The opinion, which does not appear to be linked in the NYT article, is here: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work.... Interestingly, all three judges, including Judge Osteen, a George W. Bush appointee, agreed that the map was unconstitutional and the legislature had to try again. Judge Osteen's dissent was only in part, and addressed the first amendment claim and the appointment of a special master to oversee the second attempt at drawing the map.
One article I read said that there is a 30% Republican voter base that is covered by 76% of the congressional maps. They redrew the maps so they would have 10 seats and Dems would have 3. In the past I've read the Democrats have done similar things.
As a software engineer, isn't there some way to draw maps which balance out demographics programmatically? While taking into consideration population, rural, suburban, urban areas, etc. Shouldn't there be a national policy/process that is followed?
It would make some sense to abolish recording what party people affiliate with. It really serves no purpose. Let people vote in both parties primaries.
Data Scientist with a Master of Public Administration degree here (don't ask). My proposal for solving this has always been to frame it as an optimization problem.
You have a certain number of census tracts (essentially, neighborhoods) with known populations and geographic areas. You know you need to divide the state into X congressional districts.
You should simply assign census tracts to districts such that 1) you end up with X districts, 2) each district's total population is within a Y% tolerance of state population / X, 3) you minimize the average of the lengths of the district borders (to force maximum geographic compactness).
Given available data from the Census, some mucking around in PostGIS or ESRI, and a state-of-the-art commercial solver like Gurobi, there's absolutely no reason this couldn't be done.
It'd also be trivial to add on requirements for balancing demographics or political affiliation within certain tolerances as well.
> isn't there some way to draw maps which balance out demographics programmatically
We can't even agree on what "balance" means. In particular, people want both majority-minority districts and party-balanced districts, which is a pretty tough constraint in practice.
Fivethirtyeight.com people have written a lot about it (including why you can't simply write a program and go home, just like you can't for most political questions). They also have an ongoing podcast series that talks about the issue in great detail 'The Gerrymandering Project'.
Maybe it's time to stop using geography? Geography was an important consideration in the horse/trail era where if you were stumping around trying to get people to vote for you, how far you had to travel mattered.
Plus, before skyscrapers and other sorts high density developments geography had an okay correlation with population density, but that is no longer the case anymore. There are often far more people in a single block in a city than on an entire knob out in the knobs, or an entire mountain in mountainous areas, etc. You can't easily "circle" just a floor or three of a single building on a 2D map with any accuracy, but to balance population density fairly you may have to consider problems like that.
With TV, radio, the internet, skyscrapers, and urban density, maybe we need a whole new solution for representative democracy than where physically you collect your snail mail?
I don't have any good theories on what should replace geography, but I do think geography is a problem we could eliminate by ignoring that variable.
It doesn't even have to be a complex mathematical equation. Gerrymandering is a particularly acute American problem which isn't present in most other industrial democracies, because in most cases, an independent commission is picked to define district boundaries, and they are mostly guided by common sense and fairness, which seems to work well enough. The problem the U.S. has is to leave this task to people who have an inherent conflict of interest in the outcome of the process.
> As a software engineer, isn't there some way to draw maps which balance out demographics programmatically?
Once you define which of the many competing priorities for districting (aside from naked partisan advantage and disenfranchising particular races, which we can assume are agreed not to be acceptable priorities) to optimize and how to weight them against each other this becomes easy.
Of course, the people with illegitimate goals can easily game out which combination of the notionally legitimate goals maximizes their actual illegitimate ones, and advocate for that as the standard.
Independent non-partisan redistricting commissions solve this problem easily. But only a few states (Washington, California among the bigger ones) are brave enough to go through with it.
I used to share your reasoning that a straightforward technical solution must exist but this article really opened my eyes to the various tradeoffs involved in districting and how finding a balance is indeed a political not a technical problem: "Gerrymandering isn't evil" https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/could-gerrym...
Keep in mind the whole point of these districts is to bias in favor of a demographic. If you want to automate that then you also have to explicitly define the biases. If you don't want biases then get rid of the districts.
Ironically enough, the software seems to already exist, but right now (according to the article) it's being used perversely to draw the districts in the least fair way possible.
How would the software work? You want to put communities together. Ideally, you don't want your community to be split in the middle because of a congressional line.
Not saying that isn't happening now, it is. But software doesn't solve that issue.
So we created this great problem: congressional lines. Then we try and fix it. Representation is hard. Why not do away with the problem entirely? Remove this type of representation.
Radical, yes, but what does congress do anyway? ;)
What I don't get is that the US seems to be trying to push its political system to the absolute limit. Since I came to the US there is this constant push for impeaching the sitting president, disputing election results, extreme gerrymandering and all the other nonsense going on. This is the climate that breeds a strongman dictator that "cleans up" all the mess.
Has it always been that way and will get worked out or is the US determined to destroy its institutions?
Well, let's analyze each of your questions in turn.
> Since I came to the US there is this constant push for impeaching the sitting president
When did you come to the USA?
There was a constant push to impeach Obama. There was a constant push to impeach Bush. The was a constant push to impeach Clinton.
Clinton was elected in 1993, so there are a lot of adult Americans who were born in the USA and who can also say that "since I came to the US (aka was born), there has been this constant push for impeaching the sitting president".
Congress seems to be more dysfunctional now than it was in the 80's and 90's. But there have been worse eras, too. At least the congressmen who've been shot lately weren't shot by other congressmen in duels, for example... :-\
In theory much of the country is designed to be malleable and fault-tolerant. Checks and balances exist to prevent one branch from overpowering others, but the malleable nature of the country means there are mechanisms to push the dial of what powers each branch has. So the reality is at present a strongman wouldn't have the mechanisms to clean up the mess. Gridlock is - in a way - by design.
This is really just the effect of the population (and by effect politicians) becoming more polarized. There has been a definite trend towards parties becoming more and more polarized ever since the end of WW II [1].
I'm from NC and was arrested (twice -- for 2nd degree trespass) while protesting these clowns.
Make no mistake, the crass disregard for the democratic process on display in NC is a model coming soon to a state near you :(
While rulings like this are good news, what of the laws passed by these unconstitutionally "elected" bodies during the last decade? The damage (to our school system for example) is lasting and won't be undone by a mere SCOTUS rulings.
Thanks for getting involved! And you're completely right: Republicans have been treating North Carolina (and Wisconsin) as a lab and prototype for testing out attacks on democracy.
the crass disregard for the democratic process on display in NC is a model coming soon to a state near you :(
It's not just the democratic process, but more generally the rule of law. The GOP has gone into crazy territory with their "ends justify the means" strategies. Look at the support of Roy Moore. Party over everything. Disgusting.
What the elected, Republican majority legislature voted for is not "crass disregard for the democratic process". It's actually the democratic process. If the legislature passes a bill that's unconstitutional, then it's up to the judicial branch to rectify that.
By population, NC is a 50/50 red/blue state. Even by county, which is what a non-gerrymandered legislature would look like, it's all red outside of Charlotte and Raleigh, and 50/50 in places like Greensboro or Fayetteville.
I'm against HB-2 as well, but it's up to the judicial to rectify that.
538 has recently produced a podcast series† that dives quite deeply into the question of gerrymandering. I found it really insightful and helpful in understanding a lot of the issues involved. They address North Carolina in particular‡, as well as Wisconsin, California, Arizona, among others. I've come away with a much deeper understanding, from a variety of perspectives.
So I saw one discussion where someone pointed out that gerrymandered districts tend to backfire spectacularly. Basically as soon as there is any meaningful shift in population, the districts that were carefully crafted to be safe for a specific party flip overnight with little warning. It's a thing you do to win short term gains, but you can't keep doing it over and over.
It's also a great example of politicians choosing their voters. If we are going for this system, why not just do a state-wide popular vote election and choose the top N people as winners?
Also, gerrymandering seems responsible for the candidates sliding further into extremism. Basically if you run in a freshly created district that you are reasonably sure will go to your party, your real competition isn't the Dem/Rep who is running against you. It's your opponents in the primary. So if you are a Democrat running against a Republican in a close to 50/50 split, you might be compelled to become more centrist to steal some votes. But if you are only concerned about the primaries, you will try to be the Democratiest Democrat ever.
Feels like we need to get away from geographic based representation at the state level. In a hypothetical state where voters of parties are evenly distributed geographically we would end up with the majority party always winning anyway no matter how the district lines are drawn. This feels like the end goal of gerrymandering -- it's just that since party voters aren't distributed evenly geographically they need to draw odd districts to get the desired distributions.
Switching to a system where as a state we pick based on party representation or as a whole pick N candidates (something like they do in parts of Europe I believe) seems preferable and renders gerrymandering ineffective because there are no districts to draw. Hopefully we'd get representation based on the voters being represented with this style of system.
Regarding the last two paragraphs of the article, what is the typical way that past presidents are meant to be addressed? Contrast the curt 'Mr. Obama' with President Jimmy Carter and President George W. Bush.
>In addition to Judge Wynn, an appointee of Mr. Obama’s, Senior Judge W. Earl Britt of the Federal District Court in Raleigh joined the opinion. Judge Britt was appointed by President Jimmy Carter.
>Judge William L. Osteen Jr., who was appointed by President George W. Bush and sits on the federal bench in Greensboro, said he agreed that the existing map violated the 14th Amendment, but he disputed other parts of Judge Wynn’s opinion, including the decision to appoint an independent expert to begin preparing an alternative map.
It seems crazy that we elect representatives based on geography. Can't we elect representatives based on some other grouping? Why is there an assumption that my interests are aligned with people in geographic proximity to me?
So I’ve got a question for you legal scholars. If it’s unconstitutional does that mean the people behind it broke laws or is this simply the court citing why the map was rejected?
[+] [-] freen|8 years ago|reply
https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2017/november/i-cu...
[+] [-] rayiner|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MithrilTuxedo|8 years ago|reply
Does anyone know: is it typical for the NYT to not link to court decisions? I'm used to such links in online news stories.
[+] [-] matt_s|8 years ago|reply
As a software engineer, isn't there some way to draw maps which balance out demographics programmatically? While taking into consideration population, rural, suburban, urban areas, etc. Shouldn't there be a national policy/process that is followed?
It would make some sense to abolish recording what party people affiliate with. It really serves no purpose. Let people vote in both parties primaries.
[+] [-] dbatten|8 years ago|reply
You have a certain number of census tracts (essentially, neighborhoods) with known populations and geographic areas. You know you need to divide the state into X congressional districts.
You should simply assign census tracts to districts such that 1) you end up with X districts, 2) each district's total population is within a Y% tolerance of state population / X, 3) you minimize the average of the lengths of the district borders (to force maximum geographic compactness).
Given available data from the Census, some mucking around in PostGIS or ESRI, and a state-of-the-art commercial solver like Gurobi, there's absolutely no reason this couldn't be done.
It'd also be trivial to add on requirements for balancing demographics or political affiliation within certain tolerances as well.
[+] [-] electricslpnsld|8 years ago|reply
There are mathematicians who study gerrymandering and election maps [1,2].
[1] https://sites.tufts.edu/gerrymandr/ [2] https://phys.org/news/2017-08-math-experts-brainpower-gerrym...
[+] [-] samch|8 years ago|reply
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...
[+] [-] bzbarsky|8 years ago|reply
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland's_3rd_congressional_d... for an example...
> isn't there some way to draw maps which balance out demographics programmatically
We can't even agree on what "balance" means. In particular, people want both majority-minority districts and party-balanced districts, which is a pretty tough constraint in practice.
[+] [-] pvg|8 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/0...
Fivethirtyeight.com people have written a lot about it (including why you can't simply write a program and go home, just like you can't for most political questions). They also have an ongoing podcast series that talks about the issue in great detail 'The Gerrymandering Project'.
[+] [-] WorldMaker|8 years ago|reply
Plus, before skyscrapers and other sorts high density developments geography had an okay correlation with population density, but that is no longer the case anymore. There are often far more people in a single block in a city than on an entire knob out in the knobs, or an entire mountain in mountainous areas, etc. You can't easily "circle" just a floor or three of a single building on a 2D map with any accuracy, but to balance population density fairly you may have to consider problems like that.
With TV, radio, the internet, skyscrapers, and urban density, maybe we need a whole new solution for representative democracy than where physically you collect your snail mail?
I don't have any good theories on what should replace geography, but I do think geography is a problem we could eliminate by ignoring that variable.
[+] [-] frandroid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noahl|8 years ago|reply
https://services.math.duke.edu/projects/gerrymandering/
[+] [-] shove|8 years ago|reply
I used to agree (also a software engineer) that this is a puzzle that ought to be solveable with weighted voronoi diagrams or somesuch but then I read: https://peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/10/17/the-problem-of-d...
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
Once you define which of the many competing priorities for districting (aside from naked partisan advantage and disenfranchising particular races, which we can assume are agreed not to be acceptable priorities) to optimize and how to weight them against each other this becomes easy.
Of course, the people with illegitimate goals can easily game out which combination of the notionally legitimate goals maximizes their actual illegitimate ones, and advocate for that as the standard.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] landonxjames|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://sites.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/uw_1034.pdf
[+] [-] nicolaskruchten|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derwiki|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dqpb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fallingfrog|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] odonnellryan|8 years ago|reply
Not saying that isn't happening now, it is. But software doesn't solve that issue.
So we created this great problem: congressional lines. Then we try and fix it. Representation is hard. Why not do away with the problem entirely? Remove this type of representation.
Radical, yes, but what does congress do anyway? ;)
[+] [-] maxxxxx|8 years ago|reply
Has it always been that way and will get worked out or is the US determined to destroy its institutions?
[+] [-] throwawayjava|8 years ago|reply
Well, let's analyze each of your questions in turn.
> Since I came to the US there is this constant push for impeaching the sitting president
When did you come to the USA?
There was a constant push to impeach Obama. There was a constant push to impeach Bush. The was a constant push to impeach Clinton.
Clinton was elected in 1993, so there are a lot of adult Americans who were born in the USA and who can also say that "since I came to the US (aka was born), there has been this constant push for impeaching the sitting president".
> extreme gerrymandering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Etymology
> and all the other nonsense
Congress seems to be more dysfunctional now than it was in the 80's and 90's. But there have been worse eras, too. At least the congressmen who've been shot lately weren't shot by other congressmen in duels, for example... :-\
[+] [-] nkozyra|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmiller123456|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://legacy.voteview.com/political_polarization_2015.htm
[+] [-] lurr|8 years ago|reply
Institutionally things are starting to break down because of a combination of poor design and poor implementation.
But there are so very many people who will argue that the current system is a feature not a bug.
[+] [-] samch|8 years ago|reply
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/politic...
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shove|8 years ago|reply
Make no mistake, the crass disregard for the democratic process on display in NC is a model coming soon to a state near you :(
While rulings like this are good news, what of the laws passed by these unconstitutionally "elected" bodies during the last decade? The damage (to our school system for example) is lasting and won't be undone by a mere SCOTUS rulings.
[+] [-] jdp23|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e40|8 years ago|reply
It's not just the democratic process, but more generally the rule of law. The GOP has gone into crazy territory with their "ends justify the means" strategies. Look at the support of Roy Moore. Party over everything. Disgusting.
[+] [-] fortythirteen|8 years ago|reply
By population, NC is a 50/50 red/blue state. Even by county, which is what a non-gerrymandered legislature would look like, it's all red outside of Charlotte and Raleigh, and 50/50 in places like Greensboro or Fayetteville.
I'm against HB-2 as well, but it's up to the judicial to rectify that.
[+] [-] grzm|8 years ago|reply
† https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/
‡ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/is-gerrymandering-the-b...
[+] [-] IgorPartola|8 years ago|reply
It's also a great example of politicians choosing their voters. If we are going for this system, why not just do a state-wide popular vote election and choose the top N people as winners?
Also, gerrymandering seems responsible for the candidates sliding further into extremism. Basically if you run in a freshly created district that you are reasonably sure will go to your party, your real competition isn't the Dem/Rep who is running against you. It's your opponents in the primary. So if you are a Democrat running against a Republican in a close to 50/50 split, you might be compelled to become more centrist to steal some votes. But if you are only concerned about the primaries, you will try to be the Democratiest Democrat ever.
[+] [-] jay-anderson|8 years ago|reply
Switching to a system where as a state we pick based on party representation or as a whole pick N candidates (something like they do in parts of Europe I believe) seems preferable and renders gerrymandering ineffective because there are no districts to draw. Hopefully we'd get representation based on the voters being represented with this style of system.
[+] [-] walshemj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pas|8 years ago|reply
And of course drawing lines on a map rarely helps with fairness.
[+] [-] jzylstra|8 years ago|reply
>In addition to Judge Wynn, an appointee of Mr. Obama’s, Senior Judge W. Earl Britt of the Federal District Court in Raleigh joined the opinion. Judge Britt was appointed by President Jimmy Carter.
>Judge William L. Osteen Jr., who was appointed by President George W. Bush and sits on the federal bench in Greensboro, said he agreed that the existing map violated the 14th Amendment, but he disputed other parts of Judge Wynn’s opinion, including the decision to appoint an independent expert to begin preparing an alternative map.
[+] [-] koolba|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsnick|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] odammit|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanalltogether|8 years ago|reply
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/10/27/1579905/-These-t...
[+] [-] cjslep|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tboyd47|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_toad|8 years ago|reply
1. Letting politicians determine electorate boundaries is just a dumb idea. Who thought that could possibly work?
2. Non-proportional representation belongs in the age of horses and telegrams.
[+] [-] Clubber|8 years ago|reply
The politicians that voted it into law, of course.
[+] [-] teilo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xWilliam|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calimac|8 years ago|reply
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