https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/02/how-the-i-cut-yo...
Gerrymandering is not a technological problem.
Essentially, in a first past the post system, voting for any other candidate other than the one both most likely to win AND whose politics most closely aligns with your own is effectively a vote for the major party candidate who least aligns with your politics.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
edit for link.
That's quite an interesting finding. I always understood that gerrymandeting is bad because the artificially winning parties get congressmen that are not representative of their districts. This guy uses "competitiveness" as a property worth optimizing for, achieving exactly that.
I love how antimander illuminates the tradeoffs.
Along the lines of "preserving community", preserving continuity can also be a factor. On the presumption that voters don't want to have their congressional district designation changed every 10 years. For example. I know this is a consideration during redistricting.
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Antimander is real progress. The cites are terrific. I'm delighted that I even learned some new things, like the Seats-Votes Curve.
I've spoken with the Dave Bradlee many times over the last 15 years. He created a redistricting app that got some national media attention last cycle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave%27s_Redistricting
Some of those talks were pretty bleak. I'm so glad so many more people have engaged with this issue.
Being around 50% gives you a compromise that nobody trusts and nobody feels the stake in their country.
This website seems like a great demonstration of the fairness and competitiveness trade-offs.
Steve
[1] https://www.lume.ufrgs.br/bitstream/handle/10183/174950/0010...
In California you would vote for 53 representatives, each representative would be part of a party. First the seats are divided among all parties based on some system. Then within each party the seats are given to the representatives that have the most votes within the party.
This would introduce new parties to the system, no party would be able to govern alone.
In practice, in STV PR it is generally optimal to vote for almost everyone on the ballot; you give low preferences to people you don't care about to avoid people you actively don't want getting in (it's commonly claimed that you should optimally give a preference to everyone, even those you actively don't want, but this is incorrect).
Where I life, you can give up to 2 votes per representative. You don't need to choose 54 different politicians because "empty" votes will still count for the party.
Most people will just use the list of their party and maybe remove some that they don't like or vote double for someone they like.
Yes, we'd have a LOT more representatives. But we also now have the technology to support such a thing.
> As a result [of the Reapportionment Act of 1929], the average size of a congressional district has tripled in size—from 210,328 inhabitants based on the 1910 Census, to 710,767 according to the 2010 Census. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929
People outside of (partisan) politics don't often get to see that the party orgs and the politicians are usually in conflict. More so on the left than on the right.
There is a whole field of study around efficient "cake cutting" algorithms, many of which contemplate and account for defectors.
So then all the Senators should just be from California, Texas, New York, and Florida.
But you can clearly amend the powers of the Senate, including abolishing all of them. And/or create a third house of Congress, without equal per-state representation.
First of all, you have no idea what you're talking about. The two Dakota territories gained statehood in 1889, long before there was any kind of notion of the modern-day Republican party.