
Utility Ghost: Gamified redistricting with partisan symmetry - mathfan
https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.07377
======
dane-pgp
It occurred to me that rather than trying to fix the gerrymandering problem at
the map-drawing stage, it might be simpler to solve it at the election stage,
where the imbalance is more obvious.

My proposal, which I call "merrymandering", involves comparing the number of
seats won by each party in a state after an election, with the aggregate
percentage of votes won by each party in that election. If there is an
imbalance, then the over-represented party has one of their seats assigned to
the next-most-over-represented party, and so on until any seat change would
result in a more disproportionate result.

The choice of which seat gets reassigned could be chosen based on how close
the other party came to winning that seat, to make it deterministic, or a
random process could be used, to avoid safe seats.

In practice, what I think would happen is that with this system in place,
there would be no advantage to partisan redistricting, so the merrymandering
ruleset would never actually be applied, and no seats would flip.
Nevertheless, I have some confidence that the system would survive a legal
challenge, since it only changes election results to make them strictly more
compliant with the "one person one vote" principle.

~~~
delecti
From the perspective of voters, this is a terrible system. If a district votes
one way and gets their result flipped because of this system, then they're
unambiguously not being represented by someone they want.

~~~
dane-pgp
From the perspective of voters, the current system is also terrible, as
districts are deliberately being designed so that one party cannot win them,
despite that party having a majority across the whole state.

I would hope that the majority of voters would see that they are getting
better (proportional) representation under this system (even if that
representation wouldn't always be as local as it would be for the lucky few
districts that aren't gerrymandered into irrelevance in the current system).

In any case, by changing the game theory (removing any incentive to
gerrymander districts), my expectation is that in practice no results would
get flipped, so no one would experience any bad effect attributed to this
system.

------
madrox
I'm not convinced how we elect representatives is a problem. Gerrymandering
seems an annoying an unfair way to elevate certain people, sure, but I don't
think fixing this is the panacea to toxic politics that everyone thinks it is.
You simply have to look internationally at other systems to see they also have
problems...different problems from ours, sure, but not exactly _better_.

~~~
mathfan
The Supreme Court has already stated that partisan gerrymandering is
unconstitutional, we just don't have a mechanism to systematically detect it
after the fact. That's why it's so hard to fight in the courts. If possible, I
think it's a good idea to prevent unconstitutional gerrymandering, even if it
doesn't solve all of our problems.

------
nscalf
So effectively, both parties take turns choosing what "atoms" (counties,
districts, etc) belong in which districts. They must be contiguous. I'd like
to see how this relates to the efficiency gap that was heavily used around
gerrymandering in Wisconsin. It's mentioned, but they don't go back to analyze
how it would be---at least I didn't see it from a simple search.

~~~
qfwfq_
The efficiency gap is just one measure of partisan bias that can be used to
assess the utility/efficacy of any redistricting plan. The game the authors
propose is (basically) an algorithm to draw good districts between two
players. So, there's no real or expected relationship between the two...
partisan control (the objective the authors cite) isn't necessarily related to
the efficiency of that control measured by the efficiency gap. The problem is
that so many different measures of fairness exist, have validity, and can be
used in different legal or jurisprudential contexts, we're always talking past
each other on the meaning of these measures.

------
brianolson
The abstract describes a system for achieving shoddy Proportional
Representation through bipartisan (or multi-partisan) gerrymandering. If you
want Proportional Representation, then just do that and don't try to
gerrymander districts to achieve it. I think this country is too stuck on the
notion of districts and needs to think outside the box and paint outside the
lines (nyuks intended). I think we keep describing what we want as some sort
of identity/ideology based representation and those things are now much more
important to us than geography and _where_ a person lives. So we should have
at-large PR or large multi-member districts (8 or more reps per district).

~~~
mathfan
A switch to PR would require a change to federal law. Meanwhile, in the
absence of PR, any state is free to adopt its own redistricting policy. The
latter approach seems much more feasible.

~~~
brianolson
A State changing how it runs its State Legislature is a change to the State
Constitution either way, whether taking away the map drawing authority from
the Legislature itself or changing the structure of the Legislature to be non-
districted or multi-member districted.

~~~
mathfan
What is more likely, a change to federal law, or the existence of one of 50
states that changes state law?

