[FRIAM] gerrymandering algorithm question

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Someone made an interesting point the other day ... something like "States are the most basic form of gerrymandering."  ... or maybe they said "oldest" instead of "most basic" or whatever.  But Oregon's midterm election brings this point up very clearly.  Several of our counties put measures on their ballots (nobody else's) saying the county sheriff should be able to choose which (State and Federal) gun laws to enforce and which one's not to enforce.  Clearly, Fed and State laws obviate contradictory County laws.  That's not what I care about, here.  The point was that unless you live inside that county, you can't vote for or against that measure.

The same would be true for Tom's algorithm, which assumes State membership.  And the same is true more abstractly of Marcus' in the sense of "participation in district D", however we choose to define participation.

It seems obvious that the *job* of the county sheriff is geographical, what with gasoline for the patrol cars, emergency response times, etc.  And, by extension, inter-county participation is geographical.  I live right on the edge of Clackamas, which leans right and would have likely voted for the sheriff gun law enforcement measure (if it had made it onto our ballot).  Multnomah is right next door, which would never vote for such a measure.  So (hypothetically) my sheriff wouldn't care about my loaded AK-47 and 10 houses down, their sheriff *would* care.

This seems like a problem of ballot access, not vote counts.

Moving on to the difference between popularly elected Senators and district-elected Representatives, the Cruz vs O'Rourke election was pretty interesting.  Although most of the (liberal) news sources I read claim that the blue ripple really was a blue wave, but because of the gerrymandering (and vote suppression and etc.), the Democratic gains were muted.  But O'Rourke lost by simple majority.  Clearly, there are other dimensions, not captured by districting.  I don't know what they are.

In the end, I think I'm agreeing with Nick, here: that the solution will have to be a mix treating not only district drawing, but vote proportioning, ballot access, issue communication (campaign finance), etc.  So we need our incoming politicians to have complex (interwoven) solution sets, not single technocratic one-offs.


On 11/3/18 3:54 PM, Tom Johnson wrote:
> First, we would have to agree on whether there will be objectives related to the demography of any district?  I prefer only counting the number of current population 18 and over.  Or some would argue for the total population of any age.  But given either choice, there will be serious suggestions that doing so would work hardship on racial, ethnic or other groups.  Could be, but it could also mean that anyone running for office would probably have to find a way to appeal to ALL voters.

> On Sat, Nov 3, 2018 at 4:14 PM Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>> wrote:
> 
>     Oh, I absolutely agree that we could design districts to maximize any variable we wanted.  And with a little luck, we might maximize a couple, or even three.  But inevitably, we will encounter some variable that is negatively correlated with those we already maximize, so even we philosopher kings will be dissatisfied with the result. 
> 
>      
> 
>     So, you philosopher-kings out there:  if you were designing districts out there, how would you do it.  How about all districts at-large?  Ranked choice voting?  How about requiring all districts to match the state-wide political distribution of the whole state and redistricting after every election?  Seriously.  How would you do it?


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