This is not going to happen anytime soon, but the most democratic and best way to do it would be to divide the districts anyway you want, but if a Democrat gets 40% of the vote in that district and the Republican get 60% of the vote in that district, then it would get one Democrat representative with .4 of a vote and one Republican representative with .6 of a vote. This would be completely fair and completely democratic, and therefore today’s Republican party would never allow it.
There is a lot of factional infighting at present. If we switched to proportional representation, who is on the party list and their relative position becomes really important. Just imagine the amount of backbiting then. How would this be dealt with?
If we want an actually good system we also need to abolish the senate. Which I think Matt agrees with, but, just saying. And might as well consolidate and reapportion a bunch of the states while we're at it.
I get a bit of smug satisfaction whenever an intellectual trendsetter like Matthew writes an article about an idea I’ve been championing privately for years.
If the voters don’t understand the voting system, it’s not democracy.
Introducing fancy technocratic voting systems advantages the affluent and educated (who have the time, resources, ability, and desire to learn the new system) at the expense of the rest of society (who often do not).
I vote in both the proportional representation New Zealand elections and the Australian ranked choice elections. Both systems work pretty well (with a Prime Minister not a President of course). With PR, there’s a 5% threshold so you don’t get too many nut jobs in Parliament. It’s not a panacea. We never get really terrible government, but good prime ministers come along only occasionally.
I disagree with your contention that compactness doesn’t matter. I live in Maryland’s third; which used to by one of the least compact districts in the country. That meant:
It meant my reps town halls (and services, if I had needed them) were super far away.
But more importantly, most of my other political constituencies were organized at the county level!! Now that my county is fully inside of one district, local level officials can better engage my house rep, and county wide political organizations can better interface with my house rep.
I'm not seeing this opinion represented in the comments, but: I have a very bad feeling about all this nakedly partisan gerrymandering. It will destroy what's left of the legitimacy of our representative government, and will lead to violence as those excluded from power seek other means to exercise political power. It won't happen right away (I hope) but this will be the end of the republic, at least until some future leader re-unites the formerly United States.
Why have districts at all, though, if you're still retaining a Legislature with equal voting power among Members who have unequal voter support behind them? Even multi member districts erode the voting power of every extra voter beyond the one that achieves the threshold for the representatives they ultimately receive.
You can either go proportional representation, mixed representation a la Germany, or you could embrace calculators to enable proxy voting and just say "Candidate X has voting power equivalent to 53.4% of the population of District Y, which is completed comprised of Counties A, B, and C; Candidate Z has 46.6% voting power." Then you don't have to worry about gerrymandering whatsoever and can still have place based representatives as the founders intended.
I strongly disagree that the Democrats tried to ban gerrymandering in 2021 and that (elected) Democrats evaluate gerrymanders by disproportionality.
Elected Democrats, and many progressive "experts" have adopted measures of gerrymandering such as the Efficiency Gap and Reock Scores, which are not disproportionality. One version of the Democrats' anti-gerrymandering bills, the Freedom to Vote Act, explicitly prohibited using disproportionality to assess a gerrymander, and called for using Efficiency Gap.
These measures are incredibly biased against Republicans because they don't take into account that turnout differs between House districts and Democrats tend to dominate in the lowest-turnout districts. Hence, a Democratic disproportionaity can easily be assessed as a Republican gerrymander or partisan fairness. Huge Democratic disproportionalities, such as Illinois, Oregon, and New Jersey, could be rendered "fair" by the create of ~1-3 Republican seats, which would preserve Democratic disproportionalities.
If you look at Princeton Gerrymandering's rankings using Reock scores, they are equally absurd, where a Republican disproportionality gets an "F" but its Democratic inversion gets an "A." For instance, CA gets a B, but the smaller GOP disproportionality in TX gets an F. Although CT has an 0/5 38% Republican minority but CT gets an A, while UT with its 0/4 38% Democratic minority gets an F.
To further protect Democratic seats, these anti-gerrymandering bills contained provisions protecting "communities of interest," but used definitions of "community of interest" which could much more easily apply to the Democrats, since their majority areas tend to be concentrated in cities or single counties, but could not apply to Republicans, since their voters tend to be dispersed across many jurisdictions.
Finally, the Democrats' anti-gerrymandering bill contains no solution for Massachusetts.
I agree, the real solution should be multimember districts elected by Single-Transferable Vote, but if we have to retain single-winner districts, a solution for Massachusetts could be to allow non-contiguous districts, but those are explicitly banned.
Anyway, yes, Republicans clearly use aggressive gerrymanders and yes, the real solution is proportional representation, but elected Democrats and progressive allies like Princeton Gerrymandering and the Brennan Center do NOT use disproportionality, and Congressional Democrats have NOT presented any ban on gerrymandering.
The problem is the House, in theory, is supposed to be the chamber more responsive to local concerns. Senators deal with who should be the Secretary of State, Representatives get potholes fixed, that kind of thing. It's an oversimplification obviously, but that was the idea.
In practice, due to polarization we now have a House that would lose literally nothing by going to pure PR at the state level, because members just vote with their party as opposed to conducting a deep inquiry as to how any given piece of legislation would impact their district. So without a doubt, I'm with you in thinking PR at the state level would be an absolutely enormous upgrade over the status quo.
But it would need to be sold, in the face of inevitable GOP fear mongering, to a public that I'm pretty sure still likes the idea of having a local "representative." I think it would be such an uphill battle, the most realistic approach might be to incorporate PR into a system that still has aspects of localism.
You could simply make the House much, much bigger and incorporate PR at the *district* level. This wouldn't completely solve the partisan gerrymandering issue, but while I admittedly haven't penciled it out, it seems like there'd be way less flexibility if every district had 5 members with seats divided proportionately.
You could even sell this as a *return* to localism, since every district would now have 5 times the amount of representation!
Yeah, the reason I commented what I did is because my read of Matt’s proposal was that it was basically pure PR at the state level, with the exception of larger states which would get divided into 3-4 “districts” so large there would be no element of localism.
As a subscriber, fun to see you using Dave's Redistricting for the examples in your post. I've been working on the app along with Dave and another fellow for 7 years or so with a goal of providing more powerful tools to citizens and better transparency into this crazy process.
We can all agree as Matt Y says that incumbent protection should not be the first priority. The GOP has reached a state where it does not prioritize incumbent protection because it is now a cult based around a centralizing figure who sets priorities for the whole party and anyone who tries to act in their own self interest as an incumbent will be immediately punished severely.
What legitimate mechanism do Democrats actually have to enforce a party-first dynamic in redistricting to replace the incumbent me-me-me elected-till-I-die ethos that has taken hold?
This is not going to happen anytime soon, but the most democratic and best way to do it would be to divide the districts anyway you want, but if a Democrat gets 40% of the vote in that district and the Republican get 60% of the vote in that district, then it would get one Democrat representative with .4 of a vote and one Republican representative with .6 of a vote. This would be completely fair and completely democratic, and therefore today’s Republican party would never allow it.
I am surprised no one brought up this: (use math to create least biased districts)
https://www.brown.edu/news/2017-11-07/redistricting
There is a lot of factional infighting at present. If we switched to proportional representation, who is on the party list and their relative position becomes really important. Just imagine the amount of backbiting then. How would this be dealt with?
If we want an actually good system we also need to abolish the senate. Which I think Matt agrees with, but, just saying. And might as well consolidate and reapportion a bunch of the states while we're at it.
I get a bit of smug satisfaction whenever an intellectual trendsetter like Matthew writes an article about an idea I’ve been championing privately for years.
If the voters don’t understand the voting system, it’s not democracy.
Introducing fancy technocratic voting systems advantages the affluent and educated (who have the time, resources, ability, and desire to learn the new system) at the expense of the rest of society (who often do not).
It’s completely unacceptable.
I vote in both the proportional representation New Zealand elections and the Australian ranked choice elections. Both systems work pretty well (with a Prime Minister not a President of course). With PR, there’s a 5% threshold so you don’t get too many nut jobs in Parliament. It’s not a panacea. We never get really terrible government, but good prime ministers come along only occasionally.
I disagree with your contention that compactness doesn’t matter. I live in Maryland’s third; which used to by one of the least compact districts in the country. That meant:
It meant my reps town halls (and services, if I had needed them) were super far away.
But more importantly, most of my other political constituencies were organized at the county level!! Now that my county is fully inside of one district, local level officials can better engage my house rep, and county wide political organizations can better interface with my house rep.
I'm not seeing this opinion represented in the comments, but: I have a very bad feeling about all this nakedly partisan gerrymandering. It will destroy what's left of the legitimacy of our representative government, and will lead to violence as those excluded from power seek other means to exercise political power. It won't happen right away (I hope) but this will be the end of the republic, at least until some future leader re-unites the formerly United States.
It's also important (and easier to enact) at the state-legislature level.
At the Congressional level, IIRC there's a statute requiring districts, and a mention of "districts" in the Constitution.
Why have districts at all, though, if you're still retaining a Legislature with equal voting power among Members who have unequal voter support behind them? Even multi member districts erode the voting power of every extra voter beyond the one that achieves the threshold for the representatives they ultimately receive.
You can either go proportional representation, mixed representation a la Germany, or you could embrace calculators to enable proxy voting and just say "Candidate X has voting power equivalent to 53.4% of the population of District Y, which is completed comprised of Counties A, B, and C; Candidate Z has 46.6% voting power." Then you don't have to worry about gerrymandering whatsoever and can still have place based representatives as the founders intended.
I strongly disagree that the Democrats tried to ban gerrymandering in 2021 and that (elected) Democrats evaluate gerrymanders by disproportionality.
Elected Democrats, and many progressive "experts" have adopted measures of gerrymandering such as the Efficiency Gap and Reock Scores, which are not disproportionality. One version of the Democrats' anti-gerrymandering bills, the Freedom to Vote Act, explicitly prohibited using disproportionality to assess a gerrymander, and called for using Efficiency Gap.
These measures are incredibly biased against Republicans because they don't take into account that turnout differs between House districts and Democrats tend to dominate in the lowest-turnout districts. Hence, a Democratic disproportionaity can easily be assessed as a Republican gerrymander or partisan fairness. Huge Democratic disproportionalities, such as Illinois, Oregon, and New Jersey, could be rendered "fair" by the create of ~1-3 Republican seats, which would preserve Democratic disproportionalities.
If you look at Princeton Gerrymandering's rankings using Reock scores, they are equally absurd, where a Republican disproportionality gets an "F" but its Democratic inversion gets an "A." For instance, CA gets a B, but the smaller GOP disproportionality in TX gets an F. Although CT has an 0/5 38% Republican minority but CT gets an A, while UT with its 0/4 38% Democratic minority gets an F.
To further protect Democratic seats, these anti-gerrymandering bills contained provisions protecting "communities of interest," but used definitions of "community of interest" which could much more easily apply to the Democrats, since their majority areas tend to be concentrated in cities or single counties, but could not apply to Republicans, since their voters tend to be dispersed across many jurisdictions.
Finally, the Democrats' anti-gerrymandering bill contains no solution for Massachusetts.
I agree, the real solution should be multimember districts elected by Single-Transferable Vote, but if we have to retain single-winner districts, a solution for Massachusetts could be to allow non-contiguous districts, but those are explicitly banned.
Anyway, yes, Republicans clearly use aggressive gerrymanders and yes, the real solution is proportional representation, but elected Democrats and progressive allies like Princeton Gerrymandering and the Brennan Center do NOT use disproportionality, and Congressional Democrats have NOT presented any ban on gerrymandering.
The problem is the House, in theory, is supposed to be the chamber more responsive to local concerns. Senators deal with who should be the Secretary of State, Representatives get potholes fixed, that kind of thing. It's an oversimplification obviously, but that was the idea.
In practice, due to polarization we now have a House that would lose literally nothing by going to pure PR at the state level, because members just vote with their party as opposed to conducting a deep inquiry as to how any given piece of legislation would impact their district. So without a doubt, I'm with you in thinking PR at the state level would be an absolutely enormous upgrade over the status quo.
But it would need to be sold, in the face of inevitable GOP fear mongering, to a public that I'm pretty sure still likes the idea of having a local "representative." I think it would be such an uphill battle, the most realistic approach might be to incorporate PR into a system that still has aspects of localism.
You could simply make the House much, much bigger and incorporate PR at the *district* level. This wouldn't completely solve the partisan gerrymandering issue, but while I admittedly haven't penciled it out, it seems like there'd be way less flexibility if every district had 5 members with seats divided proportionately.
You could even sell this as a *return* to localism, since every district would now have 5 times the amount of representation!
There are numerous methods that allow for both geographic representation and proportionality.
Yeah, the reason I commented what I did is because my read of Matt’s proposal was that it was basically pure PR at the state level, with the exception of larger states which would get divided into 3-4 “districts” so large there would be no element of localism.
I think he just didn’t delve into the details too closely tbh.
As a subscriber, fun to see you using Dave's Redistricting for the examples in your post. I've been working on the app along with Dave and another fellow for 7 years or so with a goal of providing more powerful tools to citizens and better transparency into this crazy process.
I’ve been using DRA for almost 8 years! Thank you for your hard work!
We can all agree as Matt Y says that incumbent protection should not be the first priority. The GOP has reached a state where it does not prioritize incumbent protection because it is now a cult based around a centralizing figure who sets priorities for the whole party and anyone who tries to act in their own self interest as an incumbent will be immediately punished severely.
What legitimate mechanism do Democrats actually have to enforce a party-first dynamic in redistricting to replace the incumbent me-me-me elected-till-I-die ethos that has taken hold?
This may be pedantic but "gerrymandering" by definition is the ugly lines.
The history of the word - portmanteau of Gerry and Salamander - alludes to shapes.
Now, you might call the situation where geography is disadvantageous unfair or unproportional but it isn't gerrymandering