notes-groupDecisionMaking-fixingDistricts

Fixing Districts

There are multiple reasons why districts are uncompetitive. Part of the problem is clearly that politicians get to draw the district boundaries during redistricting, and they often choose to draw them in such a way as to make them less competitive.

Gerrymandering

When an electorate is subdivided into districts, the districts can usually be drawn in such a way as to influence the results of elections. This phenomenon is called gerrymandering.

For example, in 2002, the Republican-controlled legislature in Florida proposed a map with 18 Republican-leaning seats and 7 Democratic ones, even though in 2000, the national presidential election indicated that Florida is about half Republican and half Democratic [1]. Another example; as of 2002, illinois's 4th congressional district looks like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a0/IL04_109.gif

Such weird shapes are a clear sign that the district shapes are being drawn with some specific objective, like gerrymandering.

Other factors

However, gerrymandering is not the only reason for uncompetitive districts (some commentators believe it is not even the main reason [2]). For example, another cause of uncompetitive districts is geographic clustering of people with similar political views.

Solutions

One class of solution is to fix gerrymandering. There are various proposals for this, for example, (a) give the task of redistricting to disinterested parties, (b) automate the task of redistricting according to some specified algorithm (example, thanks to Dana Dahlstrom: distort the map in such a way as to make the population density on the distorted map uniform, then draw a grid upon the distorted map, and finally inversely distort the grid in order to draw districts upon the original map), and/or (c) place various constraints on redistricting, such as requiring most districts to be similarly sized rectangles.

Another class of solution is to augment district representatives with at-large representatives. With a counting method that has the property of proportional representation (that is, if the at-large representatives are chosen in such a way so as to mirror the factional proportions of the entire nation), some of these seats will always be "competitive" because, with a sufficiently large number of at-large representatives, even a small fluctuation in the factional makeup of the nation will lead to a change of how many seats go to each party (by the same token, however, many of these seats will be "uncompetitive" in the sense that, unless there is a huge change in the popular will, each faction will continue to hold most of its seats).

The fix using at-large representatives has the advantage of fixing the uncompetitive district problem even to the extent that it is caused by geographical clustering rather than intentional gerrymandering.

I recommend introducing at least a few at-large representatives, and in addition adopting constraints on redistricting, or even automating it.