On one hand I look forward as a movement progressive to gerrymandering opportunities after 2010, especially after the job the GOP did to democrats in 2000. But there is something to be said for make "good", "fair", districts. Slate magazine ran a story on using computer algorithms to generate fairer more competitive maps for legislative boundaries in: Can a bunch of mathematicians make government more representative?
This dovetail nicely with a diary I wrote last Friday: Supreme Court to Rule on Voting Rights Act. In which I noted that
I fully expect that Clarence Thomas will continue to strike out at black people for making fun of him when he was a small ugly child hurting his feelings to attack all legal remedies to redress past discrimination. I could see the Roberts court being much more aggressive in challenging minority majority districts. Now at first glance many people will look a this as a bad thing. But it could have some really interesting (positive) effects.
My point is that the policy of packing during the redistricting process hurts democrats especially in the south. The goal of packing, is to concentrate as many voters of one type (in this case race) into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts. By packing opposition voters into districts they will already win (increasing excess votes for winners) and by cracking the remainder among districts where they are moved into the minority (increasing votes for eventual losers), the number of wasted votes among the opposition can be maximized. This strategy has mean that the GOP has won a majority of white southern and several Midwest US House districts by margins of around 60% Republican vs. 40% Democrat, while leaving leaving democrats with a bunch of black districts where democrats win at an 80%+ rate (or in the case of Texas a bunch of 66%+ Latino ones).
If the Supreme Courts rules, as I believe they will to weaken the parts of the civil rights bill that protect minority-majority districts, this will clash with past ruling thats defended the redistricting process as a "partisan process". Based on demographics in the some southern states the GOP would welcome being able to "crack" minority-majority (i.e. Black majority) districts. I'm thinking of places like Tennessee. But in larger states like Georgia, North Carolina, and maybe Texas. As well as Mississippi, the resulting districts could be over the 40% minority level that produces conservative democrats like Rep. Sanford Bishop, so they may not be as keen on the idea as many would think as it would result in a net loss of southern conservative republicans. If all these "ifs" and "buts" happen it might provide an opening for states to use algorithms to draw less partisan districts (some states use appointed "non-partisan" commissions to draw there legislative districts so this isn't out of left field).
As the article in Slate notes:
For decades, math and computer science have played a profound role in the drawing of legislative districts. And it's hard to argue that they've improved the process. As the amount of information and computing power available to the gerrymanderers has ballooned, they have gotten much better at surgically crafting districts to their precise desires.
So, with a reapportionment of House seats coming up in just over two years, after the next decennial census, mathematicians are now plotting their revenge. After 2010, most states will redraw their congressional districts to account for population shift, sometimes adding or subtracting seats. It's tough to find many defenders of the status quo, in which a supermajority of House seats are noncompetitive. (Congressional Quarterly ranked 324 of the 435 seats as "safe" for one party or the other in 2008.) The mathematicians—and social scientists and lawyers—who gathered to discuss the subject Thursday are certain there's a better way to do it. They just haven't quite figured out what it is.
In theory, it makes wonderful sense to hire an algorithm to do the job. Simply plug in all the requirements for a congressional district—relatively equal population, compliance with the Voting Rights Act, and so forth—and let the nonpartisan processor divvy up the state into sensible, shapely chunks. Algorithms, after all—thanks in part to Google—are having a great decade. In other areas where there's a tremendous mess of disorganized, disparate data, like the Internet or the news, we're quite comfortable letting a series of calculations determine which ones are the most important or interesting.
It's actually an interesting articles as it deals with issues such as: "What is a gerrymandered district", is it in the eye of the beholder? Furthermore, what are the difference between districts that are oddly shaped due to geography or population centers versus districts that are oddly shaped to gain a partisan advantage. Why the goal of redistricting isn't to have all the districts match a state demographics (it would require slicing and dicing of urban areas diluting their voting power), and making districts compact.
The "final solution" offered by way of a session which was arranged by Scientists & Engineers for America, came from Sam Hirsch, who is not a mathematician but a lawyer. The Hirsch plan proposes that any public proposal would first have to comply with the law and current standards for equal population, continuity, and so forth. For all the plans that passed this threshold, there would be three further metrics:
- County integrity (matching district lines with county lines when possible);
- Partisan fairness (roughly half the districts should be more Democratic than the state as a whole, while the other have should be more Republican—the system doesn't include third parties);
- Competitiveness (a little more complicated, but recalculating previous election data according to the new districts).
It would then be a public context. Then the plans would be judge using the law and the metrics developed by mathematicians as a scoring system. "It's kind of like a Netflix Prize for redistricting. The advantage of a plan like Hirsch's, which draws heavily on a lot of the mathematicians' research, is that it's quantifiable. Once plans start rolling in, any future proposal would have to score higher on those three metrics to be considered. And it would be fairly easy to substitute metrics if a particular state wanted, say, to value compactness (or nonbizarreness) over country integrity."
This diary is just food for thought. Place it in the good governance for future thought category.