
What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case? - fritzw
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/11/15949750/research-gerrymandering-wisconsin-supreme-court-partisanship
======
bradleyjg
This is an interesting article, but the headline is deceptive. The article
doesn't answer that question it poses. The reason the Supreme Court granted
cert is because the court below, which in this case was a special 3 judge
district court panel whose opinions skip the Court of Appeals, ruled in favor
of the challengers.

If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this lower
court opinion would have in effect (but not technically) stood as a nationwide
precedent modifying existing Supreme Court decisions.

~~~
lobster_johnson
That's the _procedural_ reason -- the case ended up in the SC because the
lower court sent it up the chain, but that's still not an explanation for why
they chose to accept it. As far as I know, they still had the option to refuse
it.

~~~
pyre
> _If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this
> lower court opinion would have in effect (but not technically) stood as a
> nationwide precedent modifying existing Supreme Court decisions._

I think this is the part that matters. It's possible that the Supreme Court
would rather that the judgement came from them rather than the lower court.
Leaving it as-is would modify existing Supreme Court caselaw, but the decision
itself wouldn't have come from the Supreme Court, which could lead to a bit of
ambiguity. If the Supreme Court itself weighs in, even just to agree with the
lower court, it eliminates that ambiguity. No one is left wondering "What if
it _had_ gone to the Supreme Court" about the decision.

I am not a lawyer, but that is my interpretation.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Leaving it as-is would modify existing Supreme Court caselaw, but the
decision itself wouldn't have come from the Supreme Court, which could lead to
a bit of ambiguity. If the Supreme Court itself weighs in, even just to agree
with the lower court, it eliminates that ambiguity. No one is left wondering
"What if it had gone to the Supreme Court" about the decision."_

Doesn't this reasoning apply to _every_ case that comes before the Supreme
Court, even those it refuses to hear?

~~~
heydenberk
Most cases that the Supreme Court refuses to hear are those in which lower
courts reaffirmed the status quo.

~~~
pmoriarty
Why is that? If this lower court could go against the status quo like this,
what stops other courts doing the same in other cases?

~~~
thephyber
This[1] may help. The relevant excepts:

> The doctrine operates both horizontally and vertically. Horizontal stare
> decisis refers to a court adhering to its own precedent. A court engages in
> vertical stare decisis when it applies precedent from a higher court.
> Consequently, stare decisis discourages litigating established precedents,
> and thus, reduces spending.

and

> Although courts seldom overrule precedent, Justice Rehnquist explained that
> stare decisis is not an “inexorable command.” On occasion, the Court will
> decide not to apply the doctrine if a prior decision is deemed unworkable.
> In addition, significant societal changes may also prompt the Court to
> overrule precedent; however, any decision to overrule precedent is exercised
> cautiously.

It's worth a read (not terribly long) because of the examples and the
rationale behind Louisiana having a different system.

[1]
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/stare_decisis](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/stare_decisis)

------
j_s
Re-posting my comment on _Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with
Geometry_ |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713252)
4 months ago:

 _[...] a need for expert witnesses who understand the mathematical concepts
applicable to gerrymandering. To meet that need, she’s spearheaded the
creation of a five-day summer program at Tufts [the first in a series of
regional trainings] that aims to train mathematicians to do just that

[...] over 900 people have indicated their interest by signing up for a
mailing list_

[http://tufts.us15.list-
manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7...](http://tufts.us15.list-
manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7aa8ab22ea62&id=a979bdf71d)

\--

Quoting from the end of that article, calling out the "efficiency gap" as the
spark for work towards a mathematical definition of "compactness" satisfying
districting requirements in a way that is convincingly explainable as fair:

 _Recently there was a big media sensation in Wisconsin around something
called the "efficiency gap." It was a new metric of partisan gerrymandering
that, for the first time, a court said they liked. The way it was devised was
that the people who created it, they went back and they read all of Justice
Anthony Kennedy’s written decisions about measuring gerrymandering. By reading
his words and by reading what he said he found convincing and less convincing,
they designed a statistic to appeal to him._

~~~
paulmd
To rephrase this a little more concisely:

SCOTUS turns based on which side of the bed Kennedy wakes up on (on most
issues). There are 4 solid liberal votes and 4 solid conservative votes and
Kennedy in the middle.

Kennedy indicated in a ruling a few years ago that in theory he's
uncomfortable with gerrymandering and might be open to striking them down, but
apart from "I know it when I see it" he doesn't know a neutral/nonpartisan way
to actually detect it. And "I know it when I see it" doesn't work well as a
judicial test, there needs to be a bright-line somewhere that lower courts can
apply.

Well, a bunch of mathematicians heard that and said "challenge accepted" and
have been working on mathematical models to quantify the level of
gerrymandering. And now the court cases are working their way back up to
SCOTUS, only with the academic models that Kennedy has indicated he wants.

Now we get to find out whether Kennedy's interest in neutering gerrymandering
actually goes as far as being willing to strike down a gerrymander. Because
it's easy to talk the talk, but at the end of the day Kennedy is still
conservative-ish and gerrymandering heavily benefits conservatives overall.

~~~
pc86
I was pretty much with you until the last paragraph.

The efficiency gap for all plans[0] shows pretty clearly gerrymandering can
occur for either party. In fact, the very pro-Democratic plans are _more_
gerrymandered than the very pro-Republican plans, including the plan in
question. There are four pro-D plans with the upper error limit above .2 while
the plan in question appears to be at approximately -1.5

There's no need to turn this into "if Kennedy doesn't vote against this he's
in favor of gerrymandering because it helps his conservative leanings."

[0] [https://cdn.vox-
cdn.com/thumbor/pJwDdPDejaHo83ukoW27r6Yaaxg=...](https://cdn.vox-
cdn.com/thumbor/pJwDdPDejaHo83ukoW27r6Yaaxg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale\(\)/cdn.vox-
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8831481/Gerrymander..png)

~~~
Lagged2Death
_In fact, the very pro-Democratic plans are more gerrymandered than the very
pro-Republican plans, including the plan in question._

The chart shows districing plans with larger _efficiency gaps_ but the article
does not offer any of the really damning plan simulation or sensitivity test
results for those plans.

------
crb002
I wish SCOTUS would put out a Euclidian distance Voronoi metric, where the
redistricting map presented with minimum error wins.

You quickly get into non-linear territory by using travel time instead of
Euclidian distance. Roads and bridges become weapons for cutting or connecting
districts. Bad bad stuff.

~~~
mapmeld
Programmers like to come up with mathematical plans like this, but you would
likely run into the Voting Rights Act!

Many districts which aren't compact have been created as majority-minority
districts, to prevent disenfranchisement of racial minorities. Plans which
divide or erase one of these districts get stopped by the Supreme Court all
the time. It's a 1960s approach to equality, but you can tell its
effectiveness by how the House is much more representative of the US
population's diversity than the Senate is.

~~~
graycamry
> Many districts which aren't compact have been created as majority-minority
> districts, to prevent disenfranchisement of racial minorities.

[citation needed]

I have seen many examples of horribly shaped districts, but all of them were
done for partisan advantage. I would love it if you

1\. Give an example of a majority minority district that is horribly shaped
explicitly to accommodate the VRA. 2\. Give citation for statement that there
are "Many" such districts.

~~~
ChrisBland
Some of the ugliest looking district ducklings are beautiful swans in the eyes
of the courts. For example, the Illinois 4th Congressional District drawn in
the 2000's decade is often called the "earmuff" district for obvious reasons.
The western portion of this district actually travels along the northbound
lane of Interstate 294! But, this district has a very important purpose. It
was initially created in the 1990s to elect the first Latino representative to
Congress from the Midwest.

The 4th congressional district has its funny shape because there is an
African-American community sandwiched between two Latino communities. The
African-American community is represented by the 7th Congressional district,
which is designed to elect an African-American candidate of choice. The 4th
district was wrapped around the 7th district so that both African-American and
Latino communities could have congressional representation.

~~~
opportune
But isn't that gerrymandering for democrats instead of republicans? I am open
to the idea that districts could be drawn based on more than geography, but to
me this just sounds like "helpful" gerrymandering simply because it assists
the democrats instead of the republicans.

There's no reason for congressional districts to be based on race, IMO.

~~~
ChrisBland
You could argue that one race votes for one party over another, but the VRA
goal was to ensure minority representation, regardless of the party
affiliation. Full Stop.

~~~
opportune
That's a fair concern, but to me it seems like an "easy" yet flawed solution
to systemic oppression, kind of like affirmative action. For starters, by
drawing districts specifically along racial lines for minorities, you are de
facto also drawing the other districts along racial lines for white people. I
also think that more diversity in congressional districts is a good thing, as
it avoids "lock-in" districts where the incumbent has essentially a 100%
chance of winning every election due to homogeneity of their voters. Of
course, the other side of the coin is that minority populations can get
"diluted" to the point where they can be safely ignored by politicians.

I believe the real solution to our problems is to move away from geographic
representation in its entirety. It's too easy to cheat, and by design it only
ends up allowing representation of around half the constituents in its area.
I'm not sure what could replace it; perhaps a parliamentary system based on
opt-in voting blocks could work. But in its present form it does seem deeply
flawed.

~~~
waqf
What could replace it is a sufficiently advanced delegative democracy such as
LiquidFeedback. The idea is that parties self-organize when sufficiently many
votes are delegated to a single person or entity, but they can dissolve and
reform at any time.

------
mtgx
A proportional representation voting system would also largely solve the
gerrymandering problem (no district would be dominated by a single party
anymore so exploiting the gerrymandering system wouldn't help much), along
with having many other benefits for democracy:

[http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation](http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation)

> They complied with the Constitution’s one person, one vote requirement

That line is interesting. How is the electoral college system not in conflict
with the Constitution then, if a person's vote in one state is much stronger
than another person's vote in another state? Or is it enough that it satisfies
the requirement technically (still "one vote"), even if not in _spirit_ /based
on a (I would think) more common _interpretation_ of the Constitution?

~~~
tzs
It's a bit of a tangent, but the discussion of voting systems reminds me of
another modification to voting that I sometimes think might be reasonable:
weighting votes based on voter age, with the weight starting off low for the
youngest voters and increasing to a peak, and then dropping off again.

What brought this on was thinking about the brexit vote over in the UK, which
from what I read had very different outcomes among different age groups. It
seems quite unfair that people who are likely to die before brexit is complete
should have the same say as people who will be living decades under the
outcome.

~~~
ouid
why does it start off low for the youngest?

~~~
oh_sigh
Because younger people have less life experience than older people?

How many times do you see articles about 18-23 year old people doing something
stupid, and people come to their defense saying something along the lines of
'They're only children!'?

~~~
ouid
You misunderstand. if you are operating only under the assumption that your
voting power should be proportional to the time you have left to live, then
there's a pretty clear age-power relationship.

If you add an assumption about life experience though, You're going to have to
be a lot more specific to explain how these two functions interact. why is the
optimum in the middle? Why isn't it bumpy?

As soon as you start adding other factors into your weighting function, I
don't know how you can be confident in the shape of your graph without being
precise with your functions.

To be fair though, I think that there's a pretty good argument for inverse age
weighting. If you're 20, you will eventually have to be 35, so it wouldn't
make any sense for you to screw over 35 year olds. If you're 35 though, you'll
never be 20 again. There is no incentive for you to not screw over 20 year
olds. (unless you have kids, but at that point, everyone has equal investment
in society and the premise falls apart).

------
andrewla
I'm not convinced that the "efficiency gap" is a good metric. My main issue,
aside from the difficulty in describing what a "good" map should look like,
much less measuring it, is that it is sharply discontinuous around the
"winning" criteria -- for a single district, in a 49-51 victory vs. a 51-49
loss, there's a 2% difference in the number of votes, but the wasted votes
goes from -50 to +50.

It's not difficult to see that the optimal partitioning is 75/25 (in either
direction), which seems very arbitrary.

From a democracy perspective, it seems like the ideal partitioning would be
much closer to 50-50 -- hopefully even in the margin of error for the area, so
that candidates would have to make a real effort to represent their entire
district in order to be assured re-election. Even this feels very
questionable, because as I understand it, the idea of congressional districts
is that representation should follow groups of shared problems and interests,
irrespective of proposed solutions to those problems.

~~~
maxerickson
You are stating the efficiency gap incorrectly in the single district case.
There can never be one, because the seat goes to the party with more votes
(the party with less votes should have 0 seats, no efficiency gap).

The simplest example you can work is with 2 districts.

~~~
andrewla
The efficiency gap, as described, is the number of "wasted" votes for one
party, minus the number of wasted votes for the other party, summed over all
districts and divided by the total voting population.

So fundamentally it's just a normalized version of the wasted votes metric.
Wasted votes is the thing that concerns me as a metric, and it has the
discontinuity noted.

Notably, if you have a circular uniformly populated state that is exactly
50-50 -- let's say the north of the state is 100% Republican and the south is
100% Democrat, and we restrict our districting to straight lines through the
center. Then there are two solutions that minimize the efficiency gap, the
line going from southwest to northeast, and the one going from southeast to
northwest, because both of those result in 75/25 districts (that have 0 net
wasted votes). This seems really odd to me.

~~~
maxerickson
Right, but the efficiency gap isn't obsessed with net 0 districts, it is
looking for excess wasted votes. No matter how you draw the line through your
circle, the net wasted votes across the districts will be 0, so the state wide
efficiency gap will always be 0.

I think it's actually literally impossible to use a straight line there for
partisan gerrymanding, so it isn't a real useful scenario.

~~~
andrewla
That's a fair point. Still seems off to me in terms of sensitivity, and once
again putting aside the discussion of what the goal of districting should be.

Simplifying the algebra in the calculation, though, the efficiency gap is
actually independent of the inefficiencies of any particular district, but
dependent only on the population of the districts -- the numerator simplifies
to

D - R + sum_i { I(D_i < R_i) (D_i + R_i) / 2 }

Where D and R are the total Democratic/Republican votes in the state (across
all districts) and the I(x) is an indicator function, +1 if true, -1 if false.

If you hold the size of districts to be about even, then this just says that
the ratio of the total population of districts that vote R to the total
population of districts that vote D should be approximately equal to the ratio
of the total state population of R voters to the total state population of D
voters.

That seems reasonable, just seems like a roundabout way to get there, and is
sensitive to unequal population distributions.

~~~
maxerickson
An uncontroversial (perhaps the only uncontroversial) goal of redistricting is
to make the population of the districts in a state as similar as possible.

Conceptually, I like the idea of having a test for excessive unfairness;
states can do whatever they want to deal with their special cases as long as
the result is reasonable.

------
fernandopj
"Gerrymandering" is a word difficult enough to grasp, and "partisan
gerrymandering" (for me at least) doesn't ring any bells either, so for those
of us who don't come from an USA background, but are interested in _how_
someone could mathematically define that, I found this link:

[https://www.senate.mn/departments/scr/REDIST/Red2000/ch5part...](https://www.senate.mn/departments/scr/REDIST/Red2000/ch5parti.htm)

> Partisan (or political) gerrymandering is the drawing of electoral district
> lines in a manner that discriminates against a political party.

~~~
jon_richards
Gerrymandering is by definition partisan (or political). The term comes from
when Governor Gerry redrew districts to benefit his party, resulting a
district some described as looking like a salamander, causing it to be named
the "gerrymander".

------
throwawaymanbot
I'm so glad this is happening. Gerrymandering is for 2nd rate banana
republics, not the greatest Republic of all time. This IS a national security
threat.

I would add which party is mostly responsible, but apparently mentioning the
party, although factually correct, would lead me to get in trouble here. Which
is Grand, coz im really Old, and I dont like to Party... anymore!

------
bluetwo
Personally I wish my state would enact a law that says representative
districts must be drawn to cross as few county lines as possible.

Yes, some manipulation would still be possible, but it would be greatly
diminished.

~~~
s73ver
Take the power to create districts away from the legislature. Give it to a
non-partisan commission. 1/3 Democrats, 1/3 Republicans, and 1/3 other/no
party. We did that in California, and almost none of the legislators were
happy with it, which means it probably did a good job. The state still wound
up with mostly Democratic representation, but that's more a product of
California being heavily Democrat. I'd imagine that if you did the same thing
in Texas, even if the districts were much less gerrymandered, you'd still have
mostly Republicans.

~~~
Spivak
Woo! Enshrining the current two party system in legislation. What could
possibly go wrong?

~~~
s73ver
So don't include them by name. Just say the two major parties. Doesn't matter,
doesn't change a thing.

~~~
kesselvon
first two parties to finish in the last election would be just as good

~~~
s73ver
Sure. I figure if we ever get to the point where there aren't two major
parties, it can either be fixed then, or we're under one party autocratic rule
and it won't matter anymore.

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mark-r
Surpreme? Somebody fix the title please.

~~~
sctb
Thanks! Updated.

~~~
mark-r
Now that this comment is no longer necessary, how do I delete it?

