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.
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?
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 :) ]
Other ways:
Limit the proportion of seats a party can contest to 50% so no party can control the government and will depend on other parties. Force each party to setup a voting platform so citizens in the district can vote bindingly on individual bills. The district will have two votes, one is the representative and the other is proportional vote depending on how many citizens in that district voting for that specific bill. (Can be partial vote e.g 63%)
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.
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)
I've seem a number of comments about that 36.9% - I had a quick look and it is actually higher than the Labour win in 2005 (35.2%) which had a lower turnout as well.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is a manufactured issue used by people who refuse to accept election results they don't like, and they use to it delegitimize the outcome.
You'll find that the same people who go on about it are the same people who think George W Bush stole the 2000 election.
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
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.
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?
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.
Gerrymandering of Congressional districts could only affect the Presidential election results in two small states, Nebraska and Maine.
Eliminating the Electoral College and moving to a nationwide popular vote for President would have essentially no effect on the motivation to gerrymander.
On the other hand, if all 50 states allowed each Congressional district to choose its own elector (and presumably elected the other two statewide), it would represent a massive shift in favor of the GOP, and gerrymandering would have very little to do with it. Instead, the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas would be decisive.
Gerrymandering has more to do with local elections than presidential -- unless you're suggesting that the outlines of the states are 200 year old conspiracies by and against parties that didn't even exist yet.
There's a referendum of public opinion after every election. Gore won his presidential election by about half a percent. We talked about it, but interest fizzled out.
If, in the future, that margin grows to a number that people care about, we can change the rules. The NPVIC* is probably the most direct way for that to happen.
Diagrams, information, graphs and abstract graphical representation of said information in various states, intellectually stimulating. Seems about right.
The guidelines do say most things about politics don't belong, but I feel like this would not fall into that. Is that your concern? I think the guidelines are broad enough that the opposite question needs to be asked.
[+] [-] emehrkay|10 years ago|reply
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Ho...
[+] [-] dzdt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gortok|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
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 :) ]
[+] [-] meric|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minority-one|10 years ago|reply
So you judge politicians based not on their actions but on their supposed intentions?
> Maybe we could call it a constitutional republic?
Nice save. A constitutional republic is the true "a better government, one tweak at a time" since federalism is the laboratory of government.
No one even remembered that was the point of federalism here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10290172
[+] [-] aidos|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] notahacker|10 years ago|reply
(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)
[+] [-] Siecje|10 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/Mky11UJb9AY
[+] [-] arethuza|10 years ago|reply
http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/uktable.htm
[I'm not a Labour, Conservative or LibDem supporter so I have no particular axe to grind here].
[+] [-] mason240|10 years ago|reply
You'll find that the same people who go on about it are the same people who think George W Bush stole the 2000 election.
[+] [-] kgreene2|10 years ago|reply
[0] - http://www.redistrictinggame.org/
[+] [-] jameshart|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Robadob|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dheera|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LordKano|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] twoodfin|10 years ago|reply
Eliminating the Electoral College and moving to a nationwide popular vote for President would have essentially no effect on the motivation to gerrymander.
On the other hand, if all 50 states allowed each Congressional district to choose its own elector (and presumably elected the other two statewide), it would represent a massive shift in favor of the GOP, and gerrymandering would have very little to do with it. Instead, the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas would be decisive.
[+] [-] hodwik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|10 years ago|reply
If, in the future, that margin grows to a number that people care about, we can change the rules. The NPVIC* is probably the most direct way for that to happen.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
[+] [-] civilian|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] tristanj|10 years ago|reply
This is false. Alternate vote is still susceptible to gerrymandering. It even says so in the video you linked (@3:00).
[+] [-] Nilzor|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nanny|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terminado|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damon_c|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtk40|10 years ago|reply