Redistricting 2.0: Cloud Lets Voters Take Part 83
CWmike writes "As the 2010 U.S. census results arrived, Los Angeles County's politicians started ramping up for redistricting — the once-a-decade, computing-intensive, often contentious process of geographically carving up the populace into discrete parcels of voters. In the past, such decisions were made by politicians using expensive computer systems and software. Participation in the process was limited to an elite few who could afford experts who understood redistricting's arcane rules and GIS technology well enough to game them. This year, however, it won't just be the politicians and special interest groups poring over the data and tweaking boundary lines. All 4.5 million registered voters in LA County have access to a cloud-based redistricting application called the Public Access Plan that lets voters view and modify existing maps and boundaries, submit comments, and even create and submit their own plans from scratch. LA County is among the first government entities to consider providing Web-based tools that allow for direct public participation. 'This notion of public access has changed quite dramatically,' says Tim Storey, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures. 'Throwing that wide open is a big step.' The big question now is whether the public will use it."
The cloud doesn't let voters do anything.. (Score:2)
Redistricting 2.0: Cloud Lets Voters Take Part
The "cloud" is not a mechanism, it doesn't enable the voters to do anything. The term you're looking for is called Crowdsourcing [wikipedia.org].
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This is really a major problem of the system.
Back the last time redistricting was done, the redistricting game [redistrictinggame.org] came out. It showed how eliminating gerrymandering, by forcing decisions to be made without including "percentage of voters of X party", would improve the political process.
Instead, what we're going to see now in most states is what we saw last time. If one party controls a state, they will try to make as many districts as possible that are 55% "theirs" while stuffing the remaining voters that are
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By selecting against the voters who prove they are unable to easily use logic, you negate a whole host of bad influences like gerrymandering, propaganda, sound bites, demagoguery, media over-representation, media-underrepresentation, debate framing, popularity, etc.
At the root of your plan is a basic and false assumption - namely that someone able to employ logic is unbiased. That's patently false - plenty of people are able to apply logic within a particular domain but their over-all agenda is based on something other than logic.
For example, the wars on drugs and terrorism - both based on fundamentally broken premises, but within the context of the basic stupidities are all kinds of logically sound reasoning. Another example would be religious philosophy - many rea
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The whole concept of winner-takes-all segment voting, either by district in a state, or by electoral collage for the presidency, is a scam. Plan and simple.
Back in "the day", it made more sense because it was a great deal more difficult to collect votes from all over the country to one central place to count. It was simpler to just send a representative from each of the regions and have them cast their vote for the majority of the voters they represented. This system relied on the voter distribution bein
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If they can't simply do a popular vote, then at least use a fixed boundary like county lines.
County lines don't work. Counties have different populations, some incredibly different (one county with a metropolis may be 5x the population of a neighboring mostly rural county). Constitutionally, districts must be as evenly populated as possible for Congressional representation.
What would make some level of sense is eliminating the anachronistic Senate, which used to be elected indirectly but has basically turne
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If they can't simply do a popular vote, then at least use a fixed boundary like county lines.
County lines don't work. Counties have different populations, some incredibly different (one county with a metropolis may be 5x the population of a neighboring mostly rural county). Constitutionally, districts must be as evenly populated as possible for Congressional representation.
What would make some level of sense is eliminating the anachronistic Senate, which used to be elected indirectly but has basically turned into a secondary squabbling house after the change to "direct election" of those assholes, and replacing it with a parliamentary percentage-representative system (say, each political party gets 1 Senator for each 1% of the vote they earn). The added bonus is that it would give an incentive for smaller parties to exist and participate again. ...which is precisely why the dumbicrats and republicunts won't go for it, since it would loosen their corrupt grips on power.
I'd be happy with a repeal of the 17th Amendment. The Senators being appointed by the state legislatures and sent to Washington to represent the states is a GOOD THING. It's what would prevent the federal government from bullying the states as it does today. Right now the current practice is easy to observe: the federal government collects taxes from the residents of a state; if the state plays ball and adopts policies that please Washington, the states get some of their own money back; the states are th
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I never understood how people universally recognize why a duopoly in the marketplace, when it's all about money alone, is a bad thing; yet they universally fail to understand why a duopoly with a stranglehold on politics, when it's about both money and power, is also a bad thing. In both scenarios the customers and the voters lose.
Simple: for 80-90% of the "elected representatives", those who aren't quickly replaced or in non-safe districts, they are the aristocracy. They are the ones in control. Why would
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I never understood how people universally recognize why a duopoly in the marketplace, when it's all about money alone, is a bad thing; yet they universally fail to understand why a duopoly with a stranglehold on politics, when it's about both money and power, is also a bad thing. In both scenarios the customers and the voters lose.
Simple: for 80-90% of the "elected representatives", those who aren't quickly replaced or in non-safe districts, they are the aristocracy. They are the ones in control. Why would they support a system that is highly likely to remove them from power?
I don't believe you appreciate where I was going with that.
Yes, I am aware not only of the aristocracy but also of its favorite tools of manipulation. Whereas the kings of old would use their thugs to physically intimidate the peasants to keep them in line, the masters of today are far more sophisticated. They use the media and the public schools to keep people stupid, foster anti-intellectualism, portray mental and spriitual and particularly emotional immaturity as normal and acceptable, freedom as scary
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Giving rise to the advent of "countymandering" :)
Re:The cloud doesn't let voters do anything.. (Score:4, Insightful)
(where some states are virtually ignored, and others like CALIFORNIA are flooded by campaigning)
At least California represents a significant portion of the country's population and economy. The more disturbing fact is how important New Hampshire and Iowa are.
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That's how California got into such a state. Heh heh... state...
We have the worst government in the history of the multiverse, and those not termed out *still* got re-elected due to two things.
[1] The blithering idiot voters not paying attention
[2] Gerrymandering
[2] feeds off [1]. People don't know what the fuck is going on, so they just vote for their party as a default setting.
If you are a regular, hard working, private sector, tax paying Californian, you are literally locked out of the system. It's just
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If you are a regular, hard working, private sector, tax paying Californian, you are literally locked out of the system. It's just the public employees and the politicians giving each other hand jobs over and over again, only turning to the rest of us for ever more taxes when they need to finance their next round of corrupt horseshit.
Funny.
If you are a regular, hard working, public OR private sector, tax paying citizen in the rest of the nation, you are literally locked out of the system.
It's the "elected re
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1% of the population controls more than 50% of the wealth
Nonsense!
400 divided by 300 million is a little over 0.01%, not the ridiculously large 1% you suggest.
I'm pretty sure we're going to have to rethink the whole "eat the rich" plan: there are no longer enough of them to feed more than a couple of poor families for a few years...
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You are completely wrong, but hey, don't take time to look into what happened and be sure to blame public employees.
You are NOT locked out of the system; you just don't want to bother to be part of the system and think standing around doing nothing counts is 'input'.
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I worked extensively on two state political campaigns. That's where I saw much of this first hand. Also have close friends still working for a major party, trying hopelessly to make change for the better.
So, you know, blow me.
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Crowdmandering or gerrysourcing? (Score:5, Funny)
Crowdmandering or gerrysourcing?
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Agreed. Just throw a dart at a map, lay down a fixed-sized hex, and call that a district. Set all the other districts as the same-sized hex built off the first hex.
Once the population density of a hex falls below a specific density, i.e. rural areas, start letting the computers take over and carve it up.
Maybe then, disenfranchised inner-city voters would think they have a voice.
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The point is not that disenfranchised inner-city voters (or rural voters, or suburban voters, or anyone else) do not have a voice.
It's that their voice is muted because 90% of them live in a "safe district" of one sort or another, and the only "competition" is in the primaries where you get to choose between Adolf Eichmann or Herman Goering to "represent" you in the general election and auto-win based on party affiliation.
If "your party" was running the state at last redistricting, chances are that you live
Take a cue from Iowa (Score:3)
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I can't believe I'm praising Iowa politics, but here goes: Iowa uses a simple grid and a computer to determine the maps.
Cool! Do you have a reference?
Also, we should get rid of the two-party system and use preference voting...
Agreed. Preference or approval, either one, but the plurality-take-all system is terrible.
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In fact, from the research I did back in 2008, I think the best alternative vote-counting method, from a technical standpoint, considering the requirements of a public plebiscite, is Cloneproof Sequential Schwarz Dropping... or whatever they've (I think) renamed that now.
Problem is that voters *can't understand it*.
These days, that trumps "does what I actually want".
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I found this: http://archive.fairvote.org/redistricting/reports/remanual/ia.htm [fairvote.org]
Looks fairly griddy. ;-)
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The new map is here [iowa.gov] (PDF). It was adopted by 90-7 and 48-1 votes in both chambers on April 14, signed by the governor five days later. The population variance is 0.0005% [qctimes.com], which is so small I almost don't believe it. (More details here [iowa.gov].)
And the guidelines are here [state.ia.us], summarized in the redistricting commission report [iowa.gov]:
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Better yet, get rid of districts and use proportional representation.
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Have the change the Constitution to get rid of districts, so it'll never happen.
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It's not a holy scripture, we have changed it before. Heck, 17 times since the thing was first ratified. Last time was in 1992, which is not that long ago.
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It's Holy Scripture when it takes a bunch of guys who are elected through the current gerrymandered system to pass the amendment in Congress and a bunch of guys who develop the gerrymandered system at the state level to pass it in 3/4ths of the states.
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Have the change the Constitution to get rid of districts, so it'll never happen.
It's Federal law that prohibits proportional representation.
The constitution gives congress the right the regulation elections. That's the power cited by congress when it created the prohibition against proportional representation.
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proportional representation
Proportional to what? The number of votes a private organization got? Why should private organizations be privileged? Why should Parliament or Congress or whatever represent the interests of private organizations rather than voters?
People, not Parties, are what should be represented in Parliament.
Proportional representation schemes just take for granted that political parties ought to have precedence over people, which is the problem with most modern democracies, not the solution.
PR is an attempt by part
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Who gets to elect the Representatives, then? Ohio will have 16 districts in the next election for the U.S. House of Representatives. Should I vote for the 16 I want? The top 16 win? How is that supposed to work? Who represents ME, all of them? How beholden would they be to their voters if they know they just don't have to be #17 on the ballot?
No, I think districts make perfect sense. Part of the beauty of House elections is how small they
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The accountability of the individual politician to their district is a pie-in-the-sky dream. It's a nice theory but in practice they don't care.
We vote for parties in Sweden, there are 8 of them in parliament, each party has a list of people on their ballot in order of preference to the party. If the voters wish, they can vote for individual candidates on that list and if they get a certain percentage that overrides the party's preferred candidates. The districts are relatively large and there are several s
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MOST states use simple squares for districts, but it gets complicated when you move away from the simplicity of Iowa farmland, to a heavily-populated area like a city or suburb. The district loses its "squareness" and follows the local streets/neighborhoods.
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The district loses its "squareness" and follows the local streets/neighborhoods.
No, they follow neighborhoods, generally neighborhoods carefully chosen by the party in power to ensure that said party will be reelected for the foreseeable future. Imagine a city with 50/50 republicans and democrats, where 50% of the democrats live in one neighborhood but the republicans are evenly spread. The democrats take one district handidly, but lose every other district by a considerable margin. A city that is politically an even split suddenly has a city council that is made up of 19 republican
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>>>>>follows the local streets/neighborhoods.
>>
>>No, they follow neighborhoods
I just said that. :-\
BTW if you look at the last three presidential elections, you'll see the Democrats win the city neighborhoods 99% of the time. (And vice-versa, Republicans win the surrounding suburbs/rural areas.) So your city council of 19 R's and 1 D is unlikely. It's more likely to be 100% democrat, since cities are heavily D-dominated and the republicans don't stand a chance.
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Iowa uses a simple grid...
How could that be possible? That would only work in states that are flat and utterly devoid of interesting geographical details... Oh, yeah. Uh, never mind...
Why is this done by anything but automation? (Score:2)
This could be automated and cheaply. Split the state into as many blocks as there are seats each starting at the north east. Make them square and only big enough to contain population/seats amount of people.
In reality this is really about gerrymandering not actually doing this in a fair way.
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Gerrymandering seems to be somewhere in-between a scored algorithmic approach and proportional representation.
Especially when it is done to make safe seats and not to carve pockets of opponents into little pieces.
(Saying 'fair' in a political discussion is pointless, there isn't an objective definition of the word. Take cutting a candy bar in two. Some people say 50-50 is fair, others would pretend that it should be divided proportionally based on the size of the consumers, and on and on)
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I agree, fat people should get smaller candy bars. :)
Why do all the new districts look like penises? (Score:2)
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For non-US readers (Score:5, Informative)
If you're not familiar with the US system of districting, how it works is that an area, like the state of New York gets a number of representatives (29 in NY's case) based on its population. The geography of the state is then split up into 29 regions and each region gets to choose its own representative. After the once-a-decade census, like we just had in 2010, states often will redistrict, which means that they pick the boundaries of those 29 regions. For the political parties involved, they want to draw the district boundaries such that they end up with a majority of citizens who will vote for their party in each district. They use voter registration records and census records to do so. The census records, while they don't include political party preference, do include race, age, family size, and income, all of which are good indicators of how someone will vote. As a result, redistricting is usually contentious, and often abused process.
I know that this probably isn't a complete or 100% accurate description of the process; feel free to correct me if I made any mistakes.
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If the census shows a big enough loss in population from State X, and a big enough increase in population in State Y, State X will lose a seat while State Y will gain one, leading to redistricting in both X and Y.
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Ha.
Al Sharpton.
Sheila Jackson Lee.
Ha.
Really?
These people are the worst of the worst.
They constantly tell people that they suck and are incapable of doing anything on their own without a government check.
Can you imagine what would happen to your children if you constantly took over and made an automatic success of everything they attempted
while telling them that without your "help" they would have failed.
The same thing that is happening to the minorities that are being represented by these people.
Do you real
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I believe that was my point.
Sharpton and Lee could never be elected if they were not in gerrymandered districts designed to ghettoize a political party into as few districts as possible.
Racist assholes like Culberson, Poe, and McCaul stem from the same sort of gerrymandering, they are just from the other side and are in "safe" districts designed by their own party.
NONE of them should be elected, ever. The devil's bargain is that the Democrats allow for the creation of the supersafe-districts in states they
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Along with that you also want the 'enemy' incumbents to live in one of your safe districts so they have no chance of getting re-elected. At the same time, the enemy's safe district has to run a new politician that will not be as influential as their pr
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Mostly dead on, a couple changes/additions.
1) You're talking about United States House of Representatives seats. Each House district nationwide is supposed to have roughly the same number of people in it. So that CA-5 and NC-1 and LA-2 should represent roughly the same number of people. I believe currently districts are supposed to be about 600k people.
2) These districts have to be redistricted every 10 years (a few states only have 1 district, making it easy)
3) Then many states also have state districts. T
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In general, the strategy is this: You want the opposing party's voters to have huge majorities in order to confine their influence to as few districts as possible, while arranging it so that your party has a small majority in as many districts as possible.
Needless to say, this is insane and doesn't follow logic in the slightest. In a fair/just system, districts would be chosen on a strict mathematical basis to create rectangular districts of equal population on some kind of a strict grid. Let the votes fall
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As I see it (Score:2)
Boondoogle.
Some of the public will use it, it will be mostly contradictory, and the politicians will completely ignore it (this is the real big question). I can see no end to the contradictions in opinions, district lines, local (as in town-sized) political motivations, financial motivations (if I'm over there, the taxes are lower), and what have you.
It's a nice idea, but flawed from the get-go.
How does the "cloud" figure into this (Score:1)
Tech buzzwords are my personal kryptonite. Is this anything other than a web application running on top of one or more virtual machine web servers?
Just say no (Score:3)
I always decline to list a party affiliation on the voter registration form to avoid being a pawn in the gerrymandering process. It's pretty bad in Colorado this year.
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Depends on your state. Some states like, New Hampshire, have "open primaries' which means that you don't need to be registered with a party to be able to vote in that party's primaries. Other states, like New York or Texas, have "closed primaries" which require you to be registered with a party in order to be able to vote in their primaries.
For heavily republican states like Texas, or heavily democratic cities like NYC, being able to vote it the party's primaries may be you greatest (maybe only) chance to
Odd (Score:1)
I tried to look up the Democrats version of this site, but all I could find was a list of hotels in neighboring states, and a link to the song "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to".
HJR 0.6931 Redistricting Fractal Dim Limit (Score:2)
Foxes designing the hen-house locks (Score:2)
A Goofy Idea (Score:2)