|
computer parts posted:Yeah, Hispanics wanting a Hispanic representative is totally equivalent to lynchings. Your argument is almost as full of poo poo as you are. Countering that this specific example benefited a minority is not a silver bullet that actually proves that gerrymandering is good. There are innumerable examples of similar districts designed exclusively to disenfranchise people of color Platystemon posted:Compact districts don’t solve anything. Democrats are more geographically concentrated than Republicans. You're attempting to impress your political leanings onto the concept of districts. Whether they benefit democrats or republicans is irrelevant. 30 TO 50 FERAL HOG fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Aug 21, 2016 |
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 06:10
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 17, 2024 14:07 |
|
|
BiohazrD posted:Your argument is almost as full of poo poo as you are. Countering that this specific example benefited a minority is not a silver bullet that actually proves that gerrymandering is good. There are innumerable examples of similar districts designed exclusively to disenfranchise people of color.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 06:15
|
|
|
twodot posted:I think Australia has solved the complicated ballot problem, and randomized ballot listing solves the name problem (and if your voters are so uniformed they'll vote for the first person no matter what, I think we need to revisit the entire idea of democracy). Geographically close is not ridiculous, but we've already brought up that "fair" algorithms tend to group people together that have opposed ideologies. I see no other determination than that districting is inherently political. And! We also solved the "Random gun killing spree problem" and "our highest court is a political football problem". 
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 06:15
|
|
|
twodot posted:My argument is that districting is bad, so it's weird for me for you to disagree with me and also point out why districting is bad. Districting by itself is not bad. The implementation and gerrymandering of districts is bad. I personally do not like districts. But pointing at the current system and saying "See! Districts are bad and don't work!" Is stupid because the current system is not a valid representation of fair districts.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 06:17
|
|
|
BiohazrD posted:Districting by itself is not bad. The implementation and gerrymandering of districts is bad.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 06:20
|
|
|
twodot posted:What is an example of a districting system which works better then proportional representation, and what goals does it achieve that leads you to that belief? I am not talking about proportional representation. Literally all I am saying is that the way that districts are drawn breaks the system. If we were to fix that, it would not be nearly as terrible.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 06:28
|
|
|
BiohazrD posted:Your argument is almost as full of poo poo as you are. Countering that this specific example benefited a minority is not a silver bullet that actually proves that gerrymandering is good. There are innumerable examples of similar districts designed exclusively to disenfranchise people of color And you happened upon one which explicitly doesn't. This is like pointing to affirmative action as an example of why taking non-school related factors into account for college admissions is bad.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 06:31
|
|
|
BiohazrD posted:I am not talking about proportional representation. Literally all I am saying is that the way that districts are drawn breaks the system. If we were to fix that, it would not be nearly as terrible.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 06:33
|
|
|
Multi‐member districts are kind of okay I guess.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 06:34
|
|
|
BiohazrD posted:You're attempting to impress your political leanings onto the concept of districts. Whether they benefit democrats or republicans is irrelevant. Regardless of whom they benefit, it’s undemocratic. My vote shouldn't count for less because I move to a city.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 06:36
|
|
|
I like Computer Parts constantly going back to this example of "The people democratically wanted this gerrymander!"
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 07:03
|
|
|
Potato Salad posted:I like Computer Parts constantly going back to this example of "The people democratically wanted this gerrymander!" I mean, it's a little weird to both say "we want to do things in a way that represents people" and "I don't give a gently caress about what the people being represented want".
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 07:05
|
|
|
computer parts posted:I mean, it's a little weird to both say "we want to do things in a way that represents people" and "I don't give a gently caress about what the people being represented want". minorities should never have the system set up so they can be represented in a slightly more fair manner that may never happen otherwise because of 2nd or 3rd order effects that my mathematical model fails to take into account duh
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 07:18
|
|
|
computer parts posted:I mean, it's a little weird to both say "we want to do things in a way that represents people" and "I don't give a gently caress about what the people being represented want". The goal is to eliminate power as a means by which to influence the vote, regardless of whether that power is in the hands of a party, private interest, or the people. If someone wants to support overwhelmingly-red state composition artificially, gently caress 'em. If someone wants to elect a specific race of representative, go for it, but you better not do so by loving with districts or you're no better than anyone else who uses it to accomplish your goals. Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Aug 21, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 07:31
|
|
|
exploding mummy posted:minorities should never have the system set up so they can be represented in a slightly more fair manner that may never happen otherwise because of 2nd or 3rd order effects that my mathematical model The only moral gerrymandering is my gerrymandering. Does the ends justify the means? Just because we used gerrymandering for good for once, leave it?
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 07:38
|
|
|
As much as I feel that Orson Scott Card is a weirdo, I found a very good point in the Worthing Saga: whatever is the core of your society, keep is pure. If you want to utterly destabilize a nation, show it unequivocally that the one sacrosanct thing valued by everyone involved is corrupted. In that universe, it was a life-extending drug's fair distribution that was considered the rock of their society. In ours, it's the impartiality of the voting process: Saddam Hussein doesn't kill those who abstain at the voting booth in the US, there isn't a record of who voted when for who, there isn't a guy literally inside the voting booth paying you to vote a certain way. Yes, there are influences, but none so brazen as to be a complete killer of Joe Sixpack's ability to vote freely. In my eyes, representation isn't actually as important as an impartial, unaffected-by-fuckery-like-redistricting vote. Better representation will follow suit on the whole. I offer my earlier 10-4 GOP/Dem representation in the close-to-split state of Georgia. It would be chaotic to swap over to using a convex-optimized system for districting, and it would not produce good results in every case regarding legislatures that resemble the popular vote better, but when the status quo is "We tipped the scales as hard as they can possibly go to favor one side," an impartial solution will fix the majority of the issue.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 07:46
|
|
|
Potato Salad posted:Proportional representation also brings up the question of actually recognizing parties in the states -- am I right in my thinking that the union doesn't actually formally recognize parties as an entity? Phrased differently: to actually vote for proportional representation, you'd actually have to have a party on a ticket as opposed to a person, right? We don't actually vote for parties in the states?
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 12:15
|
|
|
BiohazrD posted:Districting by itself is not bad. The implementation and gerrymandering of districts is bad. Majority minority districts do not help minorities, that's partisan Republican bullshit. They are a way of explicitly disenfranchising people by concentrating them all in one forfeit district in order to prevent minorities from voting in competitive elections.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 12:25
|
|
|
Deteriorata posted:The point is that 10 different people will give 10 different definitions of what "good" is. There is no inherent merit in a district being geographically compact, other than it looking pretty. Yes there is - literally the point of having geographic districts in the first place is to have different representatives for different regions with different interests. The system has been abused for other purposes, but the basic idea - that different areas of a state have different interests and need different representatives - is still valid. Potato Salad posted:As much as I feel that Orson Scott Card is a weirdo, I found a very good point in the Worthing Saga: whatever is the core of your society, keep is pure. If you want to utterly destabilize a nation, show it unequivocally that the one sacrosanct thing valued by everyone involved is corrupted. In that universe, it was a life-extending drug's fair distribution that was considered the rock of their society. In ours, it's the impartiality of the voting process: Saddam Hussein doesn't kill those who abstain at the voting booth in the US, there isn't a record of who voted when for who, there isn't a guy literally inside the voting booth paying you to vote a certain way. Yes, there are influences, but none so brazen as to be a complete killer of Joe Sixpack's ability to vote freely. How cute 
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 15:44
|
|
|
I'm not a liberal so, yeah the ends do justify the means
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 15:44
|
|
|
Main Paineframe posted:Yes there is - literally the point of having geographic districts in the first place is to have different representatives for different regions with different interests. The system has been abused for other purposes, but the basic idea - that different areas of a state have different interests and need different representatives - is still valid. Compactness is a poor reflection of this concept, however.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 16:02
|
|
|
BiohazrD posted:This is dumb and wrong. Not a Chicagoan, but it looks like the only thing that connects the two lobes here is the interstate. Is that..legal?
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 16:50
|
|
|
Ron Jeremy posted:Not a Chicagoan, but it looks like the only thing that connects the two lobes here is the interstate. Is that..legal? It depends! The judicial test is that districts should be roughly equal in population and compact. For some reason this passes but anyone with a brain can see that it is clearly not compact.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 17:04
|
|
|
BiohazrD posted:It depends! The judicial test is that districts should be roughly equal in population and compact. For some reason this passes but anyone with a brain can see that it is clearly not compact. Well, what's the judicial definition of compact? As dubious as this is, at least it seems to include parts of a single metropolitan area only... Edit: for context, I was thinking of this other horrible district (from past census cycle, no longer in use) for comparison:  OddObserver fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Aug 21, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 17:10
|
|
|
Ron Jeremy posted:Not a Chicagoan, but it looks like the only thing that connects the two lobes here is the interstate. Is that..legal? Actually it's only the median of the interstate!
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 18:12
|
|
|
rscott posted:I'm not a liberal so, yeah the ends do justify the means On the other hand, making the results seem psychologically fair is probably of higher utility since otherwise the system you designed for your own short-term benefit won't last past the first sea change.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 18:28
|
|
|
BiohazrD posted:It depends! The judicial test is that districts should be roughly equal in population and compact. For some reason this passes but anyone with a brain can see that it is clearly not compact. Compactness is only required to be considered as a factor in 17 states. Illinois doesn't require it for US Congressional districts, though it does require attempting to allow minority communities of interest to elect or influence the election of candidates of their choice.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 20:21
|
|
|
twodot posted:I think Australia has solved the complicated ballot problem, and randomized ballot listing solves the name problem (and if your voters are so uniformed they'll vote for the first person no matter what, I think we need to revisit the entire idea of democracy). Geographically close is not ridiculous, but we've already brought up that "fair" algorithms tend to group people together that have opposed ideologies. I see no other determination than that districting is inherently political. my favorite reason why judicial elections are poo poo is that in non-partisan judicial elections the most important factor that predicts vote share, by far, is being first on the ballot
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 23:45
|
|
|
twodot posted:Ok and all of my posts on this matter is that districting is fundamentally broken, and anyone who thinks a proper solution to districting is to engage in their preferred districting strategy is ignoring the explicitly political nature of districting. There are clearly more preferred and less preferred ways to do districting, but preferences are just that. twodot posted:if your voters are so uniformed they'll vote for the first person no matter what, I think we need to revisit the entire idea of democracy Districting exists and is actually good in large part to help deal because of the problem you see as forcing us to revisit the entire idea of democracy if it can't be dealt with. (I mean, it also deals with and was implemented because of other issues like candidate trustworthiness and to deal with actual demographic regional variance, but voter familiarity and information was part of the combined package of 'reliable representative of our regional interests') If you don't do districting, you need something else, and most of the other solutions have their own problems (or are equally incompatible with the system you'd prefer, or would render it largely irrelevant), so until you actually propose an alternative solution to the problems districting solves (beyond 'rethink democracy') your argument for abolishing it really isn't very strong. Especially since voter behaviour and candidate information problems are both much larger issues than districts in the grand scheme of things. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Aug 22, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2016 03:27
|
|
|
GlyphGryph posted:Districting exists and is actually good in large part to help deal because of the problem you see as forcing us to revisit the entire idea of democracy if it can't be dealt with. (I mean, it also deals with and was implemented because of other issues like candidate trustworthiness and to deal with actual demographic regional variance, but voter familiarity and information was part of the combined package of 'reliable representative of our regional interests') If you don't do districting, you need something else, and most of the other solutions have their own problems (or are equally incompatible with the system you'd prefer, or would render it largely irrelevant), so until you actually propose an alternative solution to the problems districting solves (beyond 'rethink democracy') your argument for abolishing it really isn't very strong. edit: I suppose I should acknowledge I have no good argument against people who are in favor of gerrymandering being a part of how our government operates.
|
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2016 03:44
|
|
|
evilweasel posted:my favorite reason why judicial elections are poo poo is that in non-partisan judicial elections the most important factor that predicts vote share, by far, is being first on the ballot I wonder why more places don't randomize ballots.
|
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2016 03:52
|
|
|
HappyHippo posted:I wonder why more places don't randomize ballots. Judicial review 
|
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2016 04:40
|
|
|
twodot posted:No? If you think gerrymandering is bad, it's because you think it distorts the vote versus some ideal. In all scenarios, you should prefer the internal ideal you have versus districting. If your internal ideal is "districting, but my way" you have significant lifting to explain why your way is better. Regional interests aren't a proper defense of districting itself, because there are loads of districting strategies that don't create cohesive districts (as has already been explained). If the courts are adjudicating the issue (I assume that's what we're talking about, since this is the SCOTUS thread), they're probably not going to impose proportional representation vs districts on the states because that's a political question. Even if the opponents of districting can conclusively prove that districting is always an inferior method of achieving any given concept of ideal representation offered by the other side, that's still something that's usually left to the legislature. On the other hand, at least some of the justices have signaled that they don't consider "protecting incumbents' seats" or "maximizing one party's share of the representation" to be constitutionally valid purposes behind drawing one set of district boundaries vs another and they could throw out specific maps and/or create tests for lower courts to use when evaluating a given redistricting plan. There are many instances in the real world where in the short term we have to work within a given system with the ability to make limited changes to it even though we lack the political ability to discard it completely and replace it with a better one (whatever our definition of better is). In situations like that it can make sense to say "we don't have the ability to abandon districting but to prevent certain abuses we should require districting plans to meet conditions A, B, and C". "But my internal ideal is better than districting with those conditions" isn't actually an argument against that.
|
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2016 05:06
|
|
|
If you feel strongly that "regions" need to be represented you can still use a fair voting system that allows voters to vote for candidates from different regions. If those drat voters are voting wrong and not choosing "local" candidates you could always encourage local representation through other means, like weighting their votes by 1/10 if the candidate didn't happen to live in a random shape drawn around their house as determined by the current legislature. That would obviously be an absurd system, but the result wouldn't be any worse than the effect of districts as they exist today.
|
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2016 05:45
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:Computers haven't really changed or improved things that much- objective ways of achieving different goals have been around for centuries. The underlying problem is that no one agrees on the measures for what is supposed to be achieved. That's the representation problem. The folks with pencils approach has the advantage of being an impermanent and openly imperfect answer to an unsolveable problem. I just think the algorithm is a good solution because, once the legislature and judiciary agree on what's desired and legal, respectively, you can prove the parameters they set are being met by a program before it even draws the map. I'm not under the misimpression that a computer can't be programmed to be biased or whatever.
|
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2016 08:10
|
|
|
Munkeymon posted:I just think the algorithm is a good solution because, once the legislature and judiciary agree on what's desired and legal, respectively, you can prove the parameters they set are being met by a program before it even draws the map. I'm not under the misimpression that a computer can't be programmed to be biased or whatever. "What's being desired" is the problem in the first place. You know legislatures already use computer programs, right? No one is districting by hand these days. They're just using parameters you dislike.
|
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2016 08:59
|
|
|
ShadowHawk posted:You don't need to recognize parties to have proportional representation. There are many ways to have proportional outcomes where voting consists of just picking individual names from a list of candidates. All you need is multiple winners and a non-stupid way of vote counting. Yes, you do need parties to have proportional representation. Proportional representation is not about multiple winners. It's about assigning seats to parties based on proportion of the vote. Without parties and simply multiple winners, an individual getting 20% of the vote is still just one seat.
|
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2016 09:17
|
|
|
joepinetree posted:Yes, you do need parties to have proportional representation. Proportional representation is not about multiple winners. It's about assigning seats to parties based on proportion of the vote. Without parties and simply multiple winners, an individual getting 20% of the vote is still just one seat. He's right, you're wrong, you're just building your conclusion into the assumptions. You can, in fact, do proportional representation without involving parties. Not saying you'd want to, but it's not difficult, literally all you have to do is not use your conclusion, there, as one of your fundamental assumptions, and poof: magic. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Aug 22, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2016 16:46
|
|
|
I guess the any you'd do it is to allow someone to have multiple seats. So if there were 4 seats and one guy gets 50%~ of the vote, he gets two of the seats. I don't know that this would be a good idea at all, and in fact rather doubt it, but it is feasible as a concept.
|
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2016 17:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 17, 2024 14:07 |
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:I guess the any you'd do it is to allow someone to have multiple seats. So if there were 4 seats and one guy gets 50%~ of the vote, he gets two of the seats. I don't know that this would be a good idea at all, and in fact rather doubt it, but it is feasible as a concept. How about you have a list of people, people vote for candidates on the list, the list is allocated seats based on their share and the seats are divided to the candidates who got the most votes on the list? The list doesn't have to be parties. There can be independent lists. Or just go "welp" and use STV instead.
|
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2016 17:23
|
|
