Looking forward to see comments say "Math and science cannot solve social/political problems".
And I anticipate that there must be someone argue that "for some problems, there is no solution, math is useless in these areas". If there is no solution, you still get nothing no matter how hard you study sociology/politics.
Math doesn’t tell us what outcome to prefer — only how to accomplish it once we do. Eg, do we prefer an outcome that gives everyone maximum individual impact or one that maximally balances the power of racial tribes?
The reason the US doesn’t use math to solve gerrymandering is that it prefers to have districts focus on maximizing the power of minority racial tribes ahead of equal representation of all voters.
- - - - -
Of course, that’s a contentious choice — with some people believing that such racist policies favoring minority groups are akin to the divide-and-conquer used to subjugate India by the British.
Understanding the pushback against “DIE” requires understanding the view of elites engaging in neo-colonial tactics to subjugate the average American, eg by disrupting class movements along racial fault lines.
> The reason the US doesn’t use math to solve gerrymandering
The US uses math to maximise partisan outcomes, when US Republicans have the chance to set boundaries they use software and consultants to crack Democrat districts and maximise chances for Republican county wins (and, of course, vice versa).
Countries such as Australia also use math to lay out districts, however they don't put the fozes in charge of the henhouse and instead have independant groups proposing new maps on the basis of party neutral constraints, take submissions and challenges onboard and operate in a transparent manner.
No system is perfect and naturally Australia at various times and in various locales has had "gerymandering" complaints and scandals - but nothing on the order of the US skews .. even after normalising for population scales.
True, but only one of these parties ever talks about fixing the system. To be fair, of course, that's partially because the data says they'd win almost every election if it came down to a straight popular vote, so any system not specifically gamed against them is in their favor.
> True, but only one of these parties ever talks about fixing the system. To be fair, of course, that's partially because the data says they'd win almost every election if it came down to a straight popular vote, so any system not specifically gamed against them is in their favor.
Democrats in New York produced a map so gerrymandered, it would have counterbalanced Republican gerrymandering elsewhere, but it was struck down by the courts:
Right — and the reason that the US doesn’t have a formulaic solution to prevent that is due to intentional racial gerrymandering.
They’ve chosen a different strategy, with different outcomes. That’s the sense in which mathematics can’t solve a political problem. US voting maps hinge on the “one drop” rule — where the government says anyone who is multi-racial counts as black but not their other races.
> Based on that guidance, census responses from people who marked both the "Black" and "White" boxes should be counted with the Black population. And when focused on discrimination specifically against Black people, responses marking boxes for two or more minority races including "Black" should also be counted as Black.
For a great (and entertaining!) look into how you can use simulations to generate these types of maps you should check out this video by the superb channel AlphaPhoenix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq-Y7crQo44
In a two party system like the US, the parties are normally self balancing.
Ie. Whichever party isn't currently in power finds it easier to find supporters, because they can pick up anyone who doesn't like what the currently in power guys are doing.
That balancing effect means that even if you artificially gave one party 10% extra votes in each election, then after 1000 years you'd probably have equal numbers of terms won by each party.
Therefore, in my view gerrymandering doesn't really have a negative effect on democracy. Sure - one party might use it to win one election, but they can't get ahead in the long term using it.
Even if gerrymandering evens out over long times, on short terms it can let a party have control over an/a few elections and use that to enact changes that will affect the future.
Sometimes you don't need 15 years to get something done, just one term.
For this to work I think the assumption is that the benefit of gerrymandering is less than the "anyone who doesn't like the in power guys" effect. e.g. % of disgruntled swing voters.
> Therefore, in my view gerrymandering doesn't really have a negative effect on democracy. Sure - one party might use it to win one election, but they can't get ahead in the long term using it.
Read up on “cracking and packing”, it’s pretty obvious that gerrymandering provides a distinct benefit to the party that controls the map.
Gerrymandering causes another major long-term problem that you’re overlooking: it creates mathematically safe seats that the opposition party can’t reasonably win, even when they gain support. This is a major reason we are seeing more extremists in office, because they no longer need to win by aiming for the center, they win by being as extreme as possible because the party already controls the seat. The election becomes a de facto purity test, and you see this play out over and over again.
That only matters to people who are alive today and for the next several hundred years. On a long enough time line, things will balance out, or humanity will go extinct. Either way, you’re dead way before it happens, so why care about silly things like gerrymandering?
Because democracies aren’t guaranteed to survive if they don’t remain democratic, and this has played out many times in history. E.g. Germany was a parliamentary democracy before it fell to the Third Reich.
There is zero guarantee that just because we have a democracy today means that it will be there forever.
Why care about anything if you're just going to die? Are you suggesting we should all go full on hedonism and give up civilization-building? What if people enjoy civilization-building and caring about things that "don't matter"?
I've never voted, never will (and before anyone starts, I'm very, very proud of that.
One of the reasons I don't vote is because of gerrymandering.
I don't see it as a 'silly thing' as it affects me, mine, and those around now, because of actions in the past. The dead people left a game for the living to live with.
Painfully bad take. Talking about how gerrymandering doesn’t matter because a millennium from now, it’ll balance out. It can lead to immense suffering in the short-to-reasonably-long-term.
Gerrymandering could lead to a bunch of complete lunatics taking office and doing things so detrimental to the environment that we could never recover, or they could enact policies that stand for several centuries and restrict intellectual and technological advancements (a new dark ages).
But why play with hypotheticals when we can instead talk about real life: recently in the US, gerrymandering led to enough representatives getting elected that they were able to overload the third branch of government with partisan hacks. The partisan hacks then overturned a very important court case, despite reportedly 70% of the country’s population supporting said court case.
I’m with you, though, fuck people who are living today. Stop being so selfish! It’ll balance out in a thousand years or so.
It really doesn't matter how many people support an issue. If that issue isn't in their purview, they can't push it through. From the get go it was on very shakey ground. If you want federal oversight of abortion then add an amendment to the constitution.
I'm so tired of hearing "government should do x - it's for the people". The problem today is that the federal government powers, enumerated by the constitution, are continually expanding. If everything happened at a local level there would be an opportunity to correct it. It's much more difficult at the federal level. Comparatively, gerrymandering is minor.
Can you explain how
gerrymandering got RvW overturned?
>equal numbers of terms won by each party. Therefore, in my view gerrymandering doesn't really have a negative effect on democracy
The point of democracy is not to deliver an equal number of victories to each of the parties. It is to reflect the will of the people. A 10 percent lean in one direction is a 10 percent negative effect on democracy.
You realise the boundaries are redrawn every few years? So a party that is in power can redraw them to stay in front of demographic change and rebalancing
I don’t know. The positive argument for districts is that your representative represents local political needs which isn’t nothing and local needs definitely exist and this is a way of expressing “hey, your federal policies are hurting me locally here”. This does happen I think although it’s unclear how effectively that gets communicated.
A big part of the problem is that gerrymandering is only really effective when the House of Representatives stays fixed in size. That’s actually fixable and would significantly reduce the effect size of gerrymandering (and also reduces lobbying power because you need to corrupt a lot more people which gets extremely more expensive).
One way to do proportional representation which I think works well is to blend it with districts. All districts get a representative but you add floating seats that are filled in proportionally based on overall vote count. That way you both get local representation in a larger system while largely removing the benefits of gerrymandering because the power balance isn’t determined by the map.
The problem is when you're talking about representatives it becomes impossible to vote out some bum once he has some seniority with a proportional system. Only the low man on the totem pole is ever really in danger. It means the parties will fossilize around the old codgers.
Granted, that's what gerrymandering is intended to accomplish as well, but at least with a district based system you can in theory vote a specific guy out. It also means you have one guy you can turn to if you have a grievance, it's not a big blob of a party for your voice to get lost in.
I asked my house rep about some legislation they supported and they basically told me to fuck off. I'm in a safe district so there is absolutely nothing I can do to oppose them. You get rid of bums in proportional representation by voting for a different party. Individual politicians matter less in that system anyway, so it really just comes down to whether you agree with the party apparatus as a whole.
Am I crazy or shouldn’t “districts” actually be composed of groups of people who are affected by legislation? An orthogonal approach could offer some solutions — such as degree of connectedness, approximated by number of roads. So, if we just cluster the most interconnected areas together, would that be unfair? Or is it just more gerrymandering?
FWIW these are the rules in the UK [1] (where districts are called constituencies):
(1) A Boundary Commission may take into account, if and to such extent as they think fit –
(a) special geographical considerations, including in particular the size, shape and accessibility of a constituency;
(b) local government boundaries which exist, or are prospective, on the review date;
(c) boundaries of existing constituencies;
(d) any local ties that would be broken by changes in constituencies;
(e) the inconveniences attendant on such changes.
These do capture the idea of people being connected, but only in an extremely vague way.
Probably more important is that the boundary commissions are designed to be politically neutral, and in practice, seem to be. I don't think i've ever heard complaints otherwise.
Could you use a cake slicing algorithm? I.e. you get one party to choose a fraction, and the other party chooses whether it's theirs or not, until the number of fractions is gone? Does this scale to n parties of different shares and allegiances splitting a 2d plane?
Or maybe just generate the borders with a heat map after elections with PR?
As the sibling to your comment noted that cake slicing only works like that if there’s a homogeneous preference for slices between parties but that’s not the case with districts.
What I don’t get here though is what is the other party picking in this scenario. Is this saying in lue of voting just give both parties equal amount of districts to represent? Then what’s the point of cake slicing?
The "slices" are done so that each slice have roughly the same amount of people.
So if one party has sliced things so that all the slices are nicely cracked and packed, the "picking" just doesn't matter. The slicing is the picking.
However, a variation of your idea is to have each party take turns drawing districts. But that doesn't really work, because you'd quickly learn that the winning strategy is to draw districts to maximize the other party's voters. Because you want to force the other party to draw districts favorable to you.
You can't apply cake slicing logic because in that scenario everyone likes the (implied homogeneous) cake equally. With gerrymandering, how we slice the cake determines how appealing it is to each party involved, so the gerrymandering slicer could slice a district that would never appeal to the other party. The other party would of course reject it, so you'll at best be in a deadlock.
Whatever solution you might implement to avoid a deadlock can't detect which party is being "unreasonable" in causing the deadlock, so you would need to have another different way of drawing districts, and whatever method that is is likely to be affected by gerrymanderers too. Even something basic like using a uniform 2D grid would likely bias one party or the other, giving an incentive for that party to desire a deadlock for any reason, as they would then win by default.
If carefully done, something like this (where parties play a game to decide the borders) might avoid partisan gerrymandering, but there's also reason to be concerned about bipartisan gerrymandering where elected representatives from 2 (or more) parties prefer to have safe seats, so they agree to group voters with similar ones in a way that means it takes a very large swing for anyone to lose a seat and change the result.
For many years California had a bipartisan gerrymander that made the 60:40 D:R state have about 60/40 in its state legislature and US House districts and every seat was a safe seat. That's a certain kind of democracy death. :-/
I'd much rather have any algorithm that gives no power to any parties, and solves a better answer to the question "what is a district for?" (my short short: Local representation for local issues)
As other comments have also noted, lots of people don't want _geographic_ representation but some kind of other issue/identity Proportional Representation. Yup. Also true. My dream State Legislature has a PR Senate at-large across the whole state in batches of 20 or so, and a small-local-district House.
District based voting isn't democratic. Proportion representation is the only real democratic choice, the district based voting simply doesn't work.
Cheating with elections is so much easier with district voting than proportional representation. The founders of the constitution hated parties but ended up with the game that leaves only a two party competition. That's hardly a choice, it's a single bit.
A real democratic system allows you to grow a political movement naturally over the years to take over and replace corrupt parties peacefully. But district voting system allows two party system to remain in power indefinitely. It completely prevents the entire point of democracy of allowing peaceful transition of power and replacement of corrupt power structures.
There's an additional problem, which is why isn't even harder to replace district voting, that those in charge of counting votes are local to each district, which is letting the car guard the cream.
In proper system with proportional representation, you need to ensure that each location doesn't abuse it's power to count votes and to fabricate population counts to gain an advantage, and you can only do so if you bring random people from different locations to count the votes in each place.
Proportional representation is great when the population is fairly homogeneous with similar political issues and goals, and you don't need a union of different independent regions and groups. The European Union would not work with proportional representation, and countries like Iceland would struggle with their very large difference between city population and country population.
The point of disproportional representation is to reduce the political power imbalance between of high population areas with low population areas. The alternative is to split up the country or union so that each unique area and demographic govern themselves in isolation. Few people want that outcome so a compromise has to be chosen. In iceland as an example, the combined country districts has a majority if they all band together, while the Reykjavík district is by size the absolute single biggest and has well above 50% of Iceland population. Its a compromise that while political power is still very much centered in Reykjavík, they can't blindly ignore the country population.
Ask someone from an urban area any basic question about a rural area, and they will be clueless about some simple things. I once had a friend who grew up in Chicago ask me if a cow was a Buffalo because it was brown and he thought cows were into black and white. That’s a silly example but it applies even more so to more meaningful policy decisions that happen is rural areas.
The states in the US aren’t divided on urban/rural lines though. They are divided arbitrarily.
Someone from Hoboken, New Jersey has a lot more in common with someone from Brooklyn than the latter does with someone from a farm in rural upstate NY.
In theory this is not a big deal because of the 10th amendment and the states having legislatures that provide some level of urban/rural balance. In practice, it's more complicated.
Maybe, but someone from a farm in rural upstate New York is also quite different from someone from a farm in Georgia. Because of mass media and news, Americans aren’t necessarily attuned to their cultural differences.
Anecdote: my parents moved to the Virginia side of the DC suburbs in 1989. In 2018, they moved 50 miles to the Maryland side, to be near my wife and our kids. I moved around a lot between high school and now so I didn’t notice it. But my dad (he travels all over the developing world for his career) immediately noticed. (And they both hate Maryland, lol.) He can tell the accents are different. The way people make small talk is different. In his view (as a Bangladeshi and then a Virginian) people are less courteous. When he pointed it out, I couldn’t unsee it. Maryland is the southernmost part of the mid-Atlantic (NJ/DE/PA). Virginia is the northernmost part of the south. Even just looking at places 25 miles on either side of DC, the Maryland side has way more Jewish people and Catholics, and way fewer Asians. (Growing up in northern Virginia in the 1990s, I don’t think I ever met a Catholic. Apparently, Virginia is only 8% Catholic compared to 20% for Maryland.)
I have no reason to disbelieve your anecdote, but I think even if true, it’s a bit of a special case. Most Americans’ culture is determined by the metro area they live in (or lack thereof), rather than by state boundaries.
Because humans aren’t atomized individuals, and instead belong to communities that themselves have a political identity. Therefore there’s a multi-dimensional optimization space, which involves not just how to make the decision (majority vote, etc.) but where to make the decision. For example, if you had a national majority vote to decide Puerto Rico’s political status (independence or statehood), Puerto Ricans probably wouldn’t be happy about that.
There is a reason that virtually every country has some form of multi-level government. And in a multi-level government, non-majoritarian voting at higher levels can help protect the integrity of the multi-level system.
> For example, if you had a national majority vote to decide Puerto Rico’s political status (independence or statehood), Puerto Ricans probably wouldn’t be happy about that.
"Two in three Americans (66%) in a June Gallup survey said they favor admitting Puerto Rico, now a U.S. territory, as a U.S. state. This is consistent with the 59% to 65% range of public support Gallup has recorded for Puerto Rico statehood since 1962." https://news.gallup.com/poll/260744/americans-continue-suppo...
The point is of course not whether the national vote would happen to agree with what the puerto Ricans would want, but the fact the whatever they want (which may or may not be statehood, don't forget a lot of people there are against statehood) would be drowned out by the rest of the country, and despite being ostensibly democratic, that doesn't mean it (nation vote) is the best solution.
The only thing stopping Puerto Rican statehood is the lack of majority rule in the US, and the fact that Republicans are heavily against Puerto Rican statehood. It's a partisan issue: "The majority of Democrats showed support for statehood for both D.C. (61.8%) and Puerto Rico (69.7%)" while among Republicans, only 26.7% supported D.C. statehood and 34.8% supported Puerto Rican statehood.
The majority of supporting Puerto Ricans is quite slim (especially compared to the national support). A couple percentage points lower and the majority wouldn't be in favor. So my point was that if you _determined_ the question in a national vote versus a local vote, locals might be quite upset about it (particularly those who lost - if it was a local loss, then they fit to participate and lost, if it was national, then they never got a say).
Although, if you're now switching to argue that the national opinion is _against_ (or at least the republicans would block it), then this actually excellently illustrates the original point that there are decisions which shouldn't be made nationally instead of locally!
> The majority of supporting Puerto Ricans is quite slim (especially compared to the national support). A couple percentage points lower and the majority wouldn't be in favor.
So? Majorities are often slim. Just look at US elections. The difference is whether you have majority rule or minority rule.
> Although, if you're now switching to argue that the national opinion is _against_ (or at least the republicans would block it)
I'm not switching, I'm just saying it's a partisan issue, and Republicans happen to be over-represented in the national government due to territorial representation, which is how they're able to block Puerto Rican statehood, against the wishes of the majority. And it's pretty obvious why Republican leaders want to block Puerto Rican and D.C. statehood, because that would likely lead to additional Senate and House seats for Democrats.
conflating Puerto Rico and DC statehood is frustrating to me.
Puerto Rico should choose independence or statehood, and the Congress should approve either way. Continuance of the colonialist/protectionist status is shocking.
But D.C. was originally not supposed to have any citizens. Only federal government offices, foreign embassies, and monuments/parks/museums. Perhaps Maryland can reclaim part of the district, as Virginia did.
58% of Americans live in the state where they were born, and the median American lives 18 miles from their mom. Statehood absolutely is a thing.
It’s absolutely hilarious that we’re watching Supra-national unions disintegrate (how much longer will Scotland be part of the UK?) but some Americans think a unitary majority-rules government in a country of 330 million people is a good idea. Madness.
The same thing you do if 3 people want 10 people to pick their cotton for free.
I can’t even tell what you’re advocating for. Minority rule? Anarchy? Democracy were you always win?
No system is perfect. Much control should be local. In zero sum situations, there isn’t a better answer than majority rule. That can be imperfect or even evil, but so can every other approach.
I'm suggesting that the baseline assumption that majority rule is some selection of "good" or "ideal" or "preferred" is at minimum misguided and at worst downright evil. Sprinkle in some geographic distinction and you edge much closer to the "evil" end of the scale.
Speaking for the US, but as long as Monsanto and Tyson make money selling the food their farms grow in the cities I'm not worried about a John Galt-style "strike" of agriculture. Doesn't make the existing system fair or right (it's honestly disturbing to me how much agribusiness is centralized), but I honestly have no concerns about the rural food going away because the rural population is upset with the urban population.
"Most people in food-growing regions are conservative, so we all must bow down to conservative interests" is a tiresome and ridiculous ultimatum that American politics needs to get past.
Obstetricians are strongly left-leaning. Do we need to bow down to them if we want babies? Should they get 5x the vote because otherwise women and babies will all die in droves in childbirth?
Most people benefit from and choose to participate in society, and in exchange each person should get the same voice as the rest. We don't need to grant them any special political status above everyone else in order to entice them to do their chosen jobs. If someone decides they won't sell food in a city that voted for Biden or deliver babies for people from a Trump county, great have fun with that. Most people are less mindkilled on politics and will fill in the gap.
I have no idea why people jump to this argument any time it's halfway relevant. It's... well, put it this way: do farmers want money?
Look, "liberal" Hollywood is largely conservatives at the top. Big farm owners & farm conglomerates aren't going to stop selling what people want just because they're mad that women can get abortions or they need a license for their semi-auto rifles or whatever. The almighty dollar rules commerce.
Curious (not trying to be snarky), where and when did you grow up? Because I am grateful I was taught the answers to these questions in elementary school civics lessons
The simple answer is that there is no natural law that dictate that people work together. Getting people to cooperate involve compromises.
Taken to an extreme, would you want a global government that had proportional representation? Most of the worlds population is not located in the geographic location of north America. With large international agreements, should EU, US and China get one vote each, or should it be based on populations?
To take a other perspective, is populate based voting the best system? In the past we had systems based on wealth or families, with the concept being that fairness is about stakes in the political outcome. Why should anyone get a vote if they don't have a stake in the outcome, and if they do have a stake, shouldn't votes be proportional to that stake? Populate based voting makes more sense in time with military drafts where every individual has an identical stake in the political outcome.
Looking at the EU the answer is both more simplistic and more complex. The reason the majority is beholden by the minority is that otherwise it would just be the German empire under a different name. German votes get slightly less power than citizens of other nations, and in return we have a union. It doesn't make Germany powerless, as they have more representatives than any other country, which also make other people upset. Why should Germany get more votes than Luxembourg? Is a system of one country one vote more fair?
> In the past we had systems based on wealth or families, with the concept being that fairness is about stakes in the political outcome. Why should anyone get a vote if they don't have a stake in the outcome
I would think those with no/ little wealth have a large stake in the outcome of politics.
I am not advocating, and if I were to extract some form of advocacy from it it would be that cooperation generally require compromises in order for people to feel that it is worth it. Fairness is based on when everyone involved feel that things are fair enough to participate.
What "between the lines" stuff are you trying to find?
Both the EU and Iceland have proportional electoral systems, with districts having several seats. But the way seats are allocated to the districts in both systems isn't strictly proportional, with less populous districts having fewer electors per seat than the more populous regions.
I think you and OP are talking past each other. A purely proportional voting system is not a good idea for the reasons you mentioned. That's why a lot of countries including the US have a bicameral system: One where regions/states are represented proportionally and one where seats are distributed equally.
I believe OPs critic is wrt the district based voting system of the House of Representatives. Having a winner takes it all system per district seat is a really bad idea and just a result of a limited understanding of election dynamics at that time and some restrictions how election results could be communicated before the advent of telegraphy:
A proportional system forces states to first collect all votes from all districts (a huge task for a state like Texas when only horses and a few rail roads are available for transportation) then collecting and counting the votes at the capital of the state and then sending messengers back to each district to announce results. When each district calculates their winner independently this problem is alleviated.
Nowadays it's clear that such a system will inevitably create a two party system. The fact that the president is also elected by an electoral college (which in most states is also a winner takes it all system) further enforces an effective two party system.
Just a nit, strictly speaking, the electoral college is just a system where states must delegate the power to vote for president to a group of people (the expectation being that they should make an informed decision to further their interests based on facts on the ground in the capital). It's also a form of indirection: you don't vote for president, the best you can do is appoint people you can trust to make a good decision (similarly, there was originally a layer of indirection for senators, who were appointed by state legislatures, not by state vote). Of course, this is essentially abolished because people wanted more direct control over the government.
Regarding district level representation being obviously a bad idea - not necessarily. Since senators represent the state (and wasn't even voted upon directly by the people), representatives are the way local (populist) interests get represented. This only breaks down once when people start having general party allegiance (both at the ballot and in mind share), which I'd argue is itself caused by the fact that we vote directly on appointments which are far beyond our locality (senators but mainly the president), which then spills over to our choices of representatives.
Why should the house of representatives reflect interests of different districts? It's supposed to represent interests of the states. For matters that are only relevant to one district they should most likely be dealt with at the state level and not federally.
No, the senate represents the interests of the states. The house represents people (which is why they are for voted by citizens - even when the senate was appointed by state legislatures, and why different states have different numbers of representatives).
I'm not sure really what the question is. In practice, they are voted for by district, so they represent the people of the district...
> Its a compromise that while political power is still very much centered in Reykjavík, they can't blindly ignore the country population.
I don't understand arguments like this. This logic is symmetric! Can't Reykjavík residents equally claim that their interests are being "blindly ignored" by the rural population who rule them? Isn't there a "power imbalance" at work already? Why does cutting the population based on location make sense to "reduce the political power imbalance" but not by other demographic metrics like gender or age or religion which also correlate with political preference?
This argument[1] seems to take as a prior that not just any minority group, but specific minority groups[2] need to be given power disproportionate to its population? If someone tried to deploy this logic in favor of another minority group (Catholics? Men? Trade workers?) you'd agree that would be wrong, right?
[1] Which we all know isn't about Iceland at all.
[2] Suspiciously, always groups aligned with the person making the argument.
Iceland has multiple levels of government (national and municipal). A wide range of things are handled at the municipal level. Folks in Reykjavík can govern themselves by simple majority vote. What they need more than a majority for us to govern folks outside Reykjavík.
Location is special—because it’s special. It’s incorrect to think of it as just another characteristic of individuals. Humans live in their geographical surroundings, and location creates natural boundaries and limits on people. I’m from Bangladesh, which in my parent’s lifetime declared war on Pakistan—a country where people share the same race and religion—so it could govern itself instead of being a far-flung province. In that case Bangladesh actually had a slight majority of the combined population, but it wouldn’t have been any different if it had 1/4 of the population. The point was to make to make the voting more closely associated with the land.
> Iceland has multiple levels of government (national and municipal). A wide range of things are handled at the municipal level. Folks in Reykjavík can govern themselves by simple majority vote. What they need more than a majority for us to govern folks outside Reykjavík.
Again: Rural Iceland can govern itself at the municipal level. Folks outside Reykjavík can govern themselves. What they need more than a majority for is to govern folks in Reykjavík.
Get the point? It's symmetric! Why is one direction right and one wrong? Why do rural Icelanders[1] matter more in your calculus? If the population inversion flipped and there were fewer Reykjavíkers than outsiders, would you really be making the same argument to reduce the voting power of the rural population?
So we get arguments like this:
> Location is special—because it’s special.
Yeah, pretty much.
This is just a losing argument, logically, and you know it. This is like when left wingers try to go to bat for affirmative action as a permanent policy instead of a temporary workaround: it just doesn't work. We all agree that everyone should be equal, right? Right? So one person, one vote is the clear goal here. Trying to construct policy arguments around bad logic is poor governance.
[1] And, again, we all know we're not talking about Iceland.
> If the population inversion flipped and there were fewer Reykjavíkers than outsiders, would you really be making the same argument to reduce the voting power of the rural population?
Yes. I don’t know about the history of this in Iceland. But in the US, voter distribution helped Democrats for much of the 20th century, because rural voters were a key part of the FDR coalition. JFK won by just 200,000 popular votes, but over 80 electoral votes. Biden had a popular vote margin of 4.5 points compared to JFK’s 0.2 points. But JFK had a bigger electoral vote margin than Biden. Obama, who did well with rural voters, could have lost the 2012 popular vote to Romney and still won the electoral vote. Republicans weren’t complaining about the electoral college back then.
> Yeah, pretty much.
This is just a losing argument, logically, and you know it.
It’s the winning argument. We have an entire world based on location. People fight wars so they can align voting with location. The minority view on this issue are the individualists, why everyone else attaches so much importance to soil.
> People fight wars so they can align voting with location.
This is a needless digression, and it's clear you won't change your mind. But FWIW, this is 100% backwards. Wars are over "location" because by definition it's not possible to fight a war to win voting share or opinions[1]. War can win territory, period. That's all it does. So we've traditionally aligned our political boundaries with whatever lines were drawn up by the last conqueror to come through the region.
That's a bug! Democracy is the fix for this disaster. You're claiming the disaster is a feature!
[1] It is possible, however, to use the tools of war to affect demographic distributions. We call that "genocide", and I really don't think you want to be aligning your logic in this direction.
> This is a needless digression, and it's clear you won't change your mind.
It’s not a digression. “Democracy” isn’t just about voting mechanisms. People all over the world care about self determination—governing whatever they consider to be their own society.
> Wars are over "location" because by definition it's not possible to fight a war to win voting share or opinions
“Opinions” aren’t what glue people together. And the things that do glue people together are locational, for the same reason wars are. As long as humans exist primarily in meat space, geographic boundaries will also naturally reflect people’s families, neighbors, workplaces, recreational places, etc. Particular boundaries might be redrawn, etc., but the relevant boundaries will be geographic. The average American lives only 18 miles from their mother. 58% of Americans live in the state where they were born. 1 in 6 have never left their home stage.
> Democracy is the fix for this disaster. You're claiming the disaster is a feature!
Democracy doesn’t fix the problem, because democracy presupposes that a particular group of people have consented to being part of a body politic on certain terms. “I trust you enough to participate in joint decision making with you” is a threshold issue, before you get to “what is the mathematical technique for making a decision jointly.”
The European Union does already have proportional representation. In addition, reducing the size of multi-member districts (see Spanish electoral system) and increasing the threshold (Germany) are ways to reduce the number of very small parties in Parliament.
This is completely backwards. The most charitable interpretation is you're thinking the entire country would have proportional representation?
You can still have proportional representation on a state level. This allows minorities who might be 10% or less of the population to have some representation. Instead we have situations like North Carolina where the GOP won by 1-2% but has a supermajority or in 2018 in Wisconsin where the GOP got 38% of the vote yet got a supermajority.
The other issue here, particular to the US, is that small states have disproportionate power. No one really predicted 200+ years ago that one state would have 40 million people and another 500,000 yet both have equivalent power in the Senate.
So for the European Union, proportional representation would most sensibly be done on a country-level, not over the entire EU.
I don’t think not “democratic” is the right phrasing. Democracy is a multi-dimensional design space. I think it’s more accurate to say that district based voting prioritizes a value (connection between a constituency and single, independent legislator) that’s become less salient in the age of mass media and powerful political parties.
I agree that proportional representation would be better. It's painful living in a "purple" state when that means one party handily wins state-wide elections but the other has a right grip on state legislature.
>In proper system with proportional representation, you need to ensure that each location doesn't abuse it's power to count votes and to fabricate population counts to gain an advantage, and you can only do so if you bring random people from different locations to count the votes in each place.
There are protections for the voting and counting processes. Each candidate gets to send a representative (often a lawyer) to audit. And the workers are chosen from the community. Allowing non-residents to become poll workers would quickly lead to national political groups sending partisan members across districts.
Population counts are created by the federal Bureau of the Census. Unless there's a constitutional amendment, that's a guarantee. Abd they're one of the last agencies we should fear about becoming politically corrupted.
We can keep the districts—which people seem to like—and get rid of the easily-rigged elections by:
- establishing multi-member districts
- electing those members via a proportional (e.g. party list) or semi-proportional (e.g. ranked choice) voting system
The first of these is actually pretty common at the municipal level (think at-large city/county council seats), but unfortunately are almost always chosen by plurality means, which means that the dominant party within the district almost always sweeps. You really need both features for this to improve on the single-member districts.
There are lots of different voting mechanisms around the world. So e are "better" in the sense that people (including me) like them more... but...
Games mature and you end up with some sort of antipattern party politics emerging.
Eg in many multiparty systems extremist small parties can strongarm governments. Acceptability to the majority isn't a thing. Party leaders become little chiefs. Not saying it's worse. It might even be better, but it's not much better.
Also, the US has relatively strong separation of powers. The house, senate and president are weak independently of eachother. Weak institutions and weak parties will probably result in complete indecisiveness.
Imo, if we're suggesting progress on democracy, we need more radical steps. Eg a randomly selected representative body.
"Weak institutions and weak parties will probably result in complete indecisiveness."
The other option is that they learn to work together for decent compromises. It's also possible that slow legislation is not a design flaw but rather a feature. The way it is now is mostly stalemates, virtue signaling (passing bills they know will be vetoed), and jamming laws through as fast as possible without any true debate.
Aye, the slowness and "design by committee" aspect of a large legislative body was known to the writers of the constitution. They wanted it to move slow, to ensure due consideration.
That it would lead to deadlock or other problems became rapidly clear -- i.e. the Vice President of the USA shooting the head of the opposing party in a duel -- and we've seen things like the consolidation of power in the President as a response.
> the US has relatively strong separation of powers
But each level has the same two parties competing for it! So your only outcomes are "deadlock" or "tyranny of the 51%". It's particularly silly for things like the Supreme Court where judges are given partisan life appointments.
I'll take "deadlock" or "tyranny" as exaggerations for emphasis.
"Tyranny" isn't more or less likely with multi-party. In recent times, a lot of democracies have move to increasingly smaller large parties. But historically, a lot of parliaments have had parties with >51% or parliament... equivalent to having house+senate+presidency, with less opportunity for defection... and mostly under weaker supreme courts.
"Deadlock" works differently in parliamentary systems but... generally tend to be more deadlocked. That's why parliamentary systems often have so many early elections. Deadlock is (assumed to be) absolute. This is way more common where small parties predominate.
Im not arguing that either is better, just that patterns emerge and repeat under all the electoral systems currently used. Transferable votes, multi-stage elections, regional electorates, proportional, vote-for-party, vote-for-candidate, etc. None seem particularly "better" for producing outcomes.
Party political patterns conform to whatever habitat they exist in.
If we're going with proportional voting, it should be based off the vote count and not just population count. A major issue I see is that most people just don't care or don't think their vote counts. These disconnected people make for a weak democracy where the people in power can basically use their indifference for the benefit of their power.
Australia has solved this problem with mandatory voting. Those who fail to vote are hit with a $20 fine. They generally have above 90% turnout in elections.
Considering the rich have far more influence in general on how the general public lives, considering their positions in industry and economic power, it seems appropriate to balance that somehow.
This wouldn't address that issue at all. The people who want to have that influence would still choose to vote or participate in other ways. The rich, being a tiny minority group, wouldn't make much difference if they didn't vote at all in most elections.
That is not true. National popular elections still rely on the same voting booths with known numbers of local voters. A location with a thousand voters turning out a million votes would be instantly detected and investigated.
Someone wanting to swing a national popular vote fraudulently would need to compromise tens of thousands of ballot boxes to steal on the order of ten million votes -- a much harder ask than compromising a hundred ballot boxes to swing three states in the Senate/Electoral College or gerrymandering twenty districts in Congress.
> A location with a thousand voters turning out a million votes
Easy to detect for a small town, not for a big city, where there are literally millions but who knows how many actually vote. In fact I could cite the exact kinds of statistical reasoning for certain counties in the recent election, but you wouldn't accept that.
> The founders of the constitution hated parties but ended up with the game that leaves only a two party competition. That's hardly a choice, it's a single bit.
I've come to believe that the only thing we need to change to have a three party system is to make all votes for bills in Congress to require 70%+. Today things can be passed with 50.00001% which is basically binary. With the required compromise and negotiation, a third party would have power to swing the vote for yea or nea and dilute the power of the duopoly. At first, it might just take form as a caucus until enough power is built to build a proper party with funding for candidates.
I know it is a pipe dream because the powers that be wouldn't want to give up their hammer. I think this is one thing that the founders got wrong. Having to build compromise could be good for everyone in the end.
Due to the filibuster, most bills require 60 votes (60%) to pass the senate. It hasn’t lead to more cooperation - it’s lead to a paralyzed government that can’t pass good laws.
A paralyzed government can’t pass required laws. The budget has to be passed every year. That will never happen with supermajority. No new programs, no cuts, just confusing resolutions. The debt ceiling has to be increased occasionally and if you thought recent negotiations were bad, supermajority would be worse.
A paralyzed government can’t pass good laws. All the problems in the country that would never get fixed. Current inaction is bad enough, but supermajority would never pass anything except the bland and disasters.
> The budget has to be passed every year. That will never happen with supermajority.
The budgets have been and will continued to be passed, with a sufficient amount of pork-barrel spending. Think of it as an extra cost of running a supermajority system.
Plenty of countries have some kind of supermajority system in place.
Why do members of the same party often disagree? I think we get a bit too wrapped up on the "two parties" thing as if there are only two opinions as well.
> There's an additional problem, which is why isn't even harder to replace district voting, that those in charge of counting votes are local to each district, which is letting the car guard the cream.
American elections are administered locally to prevent top-down rigging, especially from the federal to the state level. Presumably local politicians will be more accountable to local people than an election authority across the country. And if the local people don't want to hold them accountable because they like them, then the politician is at least representing their contstituency in some way. And from the perspective of other districts, a corrupt district cannot affect their own elections, only send, at worst, a representative they don't like as if the two districts sinply disagreed. If a national election authority were corrupted, there wouldn't be anything local political organizations could do, especially if this applied to local executive or judicial positions.
And of course the original states were not going to cede the counting of their votes the federal government. The electoral college is widely operated as a winner-takes-all system because it means that no state has to trust any other.
I really don't understand how US citizens tolerate non democratic nonsense like Gerrymandering.
Today there is no technical reason why votes couldn't be "pooled up" to whatever an election is about (e.g. for presidential election pool up on a whole US level, this would give every US citizen the same voting power no matter where they live and remove anti-democtratic problems like the electoral collage, uneven value of the vote etc.
My fellow US citizens can't even seem to wrap their minds around something as simple as ranked-choice voting, where instead of selecting the candidate you like best, you instead order the candidates based on how much you like them.
It's an incredibly simple, intuitive change that has the potential to increase overall happiness with the results and disincentivize extremism.
Yet it has been an uphill battle to get ranked-choice voting adopted, and some states and municipalities have even had to revert back to first-past-the-post voting after an outcry from voters.
If voters can't wrap their heads around that, I hardly think they would be able to follow along with the mathematical principles outlined in the Quanta article.
(1) those who don't think about it much if at all, which is probably the majority of people
(2) those who understand it but benefit from it so want to keep it
(3) those who understand it and want to change it but don't have the influence to get it changed
The supreme court ruled that it is 100% kosher for states to gerrymander for the purpose of consolidating power and excluding other parties. It is not legal to gerrymander to disenfranchise minority groups, but frequently they amount to the same thing.
The only way to change it would be for some novel legal argument to come before the supreme court that convinces them that their previous decision was wrong (very unlikely), or for Congress to pass a constitutional amendment. The latter is not going to happen because the current system is designed in part to make those seats "safe".
I started seing politics the same way: lol don't care. I used to consume loads political news, followed the developments within the national parties, tried to understand in good faith the reasoning behind various positions.
You know what? None of this matters. Nothing I'll ever do, say, think, will ever convince a politician of anything. I have 0, zilch, none whatsoever influence on politics, regional, state, national, supranational.
Public politics is for show only. The real deals are done behind closed doors. I don't need these people, and they don't need me (except my money, of course).
For many people it is the fact their lives are seriously impacted by the political outcomes these gerrymandered elections precipitate. You know, like the government making their personal medical decisions rather than their doctor.
I've been using math and C++ to do redistricting since about 2005 ( https://bdistricting.com/ ). It definitely occurred to me along the way that for the mere cost of a year or two of software engineer time, I could totally build an _evil_ version of my impartial redistricting software that optimized for evil goals. But I obviously didn't want evil ends, and sadly no one even offered to pay me to be evil ;-)
> This places it squarely in the mathematical tradition of showing that a simple problem is equivalent to a far more complicated one, and then solving the more complicated problem.
And I anticipate that there must be someone argue that "for some problems, there is no solution, math is useless in these areas". If there is no solution, you still get nothing no matter how hard you study sociology/politics.
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