if the definition is as loose as "benefits one party" then only a legitimate 50-50 case of redistricting, aka almost literally never happens, wouldn't apply. making something more fair, but not 100% equally fair, benefits the minority party.

We could say that all redistricting can have some elements of gerrymandering, but gerrymandering specifically requires intent to give disproportionate advantage. Otherwise it's just redistricting.




I already pointed out that's a bad definition, and this is a better one.

Gerrymandering (/ˈdʒɛrimændərɪŋ/,[1][2]) is a practice intended to establish an unfair political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries, which is most commonly used in first-past-the-post electoral systems.

Making something more fair benefits the minority, but a minority should be benefited if they get a disproportionately small level of representation compared to their votes.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Sep 4 2020 02:31pm

Wrong and wrong. The practical execution comes down to finding a workable definition that can quantify the degree of unfairness of a map, so that the courts can handle the case. And no, we do not know what the characteristics of the optimal solution look like. If you postulate that proportional representation should have utmost importance, then switching the election system to PR is the only way to go. But within the confines of America's first past the post election system, it very much is up for debate how the optimal solution looks like. Within FPTP, there will always be a tradeoff between proportionality, compactness, communities of interest, respect for county and city lines and so on and forth, and there is no single logical concept from which a definitive answer on the optimal tradeoff could be derived.



By the way: my personal preference would be a combination of monte carlo simulation and the so-called efficiency gap. Given the demographic data of a state and certain requirements in terms of compactness or VRA provisions, a computer is randomly drawing some tens of thousands of maps for that state and computing the efficiency gap on each of them. This way, we get a feeling for the "natural lean" of the state, and a state like MA will on average produce a higher efficiency gap than a state like NC. Then, we can compare the efficiency gap of the actual, current map with the distribution of efficiency gaps from those randomly drawn maps, and throw the map out if it lands above the X% quantile of this distribution, for example the 90 or 95% quantile.

With this method, we can not only gauge how much the map of a state favors one party or the other, we can also estimate how likely or unlikely it is for a map with this degree of tilt to have resulted from a good-faith map-drawing effort. If a map falls into the top 10 or 5% most unbalanced maps out of the spectrum the state allows for, then we can conclude that it was drawn with ill intent and throw it out of the window.

Alternatively, this method can be used by a nonpartisan redistricting commission, which picks one of the proposed maps which fall near the 50% quantile in terms of EG. (Out of those, they can pick one which suits current incumbents the most.)

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 4 2020 03:32pm

I think there are a lot of things you can do to make things fair. Compactness and contiguity are great ways to get things to pass the smell test. There are some states that are pretty egregious when you look at the number of seats vs. the state-wide popular vote.

One aspect that throws a wrench into things is majority-minority districts. At this point, they are almost a necessity because the South would purposely dilute the black vote. Another aspect is that we SELF-GERRYMANDER in that liberals will live in urban areas and conservatives will live in rural areas. Personally, I think multi-member districts are a great solution but I think those are illegal at the federal level..

That's from 2007 and 1995 respectively, but I am reading them.

Some highlights so far:

• "Most of the available estimates that CBO reviewed for its analysis were prepared when there was no federal pro-gram specifically designed to help state and local governments provide emergency health care to immigrants."

It's pre-Obamacare and also normalized emergency care across the whole population and applies it to immigrants at an assumed level. Of course, UHC or even just giving them actual government insurance would abate a lot of these costs since emergency costs are insane. Plus I have no idea how Obamacare or state health laws may have changed this in the past 13-25 years.

• It includes the costs of investigating, arresting, detaining, imprisoning, prosecuting, and deporting. It also includes the entire state and national budgets for border security, as well as the salaries of everyone in the judicial and prison systems. Those aren't "welfare going to immigrants" so it's added expense outside of the framework of this discussion.

• "Another report—prepared by the state comptroller of Texas—estimated that, in 2006, the state collected $424 million more in revenue from unauthorized immigrants than it spent to provide education, health care, and law enforcement activities for that population."

I looked at that report, and it indeed says "The Comptroller’s office estimates the absence of the estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants in Texas in fiscal 2005 would have been a loss to our Gross State Product of $17.7 billion. Also, the Comptroller’s office estimates that state revenues collected from undocumented immigrants exceed what the state spent on services, with the difference being $424.7 million."

Your CBO report goes on to add in the total uncompensated billing prices of hospital emergency rooms to come up with a negative number. Pretty dishonest accounting.

Bolded because that is a significant impact on GDP which isn't being calculated in taxes paid by the people profiting from doing business in the state. So it may be a nice $424.7 million extra in direct revenue to Texas just from the UIs, but in reality the state got a ton more from all the people they patronize or work for.

time to decriminalize weed
and criminalize spreading misinformation on social media

https://twitter.com/realDSteinberg/status/1301579878832189440

So what do you guys think of this election manipulation by liberal voter groups funded by major tech companies?
The idea being, they legally dump large ($300 million) amounts of donations into local election boards targeted in liberal districts where they want to increase turnout, while withholding that money from conservative districts
They already started doing it in Wisconsin, with the CTCL giving $6.3 million to downtown election organizers in Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee and Racine, while doing nothing at all to turn out the rural vote.
The boards themselves are supposed to be nonpartisan, and this doesn't require them to be partisan to manipulate the election- only that partisan entities are showering money into boards strategically to increase turnout in districts advantageous to them.

Is this not normal? I assumed campaigns just did this normally, targeted areas where they have strong support and bussed in voters and stuff.

as opposed to private organizing, this is funding the local government boards, who actually have the power to set policy