2016 elections - because it's never too early

[Valmy]

 

I'd still vote for Hillary after a severe stroke over Trump, Carson, or Sanders.

Yep. Sad but true.

[Razgovory]

Oh, I think that Republican domination in the House is very much about Gerrymandering.  The fact that cities are more liberal is counted into Gerrymandering, it was the basis of the Republican redistricting strategy.  Americans are not drastically more or less urban then they were 20 years ago.  Yet you did not see cases were more people voted for a Democrat then a Republican in a house seat and still have Republicans get more members elected.  District lines are not just arbitrary lines on a map, they are based on population data.  Big cities are taken into consideration.  That's why Republican redistricting created districts that have 90% Democrat 10% Republican.  It's no accident of geography or geometry.  It's was meant this way.  This is also why Republicans have much less power in the Senate.  That can't be Gerrymandered.

[Admiral Yi]

You know Raz, a description of how gerrymandering works doesn't advance the argument that Republican domination of the House is very much about gerrymandering.

I read a convincing article (I think it might have been linked here a long time ago) that claimed gerrymandering doesn't increase the number of GOP seats.  A fellow at Hoover and a prof at some university did simulations of various voting districts.

[Razgovory]

You know Raz, a description of how gerrymandering works doesn't advance the argument that Republican domination of the House is very much about gerrymandering.

I read a convincing article (I think it might have been linked here a long time ago) that claimed gerrymandering doesn't increase the number of GOP seats.  A fellow at Hoover and a prof at some university did simulations of various voting districts.

What would advance the argument Yi?

[DGuller]

I'd still vote for Hillary after a severe stroke over Trump, Carson, or Sanders.

Yep. Sad but true.

  Actually, Hillary could be a better president after a stroke than before, because then we all know Bill would be serving his third term.

[DGuller]

You know Raz, a description of how gerrymandering works doesn't advance the argument that Republican domination of the House is very much about gerrymandering.

I read a convincing article (I think it might have been linked here a long time ago) that claimed gerrymandering doesn't increase the number of GOP seats.  A fellow at Hoover and a prof at some university did simulations of various voting districts.

Doesn't this kind of analysis ultimately depend on the definition of gerrymandered?  Or rather un-gerrymandered?  How do you come up with the baseline for this analysis?

[Admiral Yi]

What would advance the argument Yi?

Some evidence about gain of seats from gerrymandering.

[Admiral Yi]

Doesn't this kind of analysis ultimately depend on the definition of gerrymandered?  Or rather un-gerrymandered?  How do you come up with the baseline for this analysis?

I can't remember the specifics, but I imagine they used the same software that non-gerrymander states use to draw voting districts.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The essential argument is that 'un-gerrymandered' means that you largely draw districts that are "geographically compact" within the parameters of what is legally required (meaning the districts have to be roughly a certain size in terms of population, based on the constitutional requirement that house districts have similar numbers of constituents.)

Gerrymandering for political purposes is usually identified based on a few criteria:

1. More compact districts easily could have been drawn, and in fact the districts drawn sometimes have very strange geographical features, like a small corridor of land stretching across another district and "connecting" say, a city to the district. Generally highly "serpentine" districts suggest there's a decent chance political gerrymandering has occurred.

2. There is explicit political involvement in the districts (this is the case in essentially all of the states.)

3. The strangely drawn districts clearly create 'safe haven' districts for the party in power that is drawing the districts.

Determining whether or not these activities costs one party House seats requires you to first demonstrate that political gerrymandering has occurred, and second requires that you show that "geographically compact" districts would result in significantly different results.

The issue with the Democrats, is that following standards of "geographic compactness" it is impossible not to basically "harm" the Democrats due to the fact that they disproportionately live in concentrated enclaves. Republicans are simply more likely to live in physical communities in which they are not as dominating politically. Primarily the suburbs. The Republicans do have disproportionate populations in very rural districts--but because the population density in those districts is so low generally huge swathes of rural areas get combined with a nearby suburb to make a "whole" district. So it isn't just that Democrats are more likely to live in communities in which they are the large majority, it's that those communities are also highly densely populated communities. There isn't really a similar situation at play for the Republicans. At this point there have been many pretty persuasive articles explaining this effect, and explaining how the simple narrative of "Republicans win the Statehouse in 2010, and then gerrymander themselves a permanent House majority" may be highly compelling and make a lot of sense, but ultimately isn't really true.

This article is probably the most persuasive. But even it isn't quite accurate, like so many it focuses far too much on "popular vote percentage in a state versus house districts won percentage." The math doesn't really work out when you do it that way, because it ignores the disproportionate self-gerrymandering phenomenon. Instead it mostly makes sense to actually look at what districts were gerrymandered, by actually looking at the districts. But it's a lot more compelling to pound your fist on a table and say "the Democrats won 55% of the vote so they should've won 55% of the House seats!" Never mind this never happens in FPTP single member systems--look at the results of recent British elections for the parliament in Westminster and you'll see this isn't the case even in a country that largely has prevented successful political gerrymandering due to the boundary commission.

Of the 25 States the GOP controlled in 2010, we can exclude Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming--these are impossible to gerrymander states. These states all have two or fewer districts, and it's fundamentally not possible to meaningfully gerrymander when you only have 1-2 districts to work with. I'd also argue the 3-district states are pretty difficult to gerrymander, albeit it's not impossible.

The States that are "most gerrymandered" according to popular perception and various internet articles are typically Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida. Florida actually passed an anti-gerrymandering law in 2010, and to be honest if you look over Florida's districts the only ones that look "funky" to me, all end up being "majority-minority districts", which in the South are actually legally promoted by the Voting Rights Act. As Nate Silver explains here, a lot of "majority-minority" districts are simply a result of the geographic compactness typical of the Democratic base, and that many of these districts would exist under any non-partisan district scheme. Where this isn't the case (and most of the crazy districts in Florida fall under this category), the district was created specifically to create such a district. A move that  back when the VRA was drawn up was seen as a "good" thin because it guarantees a certain presence of minority lawmakers in Congress; but the Republicans have shrewdly recognized it actually benefits them to vigorously follow this aspect of the VRA, because these districts create tons of "wasted votes" for Democrats. Any vote above that required to win for either party is a "wasted vote", and when a part is winning districts by 20%, 30%, or something more, then it is wasting a tremendous number of votes.

North Carolina, the much maligned gerrymandered states, honestly follows a similar pattern to Florida. Most of its craziest districts are majority-minority. The reality is allowing gerrymandering when it promotes majority-minority districts would have to be specifically disallowed to prevent Republicans from taking advantage of it, there is no other feasible mechanism of this happening. But it will likely guarantee black Democrats lose some seats in the House, it may mean more Democrats overall in the House, but they'll be likely to be white politicians and not black politicians. This is never going to be an easy thing to get the Congressional Black Caucus on board for.

Most of the South's gerrymandering could be done away with by getting rid of the majority-minority "intentionally crafted" district. But as Nate Silver pointed out, only a few "artificial" districts of this type actually exist, most just exist because blacks tend to live in geographically compact and racially homogeneous neighborhoods disproportionately. So you're only talking a few seats if you get rid of majority-minority districts. If you "clean up" the districts in Ohio and Pennsylvania, you're also only talking a few seats. The Republican majority in the House is 29 seats, you just can't get there with gerrymandering alone. Gerrymandering is only a small part of why the Republicans hold the House, the reality is geographical and only shifting demographics in more contested districts (like suburbs) will change this.

[Valmy]

The bottom line is that the Democrats need more conspiracy theories where they insist they are saving the country from insidious forces of evil. Also they need more xenophobia. Only then can they become the party Americans will support in large numbers.

[dps]

I'd still vote for Hillary after a severe stroke over Trump, Carson, or Sanders.

I think I'd have to have suffered a severe stroke to vote for any of the 4 of them.

[Valmy]

I'd still vote for Hillary after a severe stroke over Trump, Carson, or Sanders.

I think I'd have to have suffered a severe stroke to vote for any of the 4 of them.

You can always vote third party!

[Razgovory]

What would advance the argument Yi?

Some evidence about gain of seats from gerrymandering.

Oh, that's trivially easy to demonstrate.  I thought you might ask something difficult.

HAVING the first modern democracy comes with bugs. Normally we would expect more seats in Congress to go to the political party that receives more votes, but the last election confounded expectations. Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II.

Using statistical tools that are common in fields like my own, neuroscience, I have found strong evidence that this historic aberration arises from partisan disenfranchisement. Although gerrymandering is usually thought of as a bipartisan offense, the rather asymmetrical results may surprise you.

Through artful drawing of district boundaries, it is possible to put large groups of voters on the losing side of every election. The Republican State Leadership Committee, a Washington-based political group dedicated to electing state officeholders, recently issued a progress report on Redmap, its multiyear plan to influence redistricting. The $30 million strategy consists of two steps for tilting the playing field: take over state legislatures before the decennial Census, then redraw state and Congressional districts to lock in partisan advantages. The plan was highly successful.

I have developed approaches to detect such shenanigans by looking only at election returns. To see how the sleuthing works, start with the naïve standard that the party that wins more than half the votes should get at least half the seats. In November, five states failed to clear even this low bar: Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Now let's do something more subtle. We can calculate each state's appropriate seat breakdown — in other words, how a Congressional delegation would be constituted if its districts were not contorted to protect a political party or an incumbent. We do this by randomly picking combinations of districts from around the United States that add up to the same statewide vote total. Like a fantasy baseball team, a delegation put together this way is not constrained by the limits of geography. On a computer, it is possible to create millions of such unbiased delegations in short order. In this way, we can ask what would happen if a state had districts that were typical of the rest of the nation.

In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans — a split that occurred in less than 1 percent of simulations. If districts were drawn fairly, this lopsided discrepancy would hardly ever occur.

Confounding conventional wisdom, partisan redistricting is not symmetrical between the political parties. By my seat-discrepancy criterion, 10 states are out of whack: the five I have mentioned, plus Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Arizona was redistricted by an independent commission, Texas was a combination of Republican and federal court efforts, and Illinois was controlled by Democrats. Republicans designed the other seven maps. Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.

Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats and the average mock delegation of 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans exactly matched the newly elected delegation. Notably, California voters took redistricting out of legislators' hands by creating the California Citizens Redistricting Commission.

Gerrymandering is not hard. The core technique is to jam voters likely to favor your opponents into a few throwaway districts where the other side will win lopsided victories, a strategy known as "packing." Arrange other boundaries to win close victories, "cracking" opposition groups into many districts. Professionals use proprietary software to draw districts, but free software like Dave's Redistricting App lets you do it from your couch.

Political scientists have identified other factors that have influenced the relationship between votes and seats in the past. Concentration of voters in urban areas can, for example, limit how districts are drawn, creating a natural packing effect. But in 2012 the net effect of intentional gerrymandering was far larger than any one factor.

We can quantify this effect using three different methods. First, Democrats would have had to win the popular vote by 7 percentage points to take control of the House the way that districts are now (assuming that votes shifted by a similar percentage across all districts). That's an 8-point increase over what they would have had to do in 2010, and a margin that happens in only about one-third of Congressional elections.

Second, if we replace the eight partisan gerrymanders with the mock delegations from my simulations, this would lead to a seat count of 215 Democrats, 220 Republicans, give or take a few.

Third, gerrymandering is a major form of disenfranchisement. In the seven states where Republicans redrew the districts, 16.7 million votes were cast for Republicans and 16.4 million votes were cast for Democrats. This elected 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats. Given the average percentage of the vote it takes to elect representatives elsewhere in the country, that combination would normally require only 14.7 million Democratic votes. Or put another way, 1.7 million votes (16.4 minus 14.7) were effectively packed into Democratic districts and wasted.

Compared with a national total House vote of 121 million, this number is considerable. In Illinois, Democrats did the converse, wasting about 70,000 Republican votes. In both cases, the number of wasted votes dwarfs the likely effect of voter-ID laws, a Democratic concern, or of voter fraud, a Republican concern.

SOME legislators have flirted with the idea of gerrymandering the presidency itself under the guise of Electoral College reform. In one short-lived plan, Virginia State Senator Charles Carrico sponsored legislation to allocate electoral votes by Congressional district. In contrast to the current winner-take-all system, which usually elects the popular vote winner, Mr. Carrico's proposal applied nationwide would have elected Mitt Romney, despite the fact that he won five million fewer votes than Mr. Obama. This is basically an admission of defeat by Republicans in swing states. Mr. Carrico's constituents might well ask whether these changes serve their interests or those of the Republican National Committee.

To preserve majority rule and minority representation, redistricting must be brought into fairer balance. I propose two plans. First, let's establish nonpartisan redistricting commissions in all 50 states. In Ohio, one such ballot measure failed in November, in part because of a poorly financed campaign. Maybe those who prodded voters to turn out could support future initiatives.

Second, we need to adopt a statistically robust judicial standard for partisan gerrymandering. In the Supreme Court's Vieth v. Jubelirer case, in 2004, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy voted against intervention in chicanery in Pennsylvania, but left the door open for future remedies elsewhere if a clear standard could be established.

The great gerrymander of 2012 came 200 years after the first use of this curious word, which comes from the salamander-shaped districts signed into law by Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Gov. Gerry's party engineered its electoral coup using paper maps and ink. But the advent of inexpensive computing and free software has placed the tools for fighting politicians who draw absurd districts into the hands of citizens like you and me.

Politicians, especially Republicans facing demographic and ideological changes in the electorate, use redistricting to cling to power. It's up to us to take control of the process, slay the gerrymander, and put the people back in charge of what is, after all, our House.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/the-great-gerrymander-of-2012.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

[Admiral Yi]

To see how the sleuthing works, start with the naïve standard that the party that wins more than half the votes should get at least half the seats.

This is not a good place to start, as we've discussed at length.

[Razgovory]

To see how the sleuthing works, start with the naïve standard that the party that wins more than half the votes should get at least half the seats.

This is not a good place to start, as we've discussed at length.

We have?  I thought it should be obvious that voting and representation should be connected to one another.  What's your alternative?