It's a fine explanation, I suppose, but it's just like every other explanation I've heard since high school social studies. Actual gerrymandering is a bit complicated, but the concept itself is very simple.
That link is over a year and a half old, it can't possibly have anything interesting to say.
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I remembered it, and it was a nice explanation. What brought it back to your attention Ogged?
6: there was a big election a few weeks ago.
Someone linked it on Twitter. Where this gets interesting (to me) is when people write algorithms that make compact, proportional districts, which are ruled out by certain VRA provisions.
How about statewide proportional representation ranked voting? Doesn't that accomplish the goal of representing various groups with significant minorities as well as slightly overrepresenting majorities, without any possibility of map-drawing shenanigans?
Having good representation in single-member districts is a fool's errand (says the entirely not bitter Pennsylvanian), but if we must have it, there's no reason why you can't just include a step in your algorithm to first make sure there are VRA-satisfying districts.
10 before reading 9. Basically that, except I think you still need sub-state districts for big states; can you imagine being a Californian ranking politicians for 50+ seats? Five to ten seats per district is probably the sweet spot, which still allows for some gerrymandering, so you do need district-shape/distribution rules.
Bipartisan districting commissions seem to work.
What I'm wondering is whether the few states that are currently gerrymandered to hell and gone for Democrats (I live in one) should take steps to remedy that, or if this is foolish unilateral disarmament.
As long as in CA we can keep all the techno-douchbags contained in one box. Techno-douchebag isn't a protected class, is it?
...Keep in mind that when gerrymandered states actually flip, they can flip hard, and then it's probably too late to keep the other side from grabbing the advantage and feeling justified in doing it.
14 They'll grab the advantage and run with it anyway, whether they're justified in feeling justified or not. They're Republicans.
Yes, it's foolish unilateral disarmament.
9: PR reflects minority votes by their proportion; ranked choice uses their second choices that can help determine the outcome. How do you meaningfully merge those constructs into one system?
17: with a limited number of seats, and iterated redistribution. Say you have 20 seats, so you need 5% of the vote to get a seat. You redistribute the least popular candidate's votes according to his voters' second preferences, then do the same for the second least popular, and so on until every surviving candidate has at least 5% of the votes. Then you distribute the seats accordingly.
I was just trying to include as many buzzwords as Condorcet possible.
Matt McIrvin, holy moly, haven't seen you around in many years.
Our city uses a system similar to 18, which is single transferable vote, to choose 9 city councilors and 5 school board members.
20- No, because of the last step of distributing proportionally. STV just ensures that minority groups who concentrate their vote are able to select a representative who otherwise would be unable to win.
Yeah, 17 redistributes the votes of the least popular candidates first, while STV redistributes the excess votes of the most popular candidates first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
Okay, I see now. I thought STV could be mixed with party list PR by assigning additionally seats proportionally according to first choice, and I thought that was done in Ireland, but I might be confusing bits of their system with New Zealand's.
Clarification: when people say "PR" do they mean a specific system to make representation proportional, or a set of systems involving additional members, or do they mean the entire set of systems to achieve more proportional representation than single-member-first-past-the-post? I was trying to follow Wikipedia's usage where STV is a kind of PR.
Traditional mention of the superiority in all respects of large legislatures selected by lot.
Clarification: usually the last unless you're dealing with an extreme psephological pedant. Pretty much anything except FPTP.
Ooh, an electoral reform thread!
MY IDEAL SYSTEM: A lower house elected through FPTP tempered by ostracism; an upper house selected by sortition from elective constituencies; a constitutional monarchy passed on through rigorous primogeniture, with a retirement age of 65.
1. THE LOWER HOUSE. First past the post is easy to understand, and there are good reasons to have a close geographical link with a specific MP. The constituencies would be determined by algorithm. The algorithms would be overseen by a committee chosen by the upper house. At election time, voters would also have the opportunity to pick a member of the lower house for ostracism. A majority vote implies immediate ostracism. More than 20% would refer the case for ostracism to the upper house, who could vote to confirm it. Ostracised persons would be barred from holding any elected office, or from serving in the Upper House, for life, and would also be barred from public employment for five years.
2. THE UPPER HOUSE. "Elective constituency" means you can pick which one you belong to; and, in fact, if you don't like any of the ones that are on offer, you can make one up. Everyone would register every five years as a member of an elective constituency. For some this might be "textile workers", for others "cricket fans" or "Sikhs" or "left-handed people" or "attended Harrow Grammar School" or "called Jenkins". Some people might decide to make a statement by registering as "the constituency of Me". The largest 300 elective constituencies would each contribute one member to the upper house; they would be selected at random from the members of that constituency. Members of the upper house would serve for one five-year term, and are therefore immune from ostracism, because they will be leaving office at every election anyway.
"A majority vote implies immediate ostracism"
So if a political party happens to obtain a majority in the lower house they can permanently ban all their opponents? Or are you saying the constituency/algorithm method would be robust enough (subject to control of the upper house) to never allow such an absolute majority to occur?
The only thing worse than not having term limits is having term limits.
I think you only get to ostracize one person per election.
Oh, I misread that, I thought it was members of the lower house itself expelling members, not the electorate voting to expel.
Elective constituencies are an amazing idea. IIRC Jamie Kenny arguing that the UK should create a status of traditional chief on the same sort of basis.
Presumably, 28 would need ceremonial. Black Rod pursues the newly ostracised MP out of the building with the Mace of Opprobrium.
How about "the Axe of Opprobrium"? That is, spraying them with Axe Body Spray as they run.
34: I am envisaging something between the hollow-square rip-off-the-buttons ritual involved in a military court martial, an exorcism, and the Ceremony of Swan Upping.
The problem is going to come with choosing your elective constituency. You need a constantly updated list of which ones there are and how big each one is - no point starting your own "Textile Workers" group if there already is a big one that you can join instead.
That's a hell of a website design and bandwidth problem. You'd need to limit the number of times each person could change their affiliation - once per day? Otherwise the churn as it got close to election time would be ludicrous.
35: marketed as "Lynx" in this country. And the constitutional requirement for a Lynx of Opprobrium would be too fantastic an opportunity to waste on a mere tin of body spray rather than an actual lynx.
In fact, more ceremonial symbolic animals generally.
(hushed reverent voice) "...and the band of the Household Division falls silent as Her Majesty, with the reins of the Zebra of Equality in one hand and the leash of the Badger of Honour in the other, steps forward to take the salute... His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge, for the first time this year, taking the place of the Duke of Edinburgh as Mahout of the Elephant of Fiscal Rectitude..."
"After stuffing his cuffs into his socks, the Prince of Wales prepares to stuff the Ferret of Rectitude down the front of his trousers."
Obviously you can't have an "Elephant of Rectitude". That would be ridiculous.
Unexpected, certainly. It would therefore double up as the Elephant of Surprise.
The Badger of Honour weighs as much as the Lindisfarne Gospels. It must be true, I saw it on the internet.
Large elective constituencies would develop bureaucracies to help their members split up into arbitrary subgroups to increase their potential representation. Neat that since the number of constituencies are fixed, their sizes should tend towards being equal, or at least the largest would be within a factor of two (plus an epsilon, I guess) of the smallest. Unless human lifespans and the time period before changing your constituency prevents that.
The cover of the the Lindisfarne Gospels occupies 7.3 x 10EXP-8% of the area of Wales.
Did everybody stop to check my math? I didn't actually look up the surface area of the Lindisfarne Gospels. I just assumed 3 square feet.
You'd need to limit the number of times each person could change their affiliation - once per day? Otherwise the churn as it got close to election time would be ludicrous.
I think affiliations would have to be set up something like preference voting. So, if your top affiliation doesn't make it into the 300, you get re-affiliated to your next choice of group.
Picking a rando from your group to represent the affiliation seems problematic, though. Like, it would be cool to have my status as an Orioles fan recognized in the Upper House, but not if I have to be represented by that jackass, Kevin, who thought the Glenn Davis trade sounded like a good idea at the time.
43: also the sortition element means that the constituency would represent a true common interest. You wouldn't join, say, an Auto Industry constituency because the members might actually have radically different interests (workers v management, different companies etc) and so you'd risk being represented by someone who had very different motives to you.
elective constituencies
I have a better name. Let's call them "political parties."
45: The Lindisfarne Gospels are 13 1/2' by 9 3/4'. Wales is 8,022 sq mi. Thus, the area ratio of the good news of Lindisfarne to Cymru is 4.09 * 10^-12. I'd like to think humanity has gained something, culturally, by knowing this fact. Unless I messed it up.
46: We could make it slightly better, while still including productive feeling of chaos, if we chose the representative of each elective constituency by random ballot, the voting system most conducive to trolling.
Why bother to give a special name to a book if it's going to be that small?
47: But you might join the Auto Workers Constituency. Or maybe the Auto Workers Group D Constituency. Which, as the industry shrinks, would require the group to self-redistrict. Neat.
Ignore the fact that 49 makes the reverse-Spinal Tap error. Given that we're talking about an olden-timey British thing, it seems appropriate.
I didn't even notice until you spelled that out.
I'm still trying to figure how I got off by a factor of 100.
49.1 But that's only the front cover. And how wide is the spine?
54. You probably though it was much bigger than it is, like the Book of Kells, where your number would likely be about right, but don't expect me to check.
I did indeed think it was bigger, but not 100 times bigger. I did the exponents in my head and must have crossed directions.
55: That's only relevant if we're laying it out flat, as if we were photocopying it. The British Library probably frowns upon that. Might be less trouble to just fold Wales in half.
I bet the British Library would want you to use one of those photocopies specifically for books where the glass goes right to the edge so you can copy to the binding without pressing on the book.
Elective constituencies should have an open enrollment period to limit churn. Once a year is plenty.
I'm not sure how I feel about the random choice criterion. Under the rules as per 28 I'd simply ensure I was not in the top 300 so as to avoid having my life horribly disrupted for five years. I suppose that's one way of ensuring that only people interested and willing to participate actually sign up for any of the big 300.
57: That's why I do all my computations in bc. Which is 1) useless for doing division if you keep the default value of scale, 2) useless at taking remainders (via the % operator) if you change it. It's such a silly tool. I should just be using Python for command line math.
Basic calculator. It's a command line tool that comes with anything Unixy (or at least it's part of the GNU front end). If you're on Windows it's probably included in Cygwin, or at least easily available. It's a bad habit, though. Hell, Excel or even just entering stuff into Google or Wolfram Alpha would be better.
Cygwin is clearly a place in Wales.
Traditionally it was spelled "Ciggwin," meaning "meat-wine."
48: ah, but these are better. See, I could start a political party and tell everyone to vote for me because I would, say, save the British car industry, all the while knowing that I really planned to sell out my supporters as soon as I got elected. But it would be pointless to do that with an elective constituency because the actual representatives are picked at random, so I'd be very unlikely to gain power - probably some interloper who really did want to save the car industry would be one the Upper House member for the Save the Cars Constituency, and all my devious work would be for nothing. Sortition plus elective constituencies removes the motive for deceiving the electorate!
"bc -l" is such a frequent thing for me to run that not infrequently I type it into a window that's already running bc.
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I suspect the failure mode is that the political parties in the Lower House set up shadow parties in the Upper House, in the form of elective constituencies called "Conservative Party South-East Excluding London", "Labour Party Liverpool" and so on, and simply advise their supporters to join the appropriate one. But I think this would still be an improvement because it would be very difficult to have a coherent party in the upper house composed of 150 random people who all joined their local Conservative E.C., and I am pretty sure that party identification is weak enough that sufficient people would instead join the Sikh E.C. or the Railway User E.C. or whatever. With 300 seats between 40 million voters , the threshold is going to be about sixty thousand or so to squeeze in as number 300? (Assuming dalriata's right about the threshold). So all you need is to find 60,000 people whose identity as a Sikh or a Railway User or a Cricket Fan is stronger than their party identification. No problem, I should think.
The monarchy, meanwhile, would be optimised for its new role as National Reality Television, which is what heads of state seem to be doing these days anyway. This means a low retirement age so the monarch is always reasonably spry and healthy (and so there's rapid turnover) and incredibly convoluted inheritance laws to maximise telegenic conflict and factionalism.
That's just cruel, ajay. What's next, complete invasion of privacy and compulsory military service?
It looks like the complete invasion of privacy is already on the table.
It's not cruel at all. The House of Windsor is the result of a thousand-year continent-wide breeding programme to select people who are really good at, and really enjoy, convoluted and acrimonious disputes over inheritance. All the ones who didn't like it or weren't good at it didn't get to keep on being king.
NMM to the Brazilian soccer team. 2016 really is a bitch.
76: Just to clarify, a Brazilian soccer team, albeit a first division one that was having a Cinderella season. IOW, this was Leicester City going down (apparently not the whole club, either?), not the English National Team.
Well, NMM to a Brazilian soccer team. Still a bitch.
Are we talking tragic bus accident here, or a team lost an important game? I suppose I could google.
Just googled. Wow, that's grim. 75 dead.
I blame Trump.
I am baffled as to why the lead here is "Football team dies in plane crash" with, presumably, the subhead "64 lesser persons also killed".
Order of life importance, according to the UK press:
Monarchy
Non-royal Brits
Foreign celebrities
Foreign non-celebrity Anglos
Cute animals
Other humans
In terms of induced spectator mouse-orgasms, professional sportsmen are obviously the most important people in the world, ever. Unless they lose all the time, in which case they are history's greatest monsters.
From 84 we can deduce that any animals hit by the crashing plane were unattractive.
Bagehot suggested elective constituencies, but tied to individual politicians (i.e each politician needed to acquire a certain number of supporters and then they would get elected.) As Bagehot pointed out, the difficulty is that everyone would want to be in Gladstone or Disraeli's constituency, but obviously you really need to rack up lots of minor backbench constituencies, so the system would devolve into some kind of MMP-esque thing where party hacks would funnel people into the right pots to maximise representation.
STV is only PR with a large enough constituency size, and really it's a crap form of PR.
(Those gerrymandering examples in the OP are ok, but they don't allow for an important part of drawing FPP constituencies, which is that you want them to accurately reflect swings -- i.e it's a dynamic problem not a static problem.)
Oh, hi. Have you been here since the earthquake? I guess that was a while ago now, but I hope you got through well.
The House of Windsor is the result of a thousand-year continent-wide breeding programme to select people who are really good at, and really enjoy, convoluted and acrimonious disputes over inheritance.
Serious (okay, semi-serious) question: will the monarchy survive the 21st century?
(And by "the monarchy," I of course mean the British monarchy, and not one of those low-key, scaled-back continental monarchies that nobody pays much attention to).
I tend to think it will not survive, but obviously have no idea.
89: The British monarchy is already 16 years into the 21st century, no problems so far. I am fairly confident that it will survive the rest of the century. In recent history, European monarchies tend to come to an end only under fairly catastrophic circumstances. The Yugoslav and Romanian monarchies ended because the country was invaded by Nazis and then taken over by Communists with the help (to some degree) of the Soviet Army. The Greek monarchy ended because Greece was under a military dictatorship that saw the then-exiled monarchy (rightly) as a potential nucleus of opposition. The ends of the French, German, Ottoman, Italian and Russian monarchies all required the countries concerned to lose massively destructive wars, and even then the French got theirs back, twice (the Bonapartes in 1805 and 1849) before finally abolishing it permanently.
It is a mug's game trying to predict the future for the next 84 years, but I think it is reasonable to say that the UK will only lose its monarchy if it either loses a massive war or falls under a military dictatorship, and possibly not even then.
89. Serious answer? The small indicators suggest that the Cambridges are getting their ducks in a row to convert into something much more like "those low-key, scaled-back continental monarchies that nobody pays much attention to", but leaving all the tourist tat in place of course. If they succeed, I think the monarchy will survive the century faute de mieux. The real question is whether it can survive Charles, which I think is a toss-up.
I am a strong anti-monarchist in principle, but I do not want a presidential republic like America, which is basically an elective constitutional monarchy. Because. President Boris Johnson? No thanks. A more or less parliamentary republic like Ireland, OTOH is devoutly to be wished.
he real question is whether it can survive Charles, which I think is a toss-up.
But have any countries in Europe decided to peacefully get rid of their monarchy because the current monarch was just a bit crap? Even Ireland only became a parliamentary republic after decades of terrorism, guerrilla warfare and civil war.
Have any countries in Europe endured the coincidence of a monarch who is a bit crap with the total dominance of their mass media by a foreigner who is for reasons never fully explained, staunchly republican?
Quite a few Commonwealth countries have converted their Governors General into Presidents over the past 50 years. The precedent can be found if you look for it.
Slate pitch: By circa 2050, not only will Britain still have its monarchy, but most countries in the world will be under some form of monarchy.
If you include e facto monarchies where the monarch goes by the title of President, that is a racing certainty.
Have any countries in Europe endured the coincidence of a monarch who is a bit crap with the total dominance of their mass media by a foreigner who is for reasons never fully explained, staunchly republican?
Basically he's republican because it's part of his hatred for the British establishment, which he acquired from his dad, newspaper editor and shit-stirring Gallipoli fabulist Keith Murdoch. See also "why he hates the BBC", "why he hates the NHS", and "why he hates the UK educational system".
Murdoch is, however, 85 years old. He is unlikely to outlive the present queen, let alone the British monarchy.
By circa 2050, not only will Britain still have its monarchy, but most countries in the world will be under some form of monarchy.
At present 44 of the 193 UN member states have a head of state whose title is "King" or similar. (The majority of those, of course, have a head of state called "Queen Elizabeth II".) Then you can add on the hereditary dictatorships where power has already been inherited at least once (North Korea, Syria, no doubt there are others).
After that, as chris points out, we are really into arguments about definitions. Is Aleksandr Lukashenka a monarch or just a dictator? What, indeed, is the difference? If he were to hand power to his eldest son on his death, would he retroactively become a monarch, or do you actually have to have the word "king" or similar on your name tag? How about Pope Francis I? Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya is the son of Kenya's founding president, and certainly that helped his career, but he came to the presidency through a close and fairly fair election. Likewise Ian Khama of Botswana, where things get even more complicated because his father Seretse was also the son and grandson of kings, but who also came to the presidency through a free and fair election.
Is Aleksandr Lukashenka a monarch or just a dictator? What, indeed, is the difference?
There are so many. I think people generally don't have much trouble telling them apart.
The pope is a vicar, not a monarch. It's there in his title.
97. And don't forget King Simeon II of Bulgaria, reigned 1943-46 (he was a small child, there was a regency), who left the country when the monarchy was abolished, returned in 1996 and from 2001-2005 served as Prime Minister, not President, of the republic of Bulgaria. Retired now, he's nearly 80.
The real question is whether it can survive Charles, which I think is a toss-up.
About a year ago, I saw the play King Charles III, where a constitutional crisis ensues after the death of Elizabeth II and the ascension of Charles to the throne. It was all a bit wacky and crazy-dramatic, the characters all larger than life, the motifs all Shakespearean tragedy. But it didn't seem incredible or not believable. Also, the acting was great; it was a real treat to watch.
I used to be staunchly anti-monarchist. Living in the US has changed my perspective. Am I still anti-monarchist in principle? Perhaps. But in actual practice, Canada's constitutional monarchy seems to work so much better than America's presidential republic. Having an English queen as Canada's head of state seems a small price to pay for a reasonably functioning and responsive parliament.
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