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After an earlier post on gerrymandering we were challenged by reader Greg to provide a more substantial piece on how one might fix gerrymandering.
We’ll first note that while gerrymandering is of course problematic for fair representation (“The GOP scored 33 more seats in the House this election even though Democrats earned a million more votes in House races. Professor Jeremy Mayer says gerrymandering distorts democracy.”), there’s not evidence that it increases political polarization (which is ReConsider’s core issue).
Gerrymandering happens because state legislatures can draw boundaries arbitrarily within some limitations about population size for each district. The original idea is that districts represent geographical groups with shared interests, and state legislators are somehow supposed to figure out who those groups are and then put them together. This is a tough task for even the most noble legislators.
In practice, of course, we sometimes get gerrymandering, where districts are tortured into bizarre shapes in order to increase the chances of a state sending more representatives from one party to Congress. North Carolina a the canonical example (Maryland is another pretty silly one).
Step one, then, of ending gerrymandering, is to remove the arbitrary power of legislators to draw lines however they please. Therefore, we need some objective principle or system that draws the lines, rather than people. We can bemoan gerrymandering all we want, but to stop it, we need an alternative.
What is such a system that we can agree on?
WaPo’s Wonkblog put forth a map that seems tempting at first-glance. The lines of districts are automatically drawn by a computer algorithm (made by Brian Olsen) to “optimize compactness” (or generally minimize the perimeter of the districts), which would certainly eliminate the power to draw the ridiculous shapes that make up parts of NC and other states.
One question comes to mind: is compactness actually a good representation of these “areas of interest” by which one is supposed to draw these? Certainly it’s better than the most absurdly gerrymandered districts, but that doesn’t mean it’s great.
The other big problem is minority representation: for the purposes of increasing representation of minorities, some states have concentrated minority groups into single districts. In fact, this is also mandated in some states by the Voting Rights Act.
But this also decreases their influence in surrounding districts, so a local minority group may end up with one pretty dedicated representative rather than many representatives. In a “maximum compactness” system, it may be the case that minorities are a very small group of almost all the districts, and therefore could become ultimately irrelevant in almost all races (like the “compact but unfair” case in the example below: imagine red = minority and blue = white).
This “compact but unfair” drawing may also represent a washing-out of political minorities. In Massachusetts, some one-quarter of voters are Republicans, but the state almost never sends a Republican as part of its 13-member delegation to Congress. (Blacks make up only 13% of the US population, and we can imagine that in a compact system they could also be largely washed out of representation).
Like most things in government, one probably requires some judgment here. Gerrymandering is bad ultimately because it’s unfair. What does a “fair” districting look like? One might require some “independent” body to rule in cases of egregious perversion… but how does one create a truly politically-independent body?
We can’t think of (or find out in the wild) a great solution. The takeaway here is that “someone should do something about X” is a fairly weak rallying call. We can complain about gerrymandering or some other practice, but without presenting an alternative, we’re just having an enjoyable whine with our friends. In the case of gerrymandering, that solution is likely yet to come, but in other cases, the burden falls on the reformer to propose the new solution if they really want to see change.
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I mean sure there are complicated philosophical questions about what the "best" districting plan would be. However, it really shouldn't be hard to do better than today's system of letting whoever's in power decide. I mean compactness might have some difficulties with washing out minority representation (at least for geographically diffuse minorities), but is this really worse than giving more power to whoever happens to be in control of the state assembly whenever the census comes around?
Either forcing districting to use a fixed algorithm or requiring that it be done by an independent commission takes the power away from the state politicians. Now, we might worry about how to implement such a system in the best possible way, but I don't think that it's very difficult to propose a change that gives us something better than we have now.
My only objection here is I think gerrymandering isn't actually particularly wide-spread (it's why we basically see the same few states over and over as examples), and I wouldn't want to get rid of (for example) the power to re-draw things for the Civil Rights Act in favor of an automated process. So I do think we're looking more at a trade-off thing than it appears at surface.
I think that the assumption that makes this so difficult is the assumption that you have to partition voters geographically. As discussed, this essentially guarantees that a large minority of the population will have no representation. We don't talk about gerrymandered senate districts because both senators are elected by the entire state. But this is no better because both senators tend to be elected by the same majority.
A variety of "at large" electoral schemes don't suffer from this problem. For example, our city council uses a single transferrable vote scheme where each person votes for an ordered list of candidates. Candidates who receive many votes are elected, and the voters who voted for them are "discarded" since they have been satisfied by a candidate they wanted. The votes of remaining voters are then used to select other candidates preferred by those voters. As a result, we get a council where almost every voter has explicitly selected someone on the council. In other words, we have almost complete representation.
The whole practice of dividing up a country into districts and assigning one seat per district is unfair in its own right.
What you need to do is make the entire country one district, at least for the House (and also for the presidential elections, by the way). Establish a threshold of, say, five percent, so all parties that get less than five percent have no seats. A party that gets 6 percent of popular vote gets 6 percent of all seats. A party that gets 43 percent of all votes gets 43 percent of all seats. This way the House will really represent the people's preferences.
Actually, this is what most countries do. This, or a combination of the two systems. As long as you keep a district system you can be sure that a minority gains a majority sometimes, and you enable gerrymandering.
It depends on whether you feel people are best represented geographically or philosophically (or partisanly). The framers of the Constitution did not seem to see us getting so divided into partisan camps and so thought a geographic split best. This may not be so true anymore but to split by parties means a large majority of the representatives in Congress could be from the coasts with sparsely populated areas feeling even more unrepresented.
It also means if you have a problem, you cannot call "your" Congressman or Senator, you have to call someone from the party you like and hope they are not a combination of too overworked or undercaring to help you.
I don't think the current system is perfect, but the parliamentary system has problems too.
I think a plan to eliminate gerrymandering is good, but I can see a problem in my own homestate (Nebraska) where the state capitol, a city of a quarter million people, seems to be lumped in with the rest of the state while the state's one major city seems to be split in half and get 2 districts. That would not be a problem except the state only has 3 districts total.
I am going to guess there are quirks like that in other states. Such an algorithm would be a good sources for a first draft, but being edited and completed by an open committee would be necessary.
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