood of the people, let alone the will of the people, in view. THAT is what needs to change, and gerrymandering or no, it falls to WE THE PEOPLE to wake up and vote good men into office.
Amen!
The weeping bartender and his crew will raise the debt limit trillions, and accept a few billion in “on paper” spending cuts in return. But only because they are clueless, gutless and greedy.
“No more deficit spending” so quickly devolves into “significant reductions in the deficit”. Not the same animal, guys!
Lots of us are telling you that we would just as soon have that demonrat, moslem communist destroying our country as we would have you lying, cheating, worthless bloodsuckers destroying it. Got it?
Dr. Zubrin: I agree that gerrymandering is a “national disgrace” and a “crime against democracy” that has been one of the main contributors to the utter corruption of our politics. I’m not sure math is the answer.
For one thing, The Supreme Court’s “One Man One Vote” decisions and the Voting Rights Act have enshrined what to my mind are false premises with regard to the drawing of district lines. No one wants to replicate the days of the English “rotten boroughs” but forcing state legislatures to draw districts of equal population insofar as is possible is the height of judicial arrogance, and runs counter to more sensible and traditional criteria of compactness, contiguity and community of interests (however defined). The claim that Blacks have been denied the right to elect candidates of their choice (of skin color), aside from being morally reprehensible, invites the very packing of as many Blacks as possible into as few Districts as possible. The same principle is applied by both parties to their opponents, resulting in an almost unprecedented degree of partisanship in our electoral and political processes. Doing away with gerrymandering would moderate our politics and while math may be a useful tool, I’d prefer to start with the more traditional criteria outlined above.
At the same time, ending gerrymandering does not go far enough. In my opinion, term limits and the limiting of campaign contributions to natural persons who are eligible to vote for the office in question are necessary to limit both political careerism and the purchase of favor or influence by individuals or interest groups.
David, I must disagree with your claim that term limits will help. In reality we already HAVE term limits…. it is called YOUR vote. Remember, NO candidate for office can assume that office until/unless voted in by their constituents. Thus, it is incumbent upon WE THE PEOPLE to get off our sofas, LEARN about the real nature and agenda of the candidates (which likely means turning off the TeeVee set….) and vote good men of integrity into office.
Now, something else that WILL help immensely, and will actually SAVE millions of tax dollars….. remove the financial motivation from office…. $170K/year salaries, plus special “benefits” packages including fat lifelong pensions need to go away. Time was, once a man had raised his family, built his business, now run by his sons, he no longer had such a full schedule, was financially secure, wanting to return on some level some of the benefits he’d received by being here.. THEN he would seek office to SERVE the nation/state/county that had provided his chance to become the man he is. Remove the financial incentive and watch the quality of government increase. The classic “follow the money” rule will no longer apply.
Perhaps we need to change the minimum ages in the Constitution to reflect the changes in longevity since 1786?
I would think that adding an automatic 15 or 20 years to those min’s would go a long way to adding to the experience level (and type of experience) found in the Congress, and Oval Office.
Then there are term limits, and a mandatory retirement age, also.
A redistricting method I would favor would be one that required district lines to be drawn such that the total minimum distance from a voter’s residence to the center of the district is a minimum for the entire state. It would probably leave some slightly irregular lines but would do away with the Gerrymander shaped perversions. A particular district may not be quite as now but the effect on the overall state would be for more compact districts. The citizens would be grouped within a relatively convenient geographic area without the political manipulations available today. It would require implementation on a state by state basis as states are allowed by the Constitution to establish their own methods of districting (as allowed under various fairness requirements). I believe the method would cause many more districts to become competitive districts.
Combine this with Term Limits and it would make a real change. Competitive districts combined with fairly regular open races wouldd make it just too expensive for a particular group to contirbute enough to buy enough seats to accomplish anything. As it works now the objective is to buy the seat when it is first competitive and hold on forever at little cost.
Gerrymandering is an excuse. If Americans who are truly unhappy with their representation would vote anti-incumbent, no incumbent would be safe. You talk about competitive districts but my guess is that most incumbents would win reelection for one reason: Americans vote the same way out of force of habit. They see a name they recognize and they vote for that person. Or they’re registered Democrats or registered Republicans and they vote the party line. Gerrymandering works because it reflects how Americans vote.
How can it be considered an attack on democracy? People who vote the same way are gathered together in one district. THEY chose how to vote. No one forced them. The most perfect district will have a built-in preference for one party or the other. We’re not all swing voters.
Term limits could be imposed at the ballot box if Americans cared. They don’t care. That’s the problem. Removing gerrymandering won’t remove the problem. Every two years every voter in every congressional district has it within his power to vote for someone other than the incumbent. Next time someone complains about Congress ask him who he voted for. Odds are HIS representative is just fine.
Your response fails to take into consideration the lack of community forced into horribly gerrymandered districts. When you have a district with a ten mile long connecting strip running between two populated areas abutting four other more equitably shaped districts, two on each side of the connector, the voters within the strip are denied a chance to vote with their neighbors and peers. Their vote is thus diluted, and not as valuable as others. For them it makes democracy a sham.
This makes as much sense as laying a grid over a map and drawing up 435 districts, regardless of any other information. Neither device is going to be employed. The way it works now, when a critical mass of voters changes and votes differently, then eventually the districts change.
The law, politicians, and the political process is inherently corrupt, and there’s not much that can be done about it, because lawyers and politicians control the process.
We agree it is unfair but we do not want to do anything about it. It isn’t our ox being gored, so those being disenfranchised can just suck it in. We’ve got ours, the others can wait their turns.
Sounds like the spirit of the Klan is alive and well all over the nation.
This is a logical solution – which pretty much guarantees it will never be enacted.
All voting districts should be eliminated. Voting should be done by county not district. And county lines should never be allowed to change. This nonsense has to stop.
You have no idea what’s being discussed, do you?
Yes, he does. But I suspect county lines would get changed if anyone took up his suggestion.
In some states that would probably work. In others, where county size varies widely, there could be serious discrepancies. How would you handle the division of congressional seats? Fractional for small counties? Texas has 254 counties but only 36 congresscritters. How do you handle that?
Given that CA has 40 counties but 53 seats in congress, what if one county [think San Bernardino] had a population that would justify multiple seats in congress? Would they all be at large, or would the county itself be divided up? Los Angeles County would probably qualify for six seats. At large or by district?
@Tex Expatriate
There is in fact a method similar to that (although it also takes population into account) which is called the shortest splitline algorithm. http://rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html
Unfortunately, there is both “good gerrymandering” and “bad gerrymandering”.
People of different regions frequently have different interests, and in a perfect world they could band together to elect representatives to further their interests. There could be districts of mountains, for interest, who want to talk landslides — and districts of plains that worry about floods.
“Good gerrymandering” would group like-minded people together to ensure that their interests are addressed; “bad gerrymandering” attempts to marginalize disfavored groups by either concentrating them into single districts (whose representative can then be ignored in the legislature) or dispersing them among various districts (where voters can then be ignored as troublesome fringe types).
One problem with this proposal is that it fails to account for many “natural” boundaries.
Rivers, lakes and coast lines often are desirable district boundaries because they provide a clear delineation of the would-be boundary. However, they almost always meander here and there which means they would add to a districts irregularity. I would think having a congressional district that consisted of a single, populous county would be less likely to be a gerrymandered district than to have a less irregular shaped district that split part of the county away from the rest.
The problem is that *no one* who actually has the power to do this wants to do it “fairly”. Everyone, from either political party to the judges when they take control of the process, wishes to do it in a fashion that benefits them, or a group they favor. It used to be technically illegal, though unfortunately the law had to contain subjective terms like “unreasonable” that rendered the rest of the law essentially meaningless if the lawmaker in question could find a friendly judge, and of course they usually could. More recently, the judges themselves got involved, and began trying to “engineer” majority/minority districts, with the intent of increasing especially black representation in Congress. As to the one commenter who noted that Texas’ congressional districts are currently drawn by Republicans, this is true. There is, however, some history here. Jackson-Lee’s district was *originally* drawn by a court to create a majority/minority district. If the Republicans split it up and deprived her of her seat, she’d surely be in court within the same day, and that would attract the attention of a judge. The result might be the judge deciding to redistrict *all* of Texas himself, and of course the Republicans want to screw the Dems as much as possible in the rest of the state. So they leave her alone, and do their work elsewhere…
The incestuous nature of this whole process is notorious here in California. In several election cycles where Democrats controlled the process, the state gained seats in Congress, but at the same time the Dems contrived to gerrymander Republicans out of a seat. Famously, in one instance it was Bob Dornan (“B-1 Bob”) who lost his seat. He famously went to Orange County and defeated an incumbent Dem there, on the “There’s no room for a Democrat in Orange County” platform. Anyway, in the next election cycle the Dems tried something else, and the voters and the state’s judges got so upset that the process was (temporarily) taken away from them. So in the election cycle after that, they made a deal with the Republicans. The Republicans got to choose which among them lost his seat, and they naturally chose a moderate who wasn’t as hard-line as much of the rest of the party. So the Republicans moved further to the right, the Dems further to the left, and things got worse…anyone think this will ever get any better?
David,
California has taken redistricting away form the state legislature. It is being done by a commission that is politically balanced. The Dems in control of the legislature have abused the process for so long the voters took the process away from them.
The other problem with this proposal is that in states like California, the minority party (GOP in CA’s case) have accepted their minority status and are thus willing to concede gerrymandered districts as longs as certain areas (like the OC, San Diego, some places in the central valley) are protected for fat GOP permanent incumbents.
In addition to the goal of minimal irregularity (aka compactness), you should try to keep existing towns, communities and neighborhoods together in the same district.
I agree. But how do you measure that in any objective manner?
California passed proposition 20 (2010) to take redistricting out of the hands of the legislature. Depending on how it works out, it may be a model to use in other states.
I like this proposal, except for the fact that it codifies the concept of “minority party”, and it also doesn’t force at least an attempt at population equality. I recognize some districts may be smaller than others by necessity to give their people an adequate voice, but I would suggest the following:
- No district may deviate from the mean population by more than 25%.
- Wherever a border is drawn along a watercourse or other natural boundary, it is counted as a straight line for purposes of perimeter measurement.
- Any qualifying plan supported by a 25% minority vote during the interval, with a savings of 1% or more, becomes the new de facto plan.
- All census data shall be released to the public at least 30 days in advance of the initial deliberations, and any citizen-drafted plan meeting the above requirements (including saving 1% over previous plans, if any) and supported by the appropirate number of petitioners may override the legislature.
- Citizen-drafted plans must be ratified by special election to be held within 30 days of the interval elapsing, unless endorsed by the legislature with the appropriate 25% or majority vote that would be required to introduce a new plan. If a citizen plan does not win a majority public vote, the prevailing legislative plan will be enacted.
So before redistricting starts, Joe Public can get his hands on the population data and draft up a plan. He has at least 60 days from the time the data becomes available till the last possible date for submission, during which he can draft a plan and gather signatures. If he gets enough signatures and submits on time, the plan must be scored and counted for consideration. If it is considered, any legislative plans must override it with a 25% vote and a 1% savings. Otherwise, it goes up for a public vote and either the citizen plan, or the last-voted legislative plan goes into effect. As an alternative, the legislature can endorse this plan with a 25% vote (or majority vote, if no plans have been considered yet).
There’s an easier way, and the irregularities don’t really matter:
http://obstreperouscurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2005/12/congressional-redistricting.html
The funny thing about gerrymandered districts is that sometimes karma bites some deserving party on the ass. Take Tennessee, which the Democrats and Democratic judges kept 5-4 Democratic CDs long after the state shifted to the right enough that it should have been 5-4 Republican. Then, with just a little more shifting to the right, in 2010 it went 7-2 Republican over Democrat CDs, and at the same time, the Republicans took control of both houses of the State Legislature.
So Tennessee GOP can quite fairly say, hey, they are your lines, we are just leaving them in place…….and keep a 7-2 edge for the rest of the decade!
First, The Voting Rights Act should either be applied to the whole country or it should be repealed.
Gerrymandering could be eliminated more simply than the author suggests.
State legislators might simply enact a law that states:
Congressional districts will be delineated so as to minimize the sum of their boundaries not consisting of a state border.
OR
Place a dot on the map representing the population center of the state and draw one straight line spoke out from the center for every congressman in the state’s delegation so that each wedge has the same population.
Eliminating gerrymandering should also increase the number of moderates in congress.
Your second option is similar to, but I think not quite as good as the proposal I mentioned before, which is the shortest splitline algorithm. http://rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html
The Australian Electoral Commission is responsible for redistricting (and conducting elections generally) in Australia, and does so without noticeable rancor in a country almost, but not quite, as polarized as the US. Look up
aec.gov.au/About for info.
There is nothing wrong with gerrymandering when Republicans do it.
When DEMONcRATs do it, it’s evil.
Sheila Jackson-Lee (Dummy-Houston), is not just a Republican “no mans land.” It was REQUIRED by the voting rights act to elect a black congressperson. Democrats need to raalize that this is legally enforced “packing” of Democratic votes into a district that pretty much helps the surrounding areas become Republican districts.
Her district is surrounded by 2 other minority districts (Hispanic-9, 29) and 4 Republican districts (7, 10, 22, 2). District 30 (majority black) in Dallas is surrounded by all Republican districts (5, 6, 24, 32).
I agree with J in 23, nationwide or nothing.
It’s an interesting idea, but as proposed, I think it’s too easily gamed. A 1% overall decrease in irregularity can be gained by outweighing some heavily gerrymandered districts with very regular districts, even when the regular districts make less sense. For example, it’s natural to divide districts according to town lines or natural boundaries (such as rivers). These boundaries make sense, but are not always very regular. If you were to replace those sorts of boundaries with straight lines, you lower the irregularity. This gives you the opportunity to gerrymander some districts at the price of making confusing district boundaries.
That said, I like the idea in general, but I think the execution needs a bit more thought.
Rather than have representatives for a particular geographical area, we should each have direct vote on issues, with various persons declaring positions and gathering proxies from other voters.
It is then the voter’s revokable choice to whom they give their proxy, and for what period of time they give it. Some will leave it with their selected representative for the duration of their natural life. Others will give it to a representative during a debate, and then move it to another at the conclusion of the debate and before the vote on the issue.
Representatives would thus have variable terms, serving at the pleasure of those whose proxies they hold. A corrupt politician in that system could see his career end in milliseconds.
A fictional treatment of that kind of arrangement is available in “Probability Broach” by L. Neil Smith, available on line at BigHeadPress
Gerrymandering is evil when it is used to support evil deeds, such as state theft under color of authority, state corruption, rent seeking, and inefficiency. It is virtuous when it stops state theft under color of authority, state corruption, and efficiency and limits powers of government to those permitted by the constitution.
While we have the Congressional Black Caucus, we have no Black Senators. Many Black Congressional Representatives are from districts which favor Black candidates. However to win such districts the candidates must be so “black” that they can not win statewide office. Thus, no Black Senator, Governors, or other statewide offices. A Black candidate who could win in a White majority district would have a better chance at a statewide office. Those unintended consequences are a real pain.
Something like this has been around for a while. I can’t remember the exact genesis, but it went something like this:
1> The goal is to minimize the sum of the perimeters of all of the districts combined.
2> Open source it. Let the Democrats, the Republicans, the State University Political Science Department, the American Communist Party, and Miss Burke’s high school geometry class submit their proposals. The winner is the map with the shortest overall perimeter.
3> Not all perimeters are scored the same. Congressional district lines that follow state boundaries count 0. Congressional district lines that follow county boundaries count .5 their total distance. All other congressional lines score their total length.
4> Each district must have the same number of people per the census (A margin of acceptable error is defined).
Everybody submits their congressional map. The winner is the map with the shortest perimeters (scored as in bullet 3). A prize could be offered to the winning submission.
Wow! Sounds quite interesting!
Making compactness and regularity doesn’t prevent the creation of a scheme that favors one party over another. There is no reason to assume that a optimally regular district drawing will not ipso factor favor one party over another. These issues have been debated ad nauseum by experts in the field compactness and regularity are merely one element in the puzzle.
Nine years ago I proposed what I called iterative cake cutting. The majority party would follow legally established guidelines for compactness and regularity and draw a district map via computer. It would submit this district map to the other party which would then pick a distict, freeze it, and then draw a new district map from the remaining territory. The map-drawing party would submit its map to the other party which would pick a district, freeze it, and continue the process until all districts had been determined and picked.
There is no perfect scheme for drawing districts that are “fair” since fair is going to be somewhat of a subjective matter. Nor do I trust any “non-partisan” commission since I don’t see much evidence that any entity given power will not have an agenda. We do know that the fairest way to cut a cake is to have one person cut and then the other person pick. I know that my iterative cake-cutting idea is not perfect – I argue that it may be “more perfect”, to borrow a phrase, than other options.
Use zip codes.
Thank you Dr Zubrin for your suggestion.
Your comments and those of the participants above indicate the overriding point, -that a reasonable adequate solution to the problem is achievable, should sensible folks be wiling to put their minds to it.
Allow me add an additional suggestion taken from the way divorcing parties often manage to divide up community assets:
–One of the parties compiles (2) lists dividing the assets.
–The other party gets to pick which list they prefer.
–Once done, the parties may (if previously agreed to) haggle and swap various assets from one list to the other, until final agreement is reached
Same approach applies here:
–The majority party and the minority party both compile (2) two re-districting plans.
–Each party then selects the opposing party’s plan that suits it best.
–The parties then proceed to haggle-out a compromise between the two selected plans.
Point is, this creates a framework in and around which meaningful negotiations can begin. Each plan will no doubt have its share of carrots & sticks.
Your idea wont work. Each party will merely propose 2 plans that totally help themselves, and screw the other party. My idea, where anybody can propose a plan, and the one with the best computer ranking automatically wins, is guaranteed to select the least Gerrymandered plan.
Gerrymandering is the reason we have so many intolerant Congressmen on both sides of the aisle. They don’t have to answer to reasonable audiences back in their districts. It would be a fantastic thing to make more Congressmen accountable every two years rather than having 425 of them win their districts 60 to 40.
And why does drawing districts based on geometric asthetics make any sense? Coastlines, political boundaries and population distribution guarantee irregular boundaries. The dynamics of fundraising, special interests and media will result in many safe seats regardless of who draws the lines or how pretty they are. The solution to politicians acting in their own interests is to limit the damage they can do through term limits and adherence to the Constitution.
Coastlines and state borders cant be redrawn by any plan, and thus wont change the irregularity calculation between plans. Varying population densities is handled by the equal population requirement. The irregularity requirement ensures that the legeslatuure is not able to PURPOSELY draw irregularly shaped districts, when more regular shapes are available, that still result in equal population between districts. This proposal forces the state legislatures to do the right thing, and is a very good idea.
The standard isoperimetric ratio for simple closed planar curves is defined as
Q=4 pi A / L^2
it is always less than or equal to 1, and equal to 1 only for a circle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoperimetric_inequality
Excellent proposal. It will tend to produce more districts with 50-50 balance between the 2 parties, which should produce more moderates in both parties in congress, and more districts where the rep has to satisfy both parties and independents, not just their own primary voters. It also produces less situations where voters feel totally disenfranchised, because they are in a party that only has 10-20% of the vote in the district, and they know their vote makes no difference. It will also produce more turnover, and thus result in less need for term limits, because there will be less districts where a politician has a district where their party has 80-90% registration, and they can never lose.
What happens now is the majority party in a state will create a few districts with 90% majorities for the out party, and a lot of districts with 60% majorities for their own. This guarantees them a disproportionate majority of the seats, but produces really extreme and unaccountable politicians, with lots of seniority, and thus lots of power, in the opposition 90% districts, and even in the 60% districts the rep has little to fear, unless they are really bad.
A good way to ensure it is enforced is to allow any state legeslator, or the governor, or any outside group with enough signatures on a petition describing the plan, with a map, to propose a redistricting plan. Then all the plans will be run through a computer (whose algorithm and software will be publically available, in advance of the redistricting proposals, to ensure it is not rigged, and to allow anybody proposing a plan to run the program and see how their plan will rank), to calculate the combined ranking for both equal population size, and irregularity, and the plan with the best combined rankings MUST be agreed to by the state. This will guarantee that the least Gerrymandered plan must win.
For that very reason, that the redistricting will be free of political influence, the majority party in a state legislature will never enact it, so it would probably have to be enacted through a referendum. Even in a referendum, the referendum will be opposed by the majority party in the state (because they presently have the redistricting advantage), and thus may be tough to pass.
Why not use a clustering algorithm? Or some spatial econometric technique? There’s an endless number of impartial techniques.
You can’t take the politics out of politics. If you create an “objective” algorithm, then politicians will argue over which algorithm to use. There’ll be endless arguments and bickering over the matter, but one thing is sure: they’ll each fixate on the technique that, in that redistricting cycle, produces the best outcome for them. At least this way it’s out in the open.
I have thought about a similar system to this for some time. I would make the process even simpler. Instead of giving each of the two major parties a turn, I would simply set a minimum irregularity and give the majority party the prerogative to draw any boundaries they want subject to that parameter.
We are not searching for perfection here – all we want to do is to substantially reduce what goes on now due to there being NO limits.
And while the republicans may not want to help fix the system while they are in power, I’d suggest that the people can make them do it (eg through the tea party). After all, it’s in the country’s long term best interest. I’ll take that over any short term gain
I wish the math involved were so simple. Fractal math may have to come into it, especially if 1 or more of the district’s borders go along a river, mountain, or other geographical feature. Here’s a famous paper on the topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Long_Is_the_Coast_of_Britain%3F_Statistical_Self-Similarity_and_Fractional_Dimension
You people haven’t a clue. The creative crookedness required to evolve such a system is worthy of near worship. As a very naive young agent I once transported and certified unbroken custody of ten thousand votes for JFK. From Duval county to Austin TX It was an LBJ miracle,The certified box I carried after watching seal ceremoniously placed by judges ALL From a county with three thousand souls including newborns. The left mastered Gerrymandering as an art form, the right finally outgrew and took their revenge. In Texas our truly stupid commie judges figured they would keep the status quo forever declaring black and Mexican special districts— oops maybe only in Texas, a whole bunch of each but mostly Mexicans went Republican. They commies may have gotten Tom DeLay but it has cost them the State for decades.
My geometric intuition leads me to strongly suspect that this “irregularity” optimization metric is highly under-constrained. This is to say that there is an *extremely* large set of potential district partition maps that are within one percent of the global “irregularity” minimum, or even exactly equal to the global minimum. This means that the first party can simply choose from among a rather large subset of possibilities in order to maximize its actual preferred metric (i.e., electoral outcome), while still leaving no improved-irregularity option available to the second party to propose. It seems highly likely that the set of minimal-irregularity district maps includes options that are strongly favorable to one party, and others that are strongly favorable to the other.
So no, I don’t see this as a proposal that would end Gerrymandering.
If politicians won’t honestly do the simple math of counting votes, how can we trust them with the complex math of redistricting?
Straight-line boundaries eliminate contorted custom districts…
But they don’t allow for the non-linear geographical features which make appropriate district boundaries:
County boundaries.
Township boundaries.
Municipal boundaries.
Major rivers.
Navigable rivers.
Creeks and streams.
Canals.
Other bodies of water.
Expressways.
Major streets.
Railroad lines.
Mountain range crests.
I would allow anyone to submit a map for consideration. The map with the lowest “figure of merit” would be adopted.
The “figure of merit” would be the total length of all boundary lines. The length of a boundary segment would be divided by 2 if it followed any of the features listed above. If more than one applied, add 1 to the divisor for each. If an additional feature runs parallel, with no residents between, count it too.
Up to 1% variation from the mean district population would be permitted.
ISTM that Congress has power to enact this under the “republican government” clause of the Constitution (Article IV Section 4).
I’m amazed that in all this debate no one has said a word about the 800-lb. gorilla that enables the entire gerrymandering process. Since I can’t increase font size here, I’ll do the caps-bold-italic thing:
THE CENSUS
Or more precisely, the current census form. All those questions about race, income, age, etc., etc. ad nauseum are what allow the politicians to carve out districts for their own (or their party’s) benefit. The only constitutionally valid question is the number of persons at the address. Eliminate all the others and the problem solves itself as people move out, move in, die off and otherwise change the district’s makeup over time.
Three other reforms also need to be enacted: 1) Change “number of persons” above to “number of citizens.” Immigrants, since they can’t vote, have no business being counted. 2) Per Mr. Narr (thread #8), strict term limits — 12 years is enough for anyone — and no campaign $$ from anyone not eligible to vote in that race. 3) Per AD (also thread #8), an increase in the minimum age for Congresscritters. The current limits were imposed at a time when average lifespan was in the 50s, or even lower. An extra 15 years (40 for the House and 45 for the Senate) is fine, IMHO.
In 1790, each member of the House of Representatives represented about 34,000 residents, today 647,000. X in that equation is nineteen. Let politicians do all the damage they can manage with a five-fold increase in representatives–it won’t be much.
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