If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this lower court opinion would have in effect (but not technically) stood as a nationwide precedent modifying existing Supreme Court decisions.
I think this is the part that matters. It's possible that the Supreme Court would rather that the judgement came from them rather than the lower court. Leaving it as-is would modify existing Supreme Court caselaw, but the decision itself wouldn't have come from the Supreme Court, which could lead to a bit of ambiguity. If the Supreme Court itself weighs in, even just to agree with the lower court, it eliminates that ambiguity. No one is left wondering "What if it had gone to the Supreme Court" about the decision.
I am not a lawyer, but that is my interpretation.
See: http://electionlawblog.org/?p=91947 for more info.
[...] a need for expert witnesses who understand the mathematical concepts applicable to gerrymandering. To meet that need, she’s spearheaded the creation of a five-day summer program at Tufts [the first in a series of regional trainings] that aims to train mathematicians to do just that
[...] over 900 people have indicated their interest by signing up for a mailing list
http://tufts.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7...
--
Quoting from the end of that article, calling out the "efficiency gap" as the spark for work towards a mathematical definition of "compactness" satisfying districting requirements in a way that is convincingly explainable as fair:
Recently there was a big media sensation in Wisconsin around something called the "efficiency gap." It was a new metric of partisan gerrymandering that, for the first time, a court said they liked. The way it was devised was that the people who created it, they went back and they read all of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s written decisions about measuring gerrymandering. By reading his words and by reading what he said he found convincing and less convincing, they designed a statistic to appeal to him.
SCOTUS turns based on which side of the bed Kennedy wakes up on (on most issues). There are 4 solid liberal votes and 4 solid conservative votes and Kennedy in the middle.
Kennedy indicated in a ruling a few years ago that in theory he's uncomfortable with gerrymandering and might be open to striking them down, but apart from "I know it when I see it" he doesn't know a neutral/nonpartisan way to actually detect it. And "I know it when I see it" doesn't work well as a judicial test, there needs to be a bright-line somewhere that lower courts can apply.
Well, a bunch of mathematicians heard that and said "challenge accepted" and have been working on mathematical models to quantify the level of gerrymandering. And now the court cases are working their way back up to SCOTUS, only with the academic models that Kennedy has indicated he wants.
Now we get to find out whether Kennedy's interest in neutering gerrymandering actually goes as far as being willing to strike down a gerrymander. Because it's easy to talk the talk, but at the end of the day Kennedy is still conservative-ish and gerrymandering heavily benefits conservatives overall.
I think this is a little bit misleading. Most Supreme Court decisions are unanimous.
The efficiency gap for all plans[0] shows pretty clearly gerrymandering can occur for either party. In fact, the very pro-Democratic plans are more gerrymandered than the very pro-Republican plans, including the plan in question. There are four pro-D plans with the upper error limit above .2 while the plan in question appears to be at approximately -1.5
There's no need to turn this into "if Kennedy doesn't vote against this he's in favor of gerrymandering because it helps his conservative leanings."
[0] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pJwDdPDejaHo83ukoW27r6Yaaxg=...
You quickly get into non-linear territory by using travel time instead of Euclidian distance. Roads and bridges become weapons for cutting or connecting districts. Bad bad stuff.
Many districts which aren't compact have been created as majority-minority districts, to prevent disenfranchisement of racial minorities. Plans which divide or erase one of these districts get stopped by the Supreme Court all the time. It's a 1960s approach to equality, but you can tell its effectiveness by how the House is much more representative of the US population's diversity than the Senate is.
* Many more seats in smaller districts mean more independent population "samples" * 2-senator per state rule means that ND has the same Senate weight as CA, regardless of population
More generally, many mathematically inclined people eventually come to the conclusion that we should have some sort of multi-member scheme but that too is bared by federal law -- 2 USC 2c (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c)
[citation needed]
I have seen many examples of horribly shaped districts, but all of them were done for partisan advantage. I would love it if you
1. Give an example of a majority minority district that is horribly shaped explicitly to accommodate the VRA. 2. Give citation for statement that there are "Many" such districts.
http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation
> They complied with the Constitution’s one person, one vote requirement
That line is interesting. How is the electoral college system not in conflict with the Constitution then, if a person's vote in one state is much stronger than another person's vote in another state? Or is it enough that it satisfies the requirement technically (still "one vote"), even if not in spirit/based on a (I would think) more common interpretation of the Constitution?
It's not difficult to see that the optimal partitioning is 75/25 (in either direction), which seems very arbitrary.
From a democracy perspective, it seems like the ideal partitioning would be much closer to 50-50 -- hopefully even in the margin of error for the area, so that candidates would have to make a real effort to represent their entire district in order to be assured re-election. Even this feels very questionable, because as I understand it, the idea of congressional districts is that representation should follow groups of shared problems and interests, irrespective of proposed solutions to those problems.
1. Using the current district map the last set of elections show that Wisconsin had a large gap.
2. Compared to other state's the gap is an outlier.
3. By creating a large number of alternate maps within the state satisfying all the other requirements that gap was still an outlier.
4. Calculating the gap under different voting outcomes showed the result to be robust even under a 5 point swing to the democrates. (This is where the discontinuity would show up if there results were not robust.)
The simplest example you can work is with 2 districts.
https://www.senate.mn/departments/scr/REDIST/Red2000/ch5part...
> Partisan (or political) gerrymandering is the drawing of electoral district lines in a manner that discriminates against a political party.
I would add which party is mostly responsible, but apparently mentioning the party, although factually correct, would lead me to get in trouble here. Which is Grand, coz im really Old, and I dont like to Party... anymore!
Yes, some manipulation would still be possible, but it would be greatly diminished.
Seems to work fairly well for them just looking at the maps and variety of results:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa's_congressional_districts
I'm OK with that as a solution.
Rendering gerrymandering much less of a deal.
By the way APPROVAL VOTE is the best one, not ranked voting.
Madison acknowledged that while a popular vote would be ideal, it would be difficult to get consensus on the proposal given the prevalence of slavery in the South:
There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat...
What brought this on was thinking about the brexit vote over in the UK, which from what I read had very different outcomes among different age groups. It seems quite unfair that people who are likely to die before brexit is complete should have the same say as people who will be living decades under the outcome.
That said, removing people's right to vote is not only difficult, but can cause more problems than it solves. Implementing voting tests can codify racism/sexism/etc. Medical tests will just be gamed. And good luck ever passing these restrictions anyway, since old people are the most consistent voters out there.
I am really surprised that anyone would even suggest it
The electoral college system gives equal weight to the vote of everyone who isn't an elector, and that weight is 0.
It gives stronger votes to large states than to small states, except that states are allowed to split their votes, which obviates that complaint.
So fundamentally it's just a normalized version of the wasted votes metric. Wasted votes is the thing that concerns me as a metric, and it has the discontinuity noted.
Notably, if you have a circular uniformly populated state that is exactly 50-50 -- let's say the north of the state is 100% Republican and the south is 100% Democrat, and we restrict our districting to straight lines through the center. Then there are two solutions that minimize the efficiency gap, the line going from southwest to northeast, and the one going from southeast to northwest, because both of those result in 75/25 districts (that have 0 net wasted votes). This seems really odd to me.
What would prevent this?
The chart shows districing plans with larger efficiency gaps but the article does not offer any of the really damning plan simulation or sensitivity test results for those plans.
Let me guess, you happen to politically side with the benefiting partisans?
Doesn't this reasoning apply to every case that comes before the Supreme Court, even those it refuses to hear?
There's are several answers to your question.
1) To a certain extent it does apply to every case the Court doesn't hear. Although such denials of cert aren't supposed to mean anything you will nonetheless see in briefs something like:
"The Ninth Circuit held blah blah blah. Doe v. Smith 108 F.3d 1147 (9th Cir. 2012), cert. denied, 112 S. Ct. 60 (2013)."
The intention is to imply that a majority of the Supreme Court at least didn't strongly disagree with the Ninth Circuit.
2) Most cases come up to the Supreme Court from the Court of Appeals, not a special three District Court judge panel. The uses and limits of CoA judgement in their own circuits and in other circuits are well understood because it happens so much. That's not the case for these kind of judgments.
3) The nature of the decision itself is unusual. Most cases are fact bound, even most cases that are dealing with precedent work around the edges of existing cases.
The precedent the court below was dealing with -- Vieth v. Jubelirer -- is really unusual. In it four judges would have held that partisan gerrymandering cases are always non-judiciable (i.e. courts shouldn't hear them) four would have held that the such cases are judiciable. Justice Kennedy wrote a solo concurrence that represented the decisive vote. In it he wrote that such cases were as of then non-judiciable because there were no judicially manageable standards that could be applied. But he left the door open for such standards to appear in the future.
The court panel below held that the standard proposed by the plaintiffs was the standard that Justice Kennedy had been looking for all along. Leaving that in place without comment would have looked more endorsement than usual.
Younger people tend to be more creative and flexible in their thinking. As they get older those tend to diminish, but they gain knowledge and experience. I suspect that until somewhere in middle age the gains from knowledge and experience beat out their thinking becoming less flexible and creative when it comes to making well thought out political decisions.
How many times do you see articles about 18-23 year old people doing something stupid, and people come to their defense saying something along the lines of 'They're only children!'?
If you add an assumption about life experience though, You're going to have to be a lot more specific to explain how these two functions interact. why is the optimum in the middle? Why isn't it bumpy?
As soon as you start adding other factors into your weighting function, I don't know how you can be confident in the shape of your graph without being precise with your functions.
To be fair though, I think that there's a pretty good argument for inverse age weighting. If you're 20, you will eventually have to be 35, so it wouldn't make any sense for you to screw over 35 year olds. If you're 35 though, you'll never be 20 again. There is no incentive for you to not screw over 20 year olds. (unless you have kids, but at that point, everyone has equal investment in society and the premise falls apart).
I think it's actually literally impossible to use a straight line there for partisan gerrymanding, so it isn't a real useful scenario.
Simplifying the algebra in the calculation, though, the efficiency gap is actually independent of the inefficiencies of any particular district, but dependent only on the population of the districts -- the numerator simplifies to
D - R + sum_i { I(D_i < R_i) (D_i + R_i) / 2 }
Where D and R are the total Democratic/Republican votes in the state (across all districts) and the I(x) is an indicator function, +1 if true, -1 if false.
If you hold the size of districts to be about even, then this just says that the ratio of the total population of districts that vote R to the total population of districts that vote D should be approximately equal to the ratio of the total state population of R voters to the total state population of D voters.
That seems reasonable, just seems like a roundabout way to get there, and is sensitive to unequal population distributions.
Conceptually, I like the idea of having a test for excessive unfairness; states can do whatever they want to deal with their special cases as long as the result is reasonable.
> The doctrine operates both horizontally and vertically. Horizontal stare decisis refers to a court adhering to its own precedent. A court engages in vertical stare decisis when it applies precedent from a higher court. Consequently, stare decisis discourages litigating established precedents, and thus, reduces spending.
and
> Although courts seldom overrule precedent, Justice Rehnquist explained that stare decisis is not an “inexorable command.” On occasion, the Court will decide not to apply the doctrine if a prior decision is deemed unworkable. In addition, significant societal changes may also prompt the Court to overrule precedent; however, any decision to overrule precedent is exercised cautiously.
It's worth a read (not terribly long) because of the examples and the rationale behind Louisiana having a different system.
The 4th congressional district has its funny shape because there is an African-American community sandwiched between two Latino communities. The African-American community is represented by the 7th Congressional district, which is designed to elect an African-American candidate of choice. The 4th district was wrapped around the 7th district so that both African-American and Latino communities could have congressional representation.
There's no reason for congressional districts to be based on race, IMO.
I agree it's not a very good solution to minority representation, though. I think multi-member districts with transferable votes would do a better job of allowing minorities to get representation naturally instead of having to be intentionally grouped together.
It does, however, seem wicked racist and even rude that the primary goal of districting should be to get a candidate of a certain race.
Some background https://ballotpedia.org/Majority-minority_districts
Ironically, I actually know a radical anti-ageism activist who thinks 5 year olds (and 0 year olds for that matter) should have all the same legal rights as adults.
In that case, you aren't discriminating based on age. Unless you think for some reason that a 95 year old with the mental capacity of a 5 year old doesn't deserve a vote, but a 40 year old with the mental capacity of a 5 year old does deserve a vote.
I'd be really curious to know that activist's views on labor, aviation, combat, pornography, driving, and marriage--as they relate to a 5-year-old. I suppose some of those categories can be answered with skill testing or whatnot, but others clearly cannot.
I believe the real solution to our problems is to move away from geographic representation in its entirety. It's too easy to cheat, and by design it only ends up allowing representation of around half the constituents in its area. I'm not sure what could replace it; perhaps a parliamentary system based on opt-in voting blocks could work. But in its present form it does seem deeply flawed.
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