SCOTUS Has Made Their Decisions On Redistricting. Now What?

mark46 said:

First, a simple question.
If a state is 70% Republican and 30% Democratic in the last Congressional election, is it fair for a commission to do their best to have 70-30 districts throughout the state.

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No. Political affiliations of voters should not be a consideration when districts are drawn. Laying aside the fact that it's divisive, it's also stupid and short-sighted - political allegiances change.

Equal populations, compactness, and maintaining related communities whenever possible should be the factors used.

RocksInMyHead said:

No. Political affiliations of voters should not be a consideration when districts are drawn. Laying aside the fact that it's divisive, it's also stupid and short-sighted - political allegiances change.

Equal populations, compactness, and maintaining related communities whenever possible should be the factors used.

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An interesting ideal, but hard to achieve. At least in today's climate, the people doing redistricting are almost always going to be trying to get their party to win. So we've moving in the direction of districted created so whichever party controls redistricting gets almost all of the districts.

It may be that for the moment the best we can do is say that if we the number of congressmen of each party isn't roughly the same proportion as votes cast, something is wrong.

However there's an easier solution. The current scheme of districts is the only way congressmen could be elected. Historically there have been a number of ways. The current scheme is based on a Federal law. That law can be changed. E.g. some kind of proportioinal representation.

The Roberts court, the court who sees themselves beyond reproach, has just made a mess of everything.

mark46 said:

just?

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I mean from Citizens-United to Presidents are Kings to revoking civil voting rights. They just make a mess out of everything.

mark46 said:

fair enough

You disagree with the law of the land.

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You asked about what was fair, not what was legal. Something being legal does not make it fair.

mark46 said:

The Supreme Court has clearly indicated that states have the right to construct districts to benefit the political interests.

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I'm aware.

mark46 said:

SCOTUS will not interfere that states us to promote the political power of the group in control.

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I do not expect them to, at least not this current iteration of the Court.

hedrick said:

An interesting ideal, but hard to achieve. At least in today's climate, the people doing redistricting are almost always going to be trying to get their party to win. So we've moving in the direction of districted created so whichever party controls redistricting gets almost all of the districts.

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The easiest step to take, it seems to me, would be to use non-partisan commissions rather than state legislatures to draw districts. I like California's method of picking their commission:

Commissioners are selected through a rigorous application and selection process administered by the California State Auditor. Eligible and interested individuals submit an initial application and then a supplemental application package that includes essays and letters of recommendation. Additionally, the State Auditor’s office conducts background investigations and an Applicant Review Panel is responsible for identifying 60 of the most qualified applicants—20 Democrats, 20 Republicans, and 20 who do not belong to either of those two parties—after reviewing applications, taking and considering public comments, reviewing background information, and conducting interviews in public meetings. As set out by law, each of the four legislative leaders has the opportunity to strike up to two names in each of the subpools to identify the final applicant pool. The law requires the State auditor to conduct random drawing to select the first eight commissioners from the final applicant pool identified by the Legislature and those first eight commissioners are charged with selecting the final six members from the remaining applicants in the pool.

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hedrick said:

It may be that for the moment the best we can do is say that if we the number of congressmen of each party isn't roughly the same proportion as votes cast, something is wrong.

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Not really - almost half (45%) of the US electorate is registered independent/no party preference, so (in theory) who they vote for is going to depend on the candidates, not their parties.

hedrick said:

However there's an easier solution. The current scheme of districts is the only way congressmen could be elected. Historically there have been a number of ways. The current scheme is based on a Federal law. That law can be changed. E.g. some kind of proportioinal representation.

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Proportional representation has a number of problems. First of all, it further entrenches the partisan divide. If I'm just voting for a party rather than a person, that denies me the opportunity to assess each candidate's record and principles before selecting the one that I think best represents me. I, as a Democrat, have voted for a Republican (in a local election, to be fair) as recently as last fall because I preferred his outlook and take on matters better than that of the Democratic candidate. But there is no way that I would ever (in the current climate) vote for an unspecified Republican. Second, it eliminates the concept of House reps being tied to a geographic district. While this isn't something specified by the Constitution, it is how all of the states have chosen to select their House reps, and it allows Representatives to drill down on local issues, encourages them to be involved in their communities, and gives the people more of a voice in Washington (since they elected this person to represent their district). With proportional representation, either all reps represent the whole state, or districts are assigned, and that's just not the same. Third, it makes elections challenging - either you're (essentially) swapping the primary and general elections (e.g. you vote for a party in the primary, then the winning party presents a slate of candidates in the general election) or the party is appointing representatives. Neither of those scenarios is good for the public because both give the winning party the ability to push their ideology further in whatever direction they choose, since they have full control of the candidates.

mark46 said:

It could take 20 years for this to change, given the age of the various members.

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It could, but SCOTUS is immaterial to anything that I've said (outside of any potential lawsuits to stop states and/or Congress from enacting changes).

Funny the lightning speed of redistricting legislation happened after the SCOTUS ruling.
Hilarious, even

RocksInMyHead said:

The easiest step to take, it seems to me, would be to use non-partisan commissions rather than state legislatures to draw districts. I like California's method of picking their commission:

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Committees are an improvement, but even the people in them are going to have some partisan affiliations (though, obviously, less than an elected politician). I continue to think that, if we're doing districts, a geometric requirement is the best way to end gerrymandering.

RocksInMyHead said:

Proportional representation has a number of problems. First of all, it further entrenches the partisan divide. If I'm just voting for a party rather than a person, that denies me the opportunity to assess each candidate's record and principles before selecting the one that I think best represents me. I, as a Democrat, have voted for a Republican (in a local election, to be fair) as recently as last fall because I preferred his outlook and take on matters better than that of the Democratic candidate. But there is no way that I would ever (in the current climate) vote for an unspecified Republican.

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The majority of the population seems to already vote by party, though.

RocksInMyHead said:

Second, it eliminates the concept of House reps being tied to a geographic district. While this isn't something specified by the Constitution, it is how all of the states have chosen to select their House reps, and it allows Representatives to drill down on local issues, encourages them to be involved in their communities, and gives the people more of a voice in Washington (since they elected this person to represent their district).

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The problem is that this ideal is greatly neutered by (1) gerrymandering, and (2) the sheer size of districts.

Gerrymandering is self explanatory. But the population size makes local issues redundant because it's hard for there to be "local" issues when the average district size is a whopping 761,000 people. It's impossible for a Representative to properly represent that many people. So the people they end up actually representing are the donors who give them the money necessary to reach that many people (this is also a problem with Senate races, and a drawback to changing them to popular elections).

To be fair, these issues could be at least somewhat alleviated by increasing the size of the House of Representatives. Did you know that a proposed amendment to the original Constitution was that the average district would be 50,000 people? (because there was no deadline as is normal with amendments, it's actually still pending, though it's unlikely to get passed given it would increase the size of the House to more than 6,000 people) This was viewed as important because they thought it was necessary to keep a low ratio of people to Representatives in order to keep the Representatives accountable to the people. I don't think we need to go all the way up to 6000 people, but I don't see why we can't go up to at least 1,000, which also makes gerrymandering harder.

RocksInMyHead said:

With proportional representation, either all reps represent the whole state, or districts are assigned, and that's just not the same. Third, it makes elections challenging - either you're (essentially) swapping the primary and general elections (e.g. you vote for a party in the primary, then the winning party presents a slate of candidates in the general election) or the party is appointing representatives. Neither of those scenarios is good for the public because both give the winning party the ability to push their ideology further in whatever direction they choose, since they have full control of the candidates.

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I think this overlooks two things.

The first is that proportional representation, it seems to me, instantly ends the two-party system. You want there to be more choices, proportional representation does it. The constant fear of "throwing your vote away" on a third party candidate is gone, unless it's pretty fringe (generally, proportional representation systems require you to meet a minimum percentage, usually around 5%). So even it it means my choices for Republicans and Democrats are Generic Republican, and Generic Democrat, I'd get a lot more choices (Generic Libertarian, Generic Green, Generic American Solidarity, etc.) that sure seems an improvement over what we have now.

The second is that this is presented as an all-or-nothing. Either all districts, or all proportional representation. Many (most?) countries that have proportional representation do it in addition to districts. You have a district and a representative for it, so for an election you cast a vote for your district (the way it's done now in the US) and you also cast a vote that counts towards proportional representation. It seems to me that this addresses your concerns. Granted, we'd need to increase the size of the House to make this work, but we should do that anyway.

JSRG said:

Committees are an improvement, but even the people in them are going to have some partisan affiliations (though, obviously, less than an elected politician).

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Which is why an effective committee needs a high degree of transparency and oversight. Again, see California's system.

JSRG said:

I continue to think that, if we're doing districts, a geometric requirement is the best way to end gerrymandering.

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Define "geometric requirement."

JSRG said:

The majority of the population seems to already vote by party, though.

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That is a relatively recent development brought on by the focus on partisanship.

JSRG said:

The problem is that this ideal is greatly neutered by (1) gerrymandering, and (2) the sheer size of districts.

Gerrymandering is self explanatory. But the population size makes local issues redundant because it's hard for there to be "local" issues when the average district size is a whopping 761,000 people. It's impossible for a Representative to properly represent that many people. So the people they end up actually representing are the donors who give them the money necessary to reach that many people (this is also a problem with Senate races, and a drawback to changing them to popular elections).

To be fair, these issues could be at least somewhat alleviated by increasing the size of the House of Representatives. Did you know that a proposed amendment to the original Constitution was that the average district would be 50,000 people? (because there was no deadline as is normal with amendments, it's actually still pending, though it's unlikely to get passed given it would increase the size of the House to more than 6,000 people) This was viewed as important because they thought it was necessary to keep a low ratio of people to Representatives in order to keep the Representatives accountable to the people. I don't think we need to go all the way up to 6000 people, but I don't see why we can't go up to at least 1,000, which also makes gerrymandering harder.

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I agree that the size of Congress should be increased - I've mentioned that several times in the various threads on the subject. It's just outside the scope of this thread.

JSRG said:

I think this overlooks two things.

The first is that proportional representation, it seems to me, instantly ends the two-party system. You want there to be more choices, proportional representation does it. The constant fear of "throwing your vote away" on a third party candidate is gone, unless it's pretty fringe (generally, proportional representation systems require you to meet a minimum percentage, usually around 5%). So even it it means my choices for Republicans and Democrats are Generic Republican, and Generic Democrat, I'd get a lot more choices (Generic Libertarian, Generic Green, Generic American Solidarity, etc.) that sure seems an improvement over what we have now.

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Unless you also increase the size of the House drastically, this is meaningless. 37/50 states have 10 House reps or fewer, meaning that a third party would need 10% of the vote, minimum, to pick up a single seat in any of those states. Realistically speaking, California, Florida, Texas, and NY are the only states where third parties would have any hope of picking up more than a single seat here and there. You also have issues with how to fairly divide representation in states with fewer than 5 reps (21/50 states). If you only have two districts and the vote goes 80-20, does each party still get a seat? How about 70-30? 50-25-25?

JSRG said:

The second is that this is presented as an all-or-nothing. Either all districts, or all proportional representation. Many (most?) countries that have proportional representation do it in addition to districts. You have a district and a representative for it, so for an election you cast a vote for your district (the way it's done now in the US) and you also cast a vote that counts towards proportional representation. It seems to me that this addresses your concerns. Granted, we'd need to increase the size of the House to make this work, but we should do that anyway.

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It seems to me that your main argument is that the House needs to have more members, which I agree with. Not sure that needs to go hand in hand with completely changing the way our representative system works though - it seems to me that a larger House on its own solves pretty much all of the extant issues with the current system.

RocksInMyHead said:

Unless you also increase the size of the House drastically, this is meaningless. 37/50 states have 10 House reps or fewer, meaning that a third party would need 10% of the vote, minimum, to pick up a single seat in any of those states. Realistically speaking, California, Florida, Texas, and NY are the only states where third parties would have any hope of picking up more than a single seat here and there. You also have issues with how to fairly divide representation in states with fewer than 5 reps (21/50 states). If you only have two districts and the vote goes 80-20, does each party still get a seat? How about 70-30? 50-25-25?

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I think one method works basically like this:

1. calculate 'even share' by taking 1/seats.

[in the 4 rep example, X=0.25 or 25%]

2. Find the whole number of times X divides in to the total for each party, these are the "full seats"

[80-20 becomes 3 and 0
70-30 becomes 2 and 1
50-25-25 becomes 2 and 1 and 1]

3 Subtract the whole number of "full seats" * X from the raw numbers to get the remainders:

[80-20 leaves 5 and 20
70-30 leaves 20 and 5
50-25-25 leaves 0 and 0 and 0, you made that one too perfect ]

4. The largest remainder gets the last seat.

[80-20: final 3-1
70-30: final 3-1
50-25-25: final 2-1-1]

( I think if there is more than one "remainder" seat then the largest remainder gets the largest, then the nest largest, etc.

Let's change the 50-25-25 to 53-24-23
Full seats are then 2-0-0
Remainders are 3-24-23
First of two remainder seats goes to "24" for 2-1-0 leaving remainders of 3-0-23
Second remainder seat goes to "23" for 2-1-1

Apportionment works like this:

Set "enumerated population" P_i for all states.
Set "next seat number" N_i to 1 for all states.

Loop until all seats are assigned (n = 385 as 50 current seats are awarded for being a state)

In each iteration:

Find state "i" with largest value of P_i/N_i
Assign one seat to state i
Increase N_i by 1
Repeat

I note this because it may be mathematically the same as the method I listed, or it is another method used in apportioning integer power to uneven groups.

The exact details of the congressional apportionment method are given here:


Instead of P_i/N_i it uses P_i/SQRT(N_i*(N_i+1) ) which is very similar and trends towards the same formula as N_i increases.

(Note that the Census Bureau's "n" is equal to my N_i+1 because they include the "automatic" seat in their "n".)

I will not "bless" you with the code I wrote 18 years ago to read a population table and print a list of ranked seats like this one:

RocksInMyHead said:

Define "geometric requirement."

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You're right, I should have clarified that--I probably meant to originally, but meant go go back, and then forgot.

What I mean is you set a geometrical requirement as to what the districts would be like (while still requiring them to all be of the same population), and whatever map that can be found that best meets that requirement will be used.

So for example, this article (arguing for an anti-gerrymandering amendment to the Constitution) suggests:

"If a state elects Representatives by electoral districts (whether its entire delegation or only a portion), all persons in the state shall be included in exactly one such district; each district shall elect an equal number of Representatives; each district shall be contiguous; the smallest district shall have at least nine-hundred-ninety-nine persons for every thousand persons in the largest district; and the average straight-line distance between each person’s residence and the geographic center of that person’s district shall be the minimum known to be possible at the time prescribed by state or federal law for the determination of districts."

More information on this is discussed in this section of the article (this link should take you directly to the specific part). More or less, there will be a particular map that best fits this requirement. These things can be arrived at by computer calculations, and if anyone can find one that better fits the requirements, then that one gets chosen.

Another one I remember someone suggesting is requiring states to have their districts with the lowest possible total district border length.

The key point is to set a geometrical requirement that requires districts to be compact, which ruins gerrymandering attempts. For gerrymandering to work, you need to have really awkwardly shaped districts. If you essentially put in a geometrical requirement as to what the shapes have to be, you end it.

JSRG said:

You're right, I should have clarified that--I probably meant to originally, but meant go go back, and then forgot.

What I mean is you set a geometrical requirement as to what the districts would be like (while still requiring them to all be of the same population), and whatever map that can be found that best meets that requirement will be used.

So for example, this article (arguing for an anti-gerrymandering amendment to the Constitution) suggests:

"If a state elects Representatives by electoral districts (whether its entire delegation or only a portion), all persons in the state shall be included in exactly one such district; each district shall elect an equal number of Representatives; each district shall be contiguous; the smallest district shall have at least nine-hundred-ninety-nine persons for every thousand persons in the largest district; and the average straight-line distance between each person’s residence and the geographic center of that person’s district shall be the minimum known to be possible at the time prescribed by state or federal law for the determination of districts."

More information on this is discussed in this section of the article (this link should take you directly to the specific part). More or less, there will be a particular map that best fits this requirement. These things can be arrived at by computer calculations, and if anyone can find one that better fits the requirements, then that one gets chosen.

Another one I remember someone suggesting is requiring states to have their districts with the lowest possible total district border length.

The key point is to set a geometrical requirement that requires districts to be compact, which ruins gerrymandering attempts. For gerrymandering to work, you need to have really awkwardly shaped districts. If you essentially put in a geometrical requirement as to what the shapes have to be, you end it.

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That makes sense (and I will point out that one of the three ideal priorities for drawing districts that I initially stated was "compactness"). The main pitfall with making a rigid geometric requirement like the ones you suggested is that you run the risk of forcing awkward boundaries that split communities into different districts. Obviously, the line has to go somewhere, but some places make more sense than others. Maximum compactness should be the goal, but it frequently makes more sense to have a slightly less compact district that keeps a community together rather than splitting it between two districts. That's where computer programs are going to struggle more.

mark46 said:

SCOTUS Has Made Their Decisions On Redistricting. Now What?​

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Now we celebrate the elimination of racist-drawn districts.