
How I Teach Gerrymandering - jakob223
http://mitesp.tumblr.com/post/130793404248/how-i-teach-gerrymandering
======
emehrkay
I haven't read the article yet, but I was halfway expecting to see this
picture:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Ho...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/How_to_Steal_an_Election_-
_Gerrymandering.svg/2000px-How_to_Steal_an_Election_-_Gerrymandering.svg.png)

~~~
dzdt
That picture is great: by basically eliminating the geography it makes the
math clear. If someone understands this picture, it will be easy to get a good
idea about the more complicated real-world cases.

~~~
twoodfin
It's not a great picture. For one thing, it's unnecessarily provocative
(Title: "How to Steal an Election") and not-so-subtly partisan: The use of
blue for the 'natural' winner and red for the 'thief' is clearly meant to echo
(and comment on) contemporary U.S. politics.

Yes, gerrymandering happens, and yes, it currently disproportionately benefits
the GOP: Some lucky wave election timing put them in charge of more states
during the post-2000 and post-2010 Census redistricting. But the benefit they
get over their popular vote share is on par with the benefit the Democrats saw
in the '90's[1].

And the benefit isn't that great. It's good for maybe 8 seats[2], far short of
the 30 seats Democrats would need to swing to regain the majority.

The problem for Democrats in the House is that their districts are _too
natural_ : It makes sense to put urban voters with similar needs and issues
into Congressional districts with each other, rather than diluting their
influence with very different suburban areas. The Voting Rights Act even made
concentrating minority votes to create majority-minority districts mandatory
in some areas. But the result is winning Chicago wards 95-5 while losing out
in the 'burbs 55-45. To have a chance at consistently winning the House,
Democrats need to draw districts that look an awful lot like the 5-0 image in
that picture. Practically and politically, that's a non-starter. That's why
ITT and elsewhere you see calls for multicandidate districts, proportional
statewide representation, etc. It's not to "fix" gerrymandering, it's to fix
the "problem" of concentrated Democratic votes.

[1]
[http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/gerrym...](http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/gerrymandering-
the-u-s-house-1972-2014/)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/upshot/why-democrats-
cant-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/upshot/why-democrats-cant-
win.html?_r=0)

~~~
gohrt
Furhtermore, the unit is "precinct", not "voter", so the starting input is
already subject to gerrymandering.

And the chart ignores the reality that districting serves an important
purpose: to give minorities (however defined) a non-zero voice in the
representative body.

~~~
jandrese
I thought that "make sure the black people have a vote" thing was a pretty
clever way to disenfranchise them. One vote has very little power and you have
sequestered most of the constituents behind that one vote, so the people with
actual power (the majority of the other representatives) don't have to worry
about them.

I am amazed that people still consider it a good thing. Or that they ever
considered it a good thing.

------
gortok
This is a great way to teach gerrymandering. It also illustrates the problem
with 'Party X is evil, Party Y is not.'

Political parties (stripping away all else) are groups of people who identify
with one another. Take that one step further, and they're groups of people
that identify with one another _and believe their group is the best one to
represent the whole_.

Or, if you are less idealistic, they want to win (I subscribe to the idea that
they want to win because they think their way is the best way and they like
the power).

Once you believe those few things, it's easy to understand why politicians
aren't evil, they're just vested in their group; in the same way you'd be
vested in your group of friends vs. some random sampling of people you met on
the street.

Does this make our current set of political problems insurmountable? No; we
just have to mold the system so that no one party can have absolute control
even if they control the central government. Maybe by delegating a small set
of powers to the central government and keeping most governing done at the
local level. Maybe we could call it a constitutional republic?

~~~
ergothus
One slight correction to your "less idealistic view": It's not just (or at
all) that one party believes they are the best to represent the whole, it's
that they believe the other(s) are HARMFUL.

Ergo, disempowering that other voice is in everyones best interests.

While people can often do "evil" things (manipulative, etc), they usually do
them for "good" reasons, at least according to their internal
rationalizations. [citation needed :) ]

~~~
rancur
maybe we should just set up states. half blue, half red. each get to do what
they want, and everyone blue or red moves to blue or red state. We come back
in 50 years, and see what's up. The blue states are spending gobs on tuition
and everyone is still stupid, and the red states, I don't know someone help.
I'm colorblind

~~~
thephyber
The US _has_ been mostly self-sorting for decades now. It's one of the reasons
politics is so polarized right now and Congress is incapable of governing
without a looming emergency.

It's never as easy as just looking at the outcomes. As with any type of
sociology, it's not possible to force large sets of people to do identical
things for valid control+experimental groups.

Methods of taxation, tax rates, size of state government, expectations of
government services, natural resources, macroeconomic conditions, talent of
the population, and natural economic benefits all distinguish different
states. There's really no effective way to control for the large variety of
conditions across many states.

------
aidos
I'd heard the term before but never looked into it – it was useful to have
something to prompt me (partially because this article doesn't even mention
what it is). It's when the government manipulates electorates to increase
their chances of being re-elected. As someone in the UK this is something I've
wondered about a lot over the last year.

If you don't follow UK politics, we have a government that was elected with
51% of the seats on 36.9% of the votes.

I found this article which explains some of the mechanisms used to manipulate
the outcome of these elections.

[https://medium.com/@georgetaitedwards/is-britain-now-too-
ger...](https://medium.com/@georgetaitedwards/is-britain-now-too-
gerrymandered-to-be-a-genuine-democracy-fe2fcbd95d14)

~~~
notahacker
UK election outcomes have nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything to
do with being a multi-party democracy using a FPTP electoral system, which
tends to boost the representation of leading parties at the expense of smaller
parties. Indeed, you'd actually _need_ gerrymandering for such a system to
have any hope of returning seats broadly in proportion to vote share.

(the conspiracy theory about disenfranchisement advanced by the blog article
is orthogonal to the tendency of the FPTP electoral system to distort shares
of actual votes. It's also a little difficult to take seriously an argument
which suggests that a short-lived poll tax abolished in 1991 would be a
significant factor in the 2015 election. Especially when the party that
enacted it spent 13 of the intervening years out of power, with the electoral
system and distribution of voters heavily favouring their rivals at the time.
The article is equally ludicrous in suggesting Labour would be _disadvantaged_
by a fraction of voters in strongly Labour-supporting boroughs being under
financial pressure to relocate)

~~~
bonzini
> UK election outcomes have nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything
> to do with

> being a multi-party democracy using a FPTP electoral system, which tends to
> boost

> the representation of leading parties at the expense of smaller parties.

More precisely, FPTP tends to boost the representation of leading national
_and local_ parties (the latter being best exemplified by the SNP) at the
expense of smaller national parties. Small local parties are usually toast
anyway even in proportional systems due to thresholds.

During the 2015 elections the system worked exactly as designed, by favoring
parties that are strong in one or more nations of the UK at the expense of
parties that are a bit meh in all of them.

~~~
aidos
FPTP is heavily biased though - you end up in a situation where there's little
point voting the way you want, because it won't be effective.

Take the Greens, 3.8% of the vote with 0.15% of the final representation. And
I bet that 3.8% would actually have been higher if people had felt like they
wouldn't be throwing away their vote.

I understand your sentiment, but I think "bit meh" is maybe a little
uncharitable. Half of my voting life has been in NZ (mixed member
proportional) and the other half in the UK (FPTP) – so I have a reasonable
understanding of the drawbacks of the systems.

~~~
Karunamon
"you end up in a situation where there's little point voting the way you want,
because it won't be effective."

How much of that situation is due precisely to that mindset?

It seems like circular logic to me.

    
    
        10 Why not vote for the guy you want to win?
        20 Because he won't get enough votes
        30 Why won't he get enough votes?
        40 Because not enough people will vote for him.
        50 So why don't more people vote for him?
        60 goto 20
    

FPTP is arguably broken, but people engaging in "tactical voting" isn't
helping matters. You're supposed to vote for who you want to win, period.

~~~
aidos
Really? I'm in an area where one of the seats was hotly contested. I, like
thousands of others swapped votes on a website where we pledged to vote on
behalf of other people.

My local candidate narrowly won (the one I voted for, not the one I chose) –
had a number of us not swapped votes, maybe that wouldn't have happened. For
me that's a bit of a win of tactical voting - at least people were able to
have some influence.

Another thing to note is that party voting and candidate voting are all rolled
together. I actually wanted my local guy to win, but I didn't want to vote for
him because I wanted to vote for a different party.

That's all very suboptimal.

~~~
Karunamon
Out of curiosity - usually party candidates deeply reflect their party
platform. Under what circumstances would you want to vote for a party but not
their representative candidate?

~~~
aidos
The leadership of the Greens are/were most closely aligned with my values –
certainly at the time when the Blairites were still heading up the Labour
party. So I wanted to vote Green as the party.

My local Labour representative, however, is a pretty good person to have
looking out for the area. He was born and raised in the estates opposite my
house - to a working class immigrant family, no less. In his time representing
the area he's done a lot of good and he has a lot of experience. For me,
that's all good - but his party values of continued austerity and benefit cuts
don't sit well with me.

You see my conundrum? :)

~~~
bossrat
your conundrum is that you have a distinctly minority opinion, but you would
like to influence the outcome "more than your share"? so, instead of
advocating unequal income distribution, you favor unequal outcome?

~~~
aidos
Erm, no, not in the slightest – well, I think not in the slightest – I'm going
to be totally honest, I don't really understand all of your comment.

But I don't want to influence the outcome "more than my share". I'd like
everyone to have an equal share of influence. More than anything I'd like the
political process to be one that everyone is engaged in and ultimately moves
the country in a direction that is good for everyone.

------
kgreene2
To anyone interested in the subject, I'd strongly recommend playing the
Redistricting Game [0] which takes you through many of the processes outlined
in the article

[0] - [http://www.redistrictinggame.org/](http://www.redistrictinggame.org/)

~~~
jameshart
Seconded - great example of how a game mechanic can be used to highlight how
real world incentives play out.

------
Robadob
In the UK under FPTP atleast, I can imagine there is also an effect or reverse
gerrymandering or similar.

When it comes round to elections, generally the result of the majority of
seats is already known, so they're classified by parties into stronghold
(ours), stronghold (theirs), marginal.

When your located within a Labour stronghold, your unlikely to see as much
pro-Conservative media, as they are better off spending their time campaigning
in marginals and defending their reputations in existing strongholds.

Surely, this effect simply compounds strongholds, making them even harder to
change hands overtime, without a significant event to cause the public opinion
to shift significantly (e.g. the Scottish independence referendum).

The only way to fix such a problem, would be to randomise the boundaries each
election, but this would cause various extra complexities.

~~~
kaffeemitsahne
It could also be fixed by not having any such boundaries whatsoever.

~~~
Robadob
This leads to a situation whereby elected representatives are assigned local
constituencies, rather than having any particular link. Or atleast that's the
argument which is always returned when people suggest a full PR system.

Personally I think larger multi-member constituencies under STV provide the
best compromise.

------
dheera
Alternatively, by switching to popular vote, this problem, and many other
problems could be avoided entirely. Above all things, is it fair that a voter
in Massachusetts has exactly zero (and I mean exactly zero, not their fair
1/3.2e8 share) say over the election, while a voter in Ohio carries a lot of
weight?

~~~
LordKano
There's a very good reason why we don't use the popular vote for Presidential
elections.

It's precisely because without the electoral college, small states would
receive zero attention on national politics.

Why would anyone spend time courting votes anywhere north of New York when
there's a much bigger payoff to be had working the rest of the eastern
seaboard and the west coast?

To use your examples of Massachusetts and Ohio, why waste time on a campaign
stop in Boston when you can hit Columbus? Columbus has a much larger
population and one can also hit Detroit and Indianapolis in the same day to
maximize their face time with the public.

Going to a popular vote will have consequences that people really need to
thing about.

~~~
alex_young
This logic confounds me. Is there some inherent reason to disproportionately
focus our national choices on the areas of the country with the fewest people
(rural areas)?

I've lived in both the most rural and urban parts of the US, and it's clear
that the current system massively discounts the will of people in urban areas
in this stated endeavor of providing some kind of rural / urban "balance".

Depending on what you consider urban, the US is roughly split 80% urban, 20%
rural.

To me, it seems unlikely that a ground effort in rural America would be
completely neglected in a proportional system. If a party did neglect the ~20%
of rural voters, it would seem to put itself at a disadvantage to other
parties, especially given the lower relative cost of rural media markets.

We see the same problem with the Senate, where populous states such as Texas
and California stand at a remarkable disadvantage to Montana and Wyoming in
terms of representation. The voice of a constituent in Wyoming is 66 times
that of one in California.

How can we call this system representative?

~~~
LordKano
I don't see the composition of the Senate as a problem. I see it as balance.
More populous states get greater representation in the House. The Senate
serves to prevent more populous states from steamrolling less populous states.

It's a feature, not a bug.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Since the passage of the 17th amendment, Senators don't represent states, they
represent people. And some of those people have vastly disproportionate
representation by Senators.

~~~
LordKano
The Constitution only provides for proportional representation in the House.

There were disparities in population during ratification. This was a necessary
compromise to address the concerns of the smaller states.

The system is working as intended.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
I'm well aware of the reason it was created that way. I just don't think it
makes sense in an era where 3/4 of the states are just arbitrarily chosen
chunks of land rather than formerly sovereign entities.

------
civilian
The best solution to Gerrymandering is the Alternate Vote. CGP Grey has a
great video explaining it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE)

He also has a great "what is gerrymandering" video that illustrated this same
idea, but with fun animals.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY)

~~~
tristanj
> The best solution to Gerrymandering is the Alternate Vote

This is false. Alternate vote is still susceptible to gerrymandering. It even
says so in the video you linked (@3:00).

