There are a ton of important issues, but, I believe that gerrymandering is a core issue in the United States because :
Partisan gerrymandering allows for politicians to secure their seats - this leads to less voters being represented (allowing the politicians to become more polarized)
e.g. when races are tight, politicians tend to move towards the center. [2]
Partisan gerrymandering is strongly disliked by both parties and across the political spectrum, the only people fighting for it are those currently in power (on both sides) [3]
Partisan gerrymandering disenfranchises a large portion of voters, whose votes end up “not counting” b/c of how district lines are drawn[4]
Because of this, I'm currently fundraising (from friends and family) for the legal team in the North Carolina case [1]. I've committed significant amount personally to the fundraise and can say that this is arguably one of the highest leverage ways to spent dollars that you can get to get America back on track as a representative democracy.
I've done a lot of research on this - if you want to help (with $$) or just want to learn more, feel free to reach out (valgui [at] gmail.com)
The fact that gerrymandering is even possible is a symptom (albeit an severely exacerbating one) - not the cause - of the problems in the US electoral structure.
It could be countered quite effectively by a system using larger jurisdictions each with multiple representitives.
I support replacing our winner takes all (first past the post) elections with approval voting. Maybe as a step towards PR. But we'll always have executive races that'd benefit.
Benefits
* super easy to explain, administrate
* per Duverger's Law, would end our two party system
* eliminates separate primary elections
* reduces voter fatigue
* reduces admin costs
* greatly reduce mudslinging, because everyone wants to be your second choice
Yeah, you can't really do anything like it in a proportional system. For gerrymandering to be possible It is crucial that there is a large number of parallell contests so that winning many contests is more important than winning overall support.
Totally agree. The winner takes it all system is the real problem. You can start a third party and get 30 percent of the vote and still end up with zero representation.
The system the US help setup in Iraq was that half the house was local represention, then the wasted votes (didn't get your candidate locally, your candidate votes over majority) are given to the party they represent to buy seats in the other half of the house.
So the second half should be proportional to the error in the local representation.
Large jusrisdictions with multiple representatives has its own set of problems too. In the current system, people, at least, know who their representative is, and there is more accountability.
I would say the biggest problem by far is voter education--people simply are not educated on issues. They listen to idiotic MSM sound bites and narratives and are influenced by identity politics rather than anything of substance.
I must disagree. As person with an education and half a wit it doesn't matter how I vote in Omaha Nebraska. We will always vote republican and because of gerrymandering my local reps won't change.
No amount of education can be accepted by this crowd that doesn't amount to propaganda or brainwashing.
One of my professors at UT Dallas has a book that argues that districts in fact should be partisan. It's been a few years but the logic is something like if you've got a 50-50 district, you're gonna end up with 50% of the people in the district unhappy. Where as if you intentionally designed districts to be like like 90-10 (or whatever possible), more people are happy.
Not sure if I believe him, but it's interesting.
Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections are Bad for America
That's a super interesting concept. I will look into it; book ordered! From a quick think through - I think that this argument may fall flat on 2 related ideas.
1. Data shows that when seats are more secure like you say (90-10 instead of 50-50), representatives often go towards the extremes of the political spectrum (on both sides). this leads to issue 2...
2. Voters are generally not strictly partisan - that is to say (purely as an example), while I may have right leaning thoughts on how to run the economy, I may have left leaning thoughts on social issues. If I'm in a district with someone that is far right or far left, a portion of the time they're always going to vote against my wishes. Am I better off in general? Hard to tell without getting more in depth on my preferences.
Multi party systems tend to favor the most ideologically driven actors in the system. An example of this is Israel.
Furthermore, American politics isn't two ideologies. Each party is composed of multiple groups that compete for dominance. Republicans have business interests, evangelicals, etc., while democrats have progressives, neoliberal, etc.
I'm not sure I follow. American politics isn't two ideologies, but it does have ideologies. Is it better to bundle up these dozens of ideologies and interests into two parties than to have ideologically driven parties?
Part of gerrymandering is diffusing the vote of your opponent among "safe" districts. Look at Austin, Texas for example[1]. One would imagine the city would vote as a block.
I do concede that odd shaped districts can be more representative. I've been told the "famously gerrymandered" Earmuff district in Illinois[2] actually represents a single Latino community that was split.
I think single transferable vote is a much better way of addressing that criticism. We have it where I live and it has tended to produce fairly boring yet representative elections.
Ireland has it, I'm not sure you would call the last few elections "boring" (Probably more to do with the financial crisis hitting us like a ton of bricks though)
That's assuming a polarizing representative (one that 50% like and 50% are unhappy with. Could more balanced districts lead to more centrist representatives?
That position only proves true if you live in a society where compromise is seen as a negative.
I don't know when this shift occurred, but it is certainly the case now that any compromise is generally seen as a loss and failure to represent your constituents. Hence our very partisan climate and the increasing success of radical politicians. If all you have to do is vote the party line and never try to work things out, your job suddenly becomes quite easy to keep.
Now if things were to change and people would agree to discuss issues and meet midway, then more would get done and progress on long stalled issues would be made. In a country where small yet constant steps are being made, I would argue that the general populace would be far more happy than the one presented in that book by your professor.
There are issues where compromise is impossible. Reproductive rights, marriage equality, and separation of church and public schools come immediately to mind. There are also issues where compromise leads to a death of a thousand cuts with one position becoming more and more extreme to force movement in their preferred direction.
The basic problem is that government at all levels has too much power. Less coercion and more voluntarism is the only long term solution to battles over power.
But gerrymandering is ALSO an important factor behind today's political polarization.
In a district that's strongly biased one way or another (which is the goal of gerrymandering), the general election is a foregone conclusion: the nominee of the majority party will win, even if (as it's been famously demonstrated) he's dead, or if he endorses his opponent, etc.
The result is that the actual electoral process occurs during the party primaries. And middle-of-the-road folks are a lot less likely to participate in that. The make-up of the primary voters is far more extremist and partisan.
And so what we wind up with are candidates that are extremists partisans, and fewer candidates that are appealing to the median, centrist voter.
There's a lot of good comments pointing out potential flaws in his argument, but responding to yours since it's the most recent...
You're preaching to the choir. I disagreed with him at the time I read it and still do. The single party south is a "great" example of what happens when primaries become what matter.
On the other hand, the current political polarization and problems are due to the old system, so conceivably changing the structure could change things for the better. It's just fun to consider.
I'd also note that he worked in Congress (not elected) for awhile and taught for a couple decades, so his 160 page book anticipates a lot of the obvious criticisms thrown out here.
> Where as if you intentionally designed districts to be like like 90-10 (or whatever possible), more people are happy.
Right, and that's the right way to do it. The wrong, current way, is to design the districts so their own party has a slight majority everywhere, thus winning more seats overall, not a significant majority in the areas where they are strongest.
The problem is that there's a conflict of interest, so redistricting shouldn't be in the hands of the politicians with a vested interest in winning.
This is running on the egregious assumption that people can only choose one option to make them happy, and that there are only two options to choose from. It may be applicable now for the most part (when people worry about spoiling the vote, they will support one of the two) but in a situation where other parties have a serious chance of gaining a seat and people have multiple choices they approve of, this theory begins to break down.
Surely the point of a democratic election is for there to be the possibility of change? If every district is 90% in favour of one party or another then that will never happen. Assuming there are an equal number of districts then every election would be a tie, and any party that wanted to win would have to resort to gerrymandering in order to affect a change.
To solve this, I think some more universal mathematical truths would have to be employed. If you have 30 different definitions of compactness, the party in power will tend to choose the definition that will benefit them the most. If however, you choose some construct in mathematics where there is only a single option, you may avoid this particular problem.
This may not be the perfect example, but something like this
Partisan gerrymandering takes on many forms. There are also the convoluted voting blocs created to insure minority representation that can actually increase one parties representation over another based on how convoluted it is just so they don't run afoul of the courts; as in you don't make sure the selected group wins you are in court.
then the anecdotal bit, got a cousin who is in politics in a mid Western state following in her dad's foot steps. here is the dirty part, at county and city levels and even to state levels the parties negotiate who runs. sometimes they get a wild card but both pretty much work to stop that. she wanted a county seat moving up from her city district, one she got because the guy in both sides hated and no one else wanted it.
to get the county seat requires finding a way for the person in it to retire or get into state level politics. she cannot simply go up against this person because she won't have her parties help.
politics gets dirty at the earliest possible moment. gerrymandering only seems to be an issue to most when the wrong party manages to overcome it and take power. yet sometimes we need this type of distracting for the same reason how the House is set up. To prevent cities from overpowering the counties and other areas in the state.
I'm not tracking. Are we not a representative democracy? How are less (the word you seek is 'fewer') voters being represented? I need to know if you're one of the many millions of disaffected socialists who is still whining about the election last fall or if there is something of substance here.
The "I'm currently fundraising" is kind of a giveaway that you're one of them.
While gerrymandering is strongly disliked, I doubt there is much that is going to be done about it. The Constitution allows the creation of districts like this. Much like the electoral college, it is what it is and I don't see how it matters whether districts follow neat lines or whether they are all crazy and chopped up like they are today. This sounds like another feeble attempt at grasping at straws by people whose priorities are completely out of whack.
Gerrymandering is already illegal. It can be fixed relatively easily by redrawing the districts, which is done routinely. And it's not like the electoral college is written in stone either. Since you can't see why it matters, here are some examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Effects
Gerrymandering is not in general illegal. As you say, districts are routinely redrawn - but in a way which results in gerrymandering! To fix it requires that the districts be redrawn fairly, and that's a tougher fix (but a significant number of states already have non-partisan districting procedures).
Gerrymandering is not the act of making seats "more secure". This is profound misinformation, gerrymandering is only ever about disenfranchising a voting block by packing them together.
You may have missed point three, where I literally say that. Also, they are not mutually exclusive, in fact they are quite causal. Also, there is more to gerrymandering that packing a voting block together; you can split voting blocks up do more sophisticated things to ensure your goals are met (the primary objectives generally being "get re-elected"). My email is in the comment and my profile, happy to chat more.
They aren't "mutually exclusive". If your voters have been packed into a district, making your seat more secure, then you are a victim of gerrymandering. It's not simply an alternative type of gerrymandering.
The misunderstanding of who stands to benefit from redistricting has allowed republicans to propagate a narrative that "democrats do it too". In 2012, despite Republican house candidates receiving less of the popular vote they walked away with an extra 30 seats[1]. That's not a bipartisan effect.
You misunderstand my criticism. The reason they aren't "mutually exclusive" is because one of the things that you are calling gerrymandering isn't gerrymandering.
If you read the article, it says there are actually two types of gerrymandering. One is "packing" all of a voting block together, and the other is "cracking" a voting block into multiple districts so that it can't win in any of them.
A seat can be secure at 55% just as it can be at 95%. Packing and cracking both tend to yield secure seats - if nobody could confidently predict who would win the seats, how would it be gerrymandering?
Probability of victory is highly non-linear in the proportion of voters. It's so non-linear that it makes sense to treat it as a phase transition. A district is secure when the outcome is certain. There are two distinct phases where the outcome is "secure" and the border between these two phases is, because of the non-linearity, very small. That is what secure means to most people.
The specific language that the OC, and almost all journalism uses to describe the strategy is "making districts more secure". The only way to interpret that, in the context of the phase definition of security, is adding voter proportion to a district which is already secure. This is never in the interest of the party that it is happening to, so yes, it is dishonest to describe it this way.
As I just pointed out to you, it can never happen to one party without simultaneously happening to the other party. Packing Democrats into an already-secure Democratic district adds Democratic voter proportion to their district and adds Republican voter proportion to yours.
If you don't believe that this can be in the interest of either party (since it's happening "to" both of them), you don't have much left to complain about.
The party in power (in a State government) can either maximize the number of seats it has, or make seats safe. It cannot do both at once!
Maximizing seats -> minimizing the margin of victory in each district -> increasing likelihood of losing its majority in a future election!
Making seats safe -> maximizing margin of victory in each district and minimizing the number of seats by concentrating the majority's voters -> minimizing margin of victory in the popular houses (of the State legislature and Congress) -> increasing likelihood of losing its majority in a future election!
That is, no matter how you redraw district borders, as long as population per-district is roughly even (in each State), then you cannot get a long-lasting advantage.
This will probably be surprising to some here, but it's clearly true.
This means that Gerrymandering is a much smaller evil than one might think.
I would further argue that Gerrymandering is not an evil at all. It is part and parcel of the Republican system of government in the U.S.:
- the Senate, especially when Senators were selected by State governments, and still now due to its 6-year terms and staggered elections, modulates the popular House
- first past the post leads to a small number of parties and reduces party power (you vote for a person, not just a party as in the case of proportional representation systems)
- gerrymandering also modulates popular will
- juries modulate law and prosecutors
- the president is selected by the Electoral College, which also modulates popular will
- the States have police power, which modulates Federal power
- the Courts modulate Congress and the Executive branch
These things were well thought out by the Founders! They were arrived at by compromise. They weren't accidents born of ignorance of mathematics or science. This system has served us well. Changing it requires broad consensus, which requires strong arguments. So far I've yet to see any decent arguments against this structure.
Saying gerrymandering is self-limiting because the party has to choose how to allocate its power is like saying sexual assault is self-limiting because the perpetrator can only use one orifice at a time.
Gerrymandering gives an absolute advantage. At the core of it, you are destroying part of the votes of your enemies, either by bundling them in one district, or completely destroying their power by cracking them.
Flawed argument, but good on you for noticing the tradeoff. Yes, there are two types of gerrymandering, with almost exactly opposite mechanics.
Unfortunately, the rest of your comment isn't even sophomoric...the US political structure is about sloppily conceived and aimless as your constant use of the phrase "X modulates Y".
I thought gerrymandering is the art of creatively drawing the lines such that all of the opposing constituents are squeezed into one or a few "throwaway districts", thus preserving comfortable majorities in the remaining districts.
How is this self-limiting? Also, I don't quite see how it maps to the rather abstract phenomenon you are talking about?
Cryptonector's comment makes very little sense. It's an obvious advantage if you can move the boundaries between two seats in order to go from 80-20/50-50 to 75-25/55-45.
If you maximize seat safety, you minimize the number of seats you have because you bunch up all your voters. This means that the opposition need only flip a few districts to win back a majority (and then redistrict to their liking!).
If you maximize the number of seats you have then you spread your voters thin. This makes it easier to win in a wave: with many districts close to 50/50, you only have to flip a few percent of the voters state-wide or nation-wide and you win. And that's exactly what's been happening. We've had a number of wave elections recently.
It's somewhat frustrating though when you can see that one area is 200k people and another is 50k people but the party negatively affected (someone will be) by re-drawing the boundaries to be "fairer" will scream bloody murder and claim Gerrymandering.
Folks, I was paraphrasing a majority opinion by Justice O'Connor (retired). Shaw v. Reno[0], IIRC.
Downvote all you want, but all you're doing is showing your bias and ignorance. This isn't the sort of subject where you can reliably determine the truth value of any statement a commenter might make. You should be more open minded. I get the impression that if the tables were flipped you'd flip too, that the disgust you express at redistricting (or the Electoral College, or...) is merely convenient and insincere.
EDIT: And the tables have flipped over the years, haven't they. Democrats ran the table and redistricted accordingly for over 60 years between 1932 and 1994. I'm OK with that. I'm OK with Republicans doing the same now, and I will be OK with it when Democrats next get to do it again. Redistricting doesn't seem to have the effect you all seem to fear. In spite of redistricting, 2006 and 2008 happened, did they not? The 60 years that Republicans spent in the wilderness weren't due to redistricting, they were due to the long-lasting cultural effects of the Great Depression. It's reasonable to suspect that without the Great Depression we would have seen a much higher frequency of majority party switches in the 20th century. I think a switch frequency of 1 every 20 years is a reasonable guess. I can live with that.
Interesting take, but it assumes a high margin of error in the voting preferences of certain constituents, which may not be true, which likely makes it not self-limiting enough.
It assumes the opposition can sway some percentage of the population in a wave in one case (maximizing seats) or that they can put up a few really good candidates that can win on personal attributes and policy, not policy alone, in the other (maximizing seat safety).
We've certainly had wave elections, have we not? 1920, 1932, 1994, 2006, 2010... They're getting more frequent, perhaps because redistricting may not be maximizing seat safety as much? (I'm not sure, I've not and will not spend my cycles on analyzing redistricting history.)
To me, the problem is winner-take-all districts to begin with. It all but ensures some constituents are going to be sorely disappointed. Why not consider something like multi-member districts? We could tune it even further by awarding variable voting power. Then the way the borders are drawn becomes far less relevant. I'm sure there are tradeoffs, but it would certainly be more representative.
Lets say that each state have 10 seats. Anyone can run for a seat in a state, but not in more than one state. Two or more people can form a party and have that party on the voting list with them personally on the ballot paper under that party name. (Some mechanism should prevent everyone and his mother to run for shit'n'giggles, e.g. a % of all voters signatures).
Distribute the seats based on largest quotient (details need not to be understood by lay man, but it is fairly simple), and there it is all states equally represented. If people are unsatisfied with current politician, they don't have to become part of the established system to enter.
Thomas Jefferson introduced the method for proportional allocation of seats in the United States House of Representatives in 1791. Victor D'Hondt published it in 1882.
d'Hondt and Jefferson methods are equivalent. Only difference is the way result is calculated. d'Hondt method is used all over the world, but I Americans might feel more patriotic using Jefferson method.
Most of the arguments against this center on the fact that ranked systems would be too complex for voters to understand. Which I used to think was pure hogwash, but Americans have since proved that they can't handle even two candidates for a major office. Hint: the worst one was the one with zero government experience.
The parent didn't mention ranked choice voting unless I read it wrong. I read them to argue in favor of multiple representatives per district. You can have that even with the current voting system. The top n candidates get the job with n > 1. There only difference is right now n = 1.
That being said there is also the much simpler approval voting.
Approval voting is great too, but I don't know that it addresses the issue of district boundaries on its own.
And to address the question of complexity from the first person to reply to me, I don't think that's a realistic concern. Basically it would work like this: you vote normally (whether singe vote, approval, ranked, or whatever), then each party gets at most the number of winners proportional to their aggregate share of the vote, with representatives chosen in order of performance.
The real problem, in my opinion, is that we're making more and more centralized decisions. Federalism properly done lessens the pressure to come up with complex gerrymandering and voting schemes by lessening the election pressure altogether.
It adds more power to other important democratic mechanisms: free speech and vote-with-your-feet.
The power of free speech is improved because a state legislator has fewer constituents, so each group of 100 with similar interests matters a lot more.
And, at the end of the day, if a city or state is really screwing things up, people (not everyone, but enough) can relocate to somewhere that is doing a better job.
Eliminating gerrymandering (how? how will it get passed?) and new voting schemes (which? how will it get passed?) are interesting, but federalism already exists (10th amendment), it's just underemphasized.
The downside is increased governance costs due to duplication of bureaucracy, increased complexity of legal systems, and more confusing everyday laws (as fewer people = less documentation and support services).
Which all means "vote-with-your-feet" is actually far harder to do, as all your everyday legal knowledge is useless in other states.
The counterargument is that increased layers of bureaucracy is also expensive, possibly more expensive. And we already have byzantine regulations, so it's not all that much of a downside.
And, at the end of the day, we can talk to our city councilmen about the unfairness of complicated regulations. And cities can brag about their simple and fair legal systems to get people to want to move there.
Theres probably some kind of quantifiable tendency to centralize over time that arises from some aspect of our system. Addressing that would help better effect federalism.
It's easy to gerrymander a surface. It's hard to gerrymander a line, or a circle, where the connectedness requirement has teeth. One solution to gerrymandering is to determine congressional districts by birthday, or last name, rather than by geographic location.
The U.S. is not a monolith–registered Democrats in West Virginia have very different priorities from those in Massachusetts–so geographical boundaries actually serve a purpose in electing a representative who is (ideally) aware of local needs and committed to fighting for them.
In contrast, those with a common birthday or name have no distinguishable political desires in aggregate, so the likely result would be 538 generic congress members.
Furthermore, if we assume people exhibit a bias toward candidates from their home state (they do, on average), grouping by birthday or last name is actually a net negative choice since it would likely result in overrepresenation of Californians in congress (assuming first-past-the-post).
Interesting concept! I wonder if this is hackable based on demographic popularity of last names, by race. According to Wolfram Alpha, the most common last names are: Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, which don't share a common 1st letter. But maybe some ethnic names might: Rodriguez, Ramirez, Chan, Chen, Chang...
But ultimately, what political needs would a community of last-name-starts-with-C need?
The problem is that there are far far more policies that impact people based on area than based on name. This could effectively destroy any representation of rural areas which would achieve the opposite (every single politician would answer to 65% city voters and only 35% rural voters if the districts were based on something fully independent of location).
As others have noted, proportional representation (PR) is the best solution to gerrymandering. (Not arguing that we shouldn't also support second-best solutions like nonpartisan redistricting and court challenges to the worst gerrymanders.)
The three PR methods in common use are STV-with-multimember-districts; mixed-member proportional (MMP); and open (or, yuck, closed) list systems. All of these (except closed lists) are decent, but have downsides. STV leads to very complex ballots; MMP leads to "two classes" of representatives; open list focuses your voting power on the partisan choice, but doesn't give you much power to help set the direction of your favorite party. And all three can lead to extreme party fragmentation and thus excess "kingmaker" power for splinter parties, unless there are rules against that.
It is, however, possible to design a method without any of these downsides. Perfection is impossible, but the Pareto frontier is, and none of the above methods are on it. Here's one that is:
Do you have a more detailed desription about how this method works? Your links do not describe it in much detail but it is interesting.
Even without the details my sense is that this method suffers from some very serious problems. Picking the two candidates with the highest initial votes seems like a bad idea; this can remove all of the most widely supported candidates if there are enough similar candidates (i.e. if 70% of the voters are split between 10 candidates and 30% between two candidates, but the 70% consider the two that the 30% would elect to be least favored).
In general, strategic voting is likely to have a huge effect. I don't understand what the write-in option does, but if it allows you to vote for candidates in a different district than that would allow votes to be used to disloge more influential members of an opposing party against the wishes of the district that candidate actually represents.
In any case, always interesting to learn about possible voting methods :).
IMO, limiting the effectiveness of strategic voting is one of the most important things a voting method should do, while also not electing anyone who would heavily lose in two candidate races vs. any of the other candidates. I don't think it needs to be strictly Condorcet, but the further away from that a method gets (at least when geographic representation is involed) the less reasonable it seems in a lot of ways IMO.
I've been thinking about the possibility of a parallel system where the grographical representation part is non-partisan. I think this might work if geographical representatives are allowed and expected to allocate their vote on a given issue proportionally to how the people they represent would vote on that issue.
Instead of using math to rewrite districts, do something else:
Change the ballot.
Ranked voting is better than First Past the Post (what we use) but the one with the BEST statistical properties and simplest exanation is the Approval Vote.
Simply be able to mark more than one candidate.
This way Bernie or Bloomberg could have run and taken the whole thing. As opposed to staying out because of fear "a vote for X is a vote against Y".
Maine did it. They switched! Now 49 more states to go.
This can be done at a local level in some places. Any district that does this will become less politically polarized and people won't be so fearful and hate each other less :)
What surprises me, though, is how little attention is given to caucuses in the US presidential primaries. The turnout is very low and they're subject to strong arming and party insider corruption in both major parties.
Well speaking just for myself, I honestly would prefer an even more party insiders driven process for the primaries. Too much democracy seems to lead to insane levels of populism leading to characters like Trump. At any rate, US democracy guarantees one a vote in the general -- parties are private orgs and it's not "corrupt" or "wrong" for them to select candidates however they want.
> I honestly would prefer an even more party insiders driven process for the primaries. Too much democracy seems to lead to insane levels of populism leading to characters like Trump.
Non sequitur. The DNC's heavily party-insider-driven primary process gave us Clinton as Trump's opponent, rather than Sanders, a similarly populist (and popular!) candidate who most likely
would have won.
Except since there's no chance for a 3rd party, these two parties hold too much power and it suddenly matters much more. If it was like other countries with tons of parties that rise and fall, you'd be correct.
Also what do you mean by insane levels of populism? Isn't that just a derogatory way to say "what the people want"?
There would be more of a chance for a 3rd party if people bothered to care about the house rather than just the presidency...
But yeah, today there's little chance. But so what? Plenty of progress, far more than today was made in the past before the primary system. Several great presidents (including Lincoln, FDR, TDR) came from the old process. Meanwhile the new process gave us Trump...Not to mention, tons of members of Congress afraid to do anything sensible because they are too afraid of primary challenges by hyper partisan people on their side.
UK doesn't have a primary system (mostly -- they did for Labour who are now saddled with Corbyn) and they don't have a stupidly gridlocked govt. Neither does Canada. Both of those countries have politics dominated by mostly 2-3 parties. In fact almost no country on Earth has it to the level that the US does.
Re:"what people want" -- for one thing what people want is often contradictory. For another, there's a reason why the US doesn't have mob rule by majority. What people want is not always coherent or wise. IMO our goal as a society should be a functioning govt and a liberal polity for which democracy is a means. But by no means is democracy a good in an of itself for me at least.
My perspective is that the politics of the the past 20-30 years lead to candidates like Trump. People were tired of being taken for granted and hearing a lot of promises that weren't kept, from the same bunch of recycled politicians, while their day to day lives kept getting worse.
The problem is with the idea of representative democracy at all. If the electorate is smart enough to figure out that Candidate A is _both_ correct on a range of policy matters _and_ of a trustworthy nature, then why are they not smart enough to decide directly on said policy matters?
Governments should be composed solely of civil servants drawn from academia and other fields in which they need to prove their knowledge and competence. Their job would be to advise on and implement the policy goals chosen by ballot measures.
Figuring out some way to allow direct ballot/referendum securely and efficiently would be more welcome than re-jigging the USA to bring it into line with one of the other countries that has an elite class shuffling between ruling in the interests of businesses and remunerating themselves as leaders of those businesses.
Just like I hire a person to fix my car, or hire a person to fly the planes I sometimes travel on, we hire people to handle running the country for us. It's an abstraction of labor. I really don't want to be bothered with every little tiny decision about budget or foreign policy.
That said, people in the US are so busy that they don't have any time at all to even make informed decisions on who to elect to run the city/state/country for them. This is a problem...people need to work less, but good luck solving that one with a crippled economy and enormous wealth disparities.
In principle, I agree with you...we have the technology to allow referendum voting, and it would certainly make for a more representative government. However, I think time, understanding, and human nature are large barriers. Also, don't think that just because people can vote directly means they won't be easily swayed by ruling-class propaganda. A good example is when cities try to install their own fiber infrastructure and Comcast rolls in and convinces everyone it's somehow communism. That doesn't go away just because people have a more direct rule.
I think a representative republic still makes sense for our day and age. Gerrymandering is a huge issue and should be dealt with...along with lobbying and other forms of (very obvious) corporate intervention in our republic.
I think allowing to specify what percent of your tax goes into what 'pre-canned' list of causes, would allow a way for folks to influence the politicians outside of the 'election process', and, without, full blown on-line-referendum surveys for all the issues.
Clearly, the above would bias some of the decision making power away from low-income populous, however this can be addressed by some form of weighting and thresholds.
The problem is, I, and the typical taxpayer, is not qualified to make an informed decision about budget allocations. When I want to know where to spend my tax dollar, It is not sufficient to know how I value the causes, but rather how I value them relative to their existing budget allocations, and how useful additional money would be to them.
For instance, I may value national defense and our military in the abstract. However, if I look at the actual budget, think we overspend and that the marginal value of an additional dollar is small because of diminishing returns.
In contrast, I am sure that there are government programs that provide me great benefit but that I do not know or think about. This proposal would require every government cause to engage in large scale marketing, which is wastefully expensive, and would likely result in inefficient allocations.
>Clearly, the above would bias some of the decision making power away from low-income populous, however this can be addressed by some form of weighting and thresholds.
We could avoid this problem entirely by giving every voter an equal slice of the government budget to allocate.
Actually, I think that some people would specialize in providing good allocations for people to use. After all some people specialize in providing good stocks to pick, or good collections of parts to build a computer out of, or good combinations of ingredients to make a recipe.
So I think that people would have no problem finding someone who they trust who has taken the time to identify the best places to spend government money without a huge large scale marketing scheme being necessary.
I think, my recommendation, would create more informed voter base. Mostly because lobbyist would have to reach out to the voters, rather than to the politicians.
Additionally, perhaps, letting a voter to 'forego' his/her right for the allocation could be allowed. This way you can choose to forego the right, while others would keep it.
Lobbyists currently do not even need to use propaganda. They just need to provide a sufficient monetary reward to the smaller number of people's "representatives". It is much easier to bribe/suborn a few people than the entire electorate.
> Just like I hire a person to fix my car, or hire a
> person to fly the planes I sometimes travel on, we
> hire people to handle running the country for us. It's
> an abstraction of labor. I really don't want to be
> bothered with every little tiny decision about budget
> or foreign policy.
Except you're not getting a choice about any details, large or small. In actuality it is entirely unclear what you are getting to choose at all apart from which person you imagine, might, against hope, history and evidence maybe do something you agree with.
I am proposing that fundamental policy matters: taxation, foreign wars, climate change accords, trade deals be dealt with directly.
The smaller details can be handled by experts in order to free up our time to watch football games, catch up on soap operas and paint our nails.
>Just like I hire a person to fix my car, or hire a person to fly the planes I sometimes travel on, we hire people to handle running the country for us.
This could easily still be done with referendum voting, by allowing people to appoint SMEs as proxies for relevant issues.
>That said, people in the US are so busy that they don't have any time at all to even make informed decisions
Neither does congress, because most of their time is spent begging for money and selling legislation. So much so that they regularly pass bills that was neither authored by a congressman nor read by many of those who voted for it.
Impose a new wealth tax on anyone in the top 1%
of income earners. Redistribute the money directly
to the people.
> The problem is with the idea of representative democracy at all.
The real problem is faith in democracy itself. It's not about a smart electorate or a technocratic bureaucracy. It's about voting being inherently adversarial, with a voting majority (population minority) always on the offensive against the rest of the people. Many vote in defense of their property against their neighbors who would take it through the ballot box.
Look at the 2016 US election. How many actually voted for either candidate, rather than against the other one?
The only hope for the long-term survival of America is to decentralize power into smaller and smaller self-governing units, with free movement of people and property between those units. We are a union of states, after all (not that they teach republicanism in schools).
There are two moral alternatives: either you impose the yoke of government on people, then give them majoritarian control over government, or you have no government. The latter sucks for people who make up the 1% now, because it's government that keeps the merchant/capitalist/industrial class from being dominated by the warrior class.
I think the idea that any of us are able to judge the trustworthiness of a politician is dubious on its face. When we add in the cliched and repetitive history of broken campaign promises then it becomes laughable.
The problem is not bias, but uneven representation. We can get uneven representation without bias quite easily: I've not ran your system in practical terms, but I'd be very surprised if, in the US, this gave you republican house majorities even when they lose the popular vote. The reason is simple: Republican voters are more dispersed geographically, so it's very hard for them to get clumped into a district where they have an overwhelming advantage.
This is why plenty of people prefer to do things like maximize the chance that a voter feels well represented, or minimize the safety of incumbents, instead of going for something that leads to simple lines.
Another important problem of straight lines is that it ignores the physical limitations of actual voting: Each voting location is expensive (go ask in North Carolina, where magical budget cuts make it harder to vote in areas that tend to vote democratic). inconvenient, mathematical lines will give you higher average costs to get to your own polling place, and will require more polling places, or places that have to corral different people to different booths with different options. Good luck doing that without doing everything fully digitally, which is, IMO, not necessarily a good idea.
> magical budget cuts make it harder to vote in areas that tend to vote democratic
Once and again the divisiveness of the US politics keeps astonishing me. This would never fly in my home country, even reading this here is repulsive in its unfairness. Sure the parties push their own ideologies, but luckily a fair election still seems to be a sacred concept.
For number 2, there could be any number of solutions to fix those degrees of freedom. Intuitively, a maximum margin separator for determining the division wouldn't seem to be a terrible idea.
That just means that the way of restricting the degrees of freedom is, itself, a degree of freedom, but I wasn't the one arguing that the problem could be solved.
If you redesign the districts to be purely on population you'll skew policy so hard towards urban life that you destroy the rural, agricultural base of the country.
If you care at all about being provided with food, it is unwise to ignore those who live outside of a city or you cut your own throat.
Democrats don't seem to get this because they care too much about their social issues, and Republicans aren't much better about this for the last decade.
Only Trump seems to have figured this out and smartly got rural America on his side.
The real solution to preventing gerrymandering is to get rid of congressional districts altogether, and move to proportionally representative delegations from each state. Afterall, there is absolutely no constitutional basis for partitioning states into districts.
Approval voting with a binding "None of the above are acceptable" would be a great improvement over the status quo. I suspect that NOTA would have beaten both Clinton and Trump.
I think you are moving this up with ranked choice. Approval voting allows you to vote for every option either ones or not at all. So you either approve of the option or not. If you want you can vote for everyone. However, that's the same as voting for nobody. You could however also vote for everybody except for one option. That would be the equivalent of voting against somebody. Example ballots could be:
Voter one:
Green - yes; dem - yes; rep - no.
Voter two:
Green - yes; dem - no; rep - yes.
This would result in the green party winning in the above example.
The vote would be very close if not identical to approval ratings we frequently see for various candidates. This would have probably gotten us Bernie, since he was the only candidate running at all with favorable approval ratings. Both candidates who made it beyond the primaries were disliked by the majority, which is unfortunate to say the least.
As an added benefit we could completely leave off primaries if we want. There is very little spoiler effect in this system.
Because there is much less reason to strategically vote for your second choice in order to prevent a candidate you definitely don't want. A friend of mine who is very active in this area also claims there are studies about this. But I've honestly never read them. It seems intuitively true to me. Which I acknowledge is not ideal.
I think this is a really interesting idea, and I would love to see it tried in a modern government. There are a lot of potential problems, but possibly less than those involved with voting.
From what I understand, the US legal system has the jury duty as a form of sortition, who make life or death decisions.
It is a solution to make the governing bodies more inclusive and representative, which is the title of the article. No winner takes all, no fake news, no votes buying, no suspicious campaign donations, probably no 2 party system, less oligarchies, corruption and nepotism. What is not to like? Wikipedia [1] does list a couple of points, all debatable and/or easily countered imo.
I also happen to like how seamlessly it integrates with the current representative model and remains scalable as opposed to more direct approaches.
The big difference that I see from juries, is that juries only choose from a fairly limited selection of possibilities, and they have a few specifically identified professionals (the judge and the lawyers for each side) who guide them through the process. With an actual government, there are only a few constraints and everything else is open to them. There are also thousands of interested parties trying to influence them instead of just two. That would make their job much more challenging than being a juror. It could potentially end up handing more power to lobbyists because of the inexperience of the people in power and resulting in more corruption because there are no longer have to hide it to ensure re-election.
I mean it is already practiced in some form, this is not a whole new concept.
Of course, there are discussions to be held about the implementation details, including the governments reach and the checks and regulations. A lot can be argued about what political experience brings to the table (imo bad things for the very large part, but that is a ugly can of worms). Personally, I would trust my neighbor more to do The Right Thing, than any career politician.
Nevertheless, a sampling based method is much more representative and more in line with the rule of the people idea.
Partisan gerrymandering allows for politicians to secure their seats - this leads to less voters being represented (allowing the politicians to become more polarized) e.g. when races are tight, politicians tend to move towards the center. [2]
Partisan gerrymandering is strongly disliked by both parties and across the political spectrum, the only people fighting for it are those currently in power (on both sides) [3]
Partisan gerrymandering disenfranchises a large portion of voters, whose votes end up “not counting” b/c of how district lines are drawn[4]
Because of this, I'm currently fundraising (from friends and family) for the legal team in the North Carolina case [1]. I've committed significant amount personally to the fundraise and can say that this is arguably one of the highest leverage ways to spent dollars that you can get to get America back on track as a representative democracy.
I've done a lot of research on this - if you want to help (with $$) or just want to learn more, feel free to reach out (valgui [at] gmail.com)
[1]http://www.campaignlegalcenter.org/sites/default/files/LWVNC... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/us/politics/in-indiana-tig... [3]http://www.theharrispoll.com/politics/Americans_Across_Party... [4]http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-wang-remlinger-ge...