good video on the 2010 gerrymandering by republicans

[repoman]

go to 5:35 for the start:



This is one of the best interviews I have ever listened to.

 

[lpetrich]

Newspaper Boston Globe had published the results for the 2012 US House elections, and I analyzed them with the help of a proportional-representation algorithm. My results:

What	D	R
Actual	201	234
State-by-state PR	215	220
National PR	220	215

Minor parties ignored.

Some states had sizable disproportions, like Pennsylvania. In that state, PR gives 9 each of both parties, while the actual number was R=13, D=5. Likewise, in Massachusetts, PR gives D=6, R=3, while the actual number is all 9 being Democrats.

 

[blastula]

I liked the part about Harry's razors, because now I want to slit my wrists. Fuckin' Tim Kaine.

 

[repoman]

huh, I told you to start at 5:35 to skip all of that.

What about Tim Kaine?

 

[blastula]

Kaine was in charge of the DNC at the time, and it doesn't look like they made much of an effort to stop it.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Newspaper Boston Globe had published the results for the 2012 US House elections, and I analyzed them with the help of a proportional-representation algorithm. My results:

What	D	R
Actual	201	234
State-by-state PR	215	220
National PR	220	215

Minor parties ignored.

Some states had sizable disproportions, like Pennsylvania. In that state, PR gives 9 each of both parties, while the actual number was R=13, D=5. Likewise, in Massachusetts, PR gives D=6, R=3, while the actual number is all 9 being Democrats.

Curious, which district area should go Republican in Massachusetts? If you look at the 2012 election, Obama won each district.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Kaine was in charge of the DNC at the time, and it doesn't look like they made much of an effort to stop it.

America voted in the Republicans in an historic landslide because they told the elderly that Obama wanted to end Medicare... and death panels.

 

[repoman]

yeah, but even with that the Dems could have prevented much of the new style micro-gerrymandering - at least according to the guest in the video.

 

[lpetrich]

Newspaper Boston Globe had published the results for the 2012 US House elections, and I analyzed them with the help of a proportional-representation algorithm. ...

... Likewise, in Massachusetts, PR gives D=6, R=3, while the actual number is all 9 being Democrats.

Curious, which district area should go Republican in Massachusetts? If you look at the 2012 election, Obama won each district.

Jimmy Higgins, it looks like I'll have to explain proportional representation to you.

Let's say that the people of Massachusetts decided to elect their national House delegation by party-list proportional representation. Instead of district-by-district representation, the delegation would be elected at-large, by all the voters of the state. Each voter would vote for a party, and each party would get a number of delegates in proportion to how many votes that it received. Thus, from how many votes Democrats and Republicans received in 2012, Massachusetts voters would be represented by 6 Democrats and 3 Republicans.

Is there anything further that I need to explain?

 

[zorq]

There is some use for one powerful politician representing a region of people.

Sometimes issues aren't political, and they are confined to specific regions. Regions too small for a representative of a state containing nearly 700,000 square kilometers like Texas has. For example, suppose an earthquake devastated the cities in north eastern California, or a pipeline oil spill contaminates the ground water in eastern Texas. There is a national representative in Washington available to advocate for the people in these regions.

Proportional representation would destroy that geographical non-partisan representation.

Is the trade off of better political representation worth the abandonment of geographical representation entirely?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Curious, which district area should go Republican in Massachusetts? If you look at the 2012 election, Obama won each district.

Jimmy Higgins, it looks like I'll have to explain proportional representation to you.

Let's say that the people of Massachusetts decided to elect their national House delegation by party-list proportional representation. Instead of district-by-district representation, the delegation would be elected at-large, by all the voters of the state. Each voter would vote for a party, and each party would get a number of delegates in proportion to how many votes that it received. Thus, from how many votes Democrats and Republicans received in 2012, Massachusetts voters would be represented by 6 Democrats and 3 Republicans.

Is there anything further that I need to explain?

You said "algorithm" which implied something a little more involved than, split the seats as per the percentage of popular vote received. So which parts of Massachusetts would the Republicans serve?

 

[lpetrich]

Is there anything further that I need to explain?

You said "algorithm" which implied something a little more involved than, split the seats as per the percentage of popular vote received.

Algorithms can be very simple. But I must concede that simply dividing out is not enough. In general, it will give each party a non-integer number of seats, a mathematical absurdity.

There are several algorithms for getting an integer number of seats.

A simple one is the largest-remainder algorithm. One rounds down, and then allocates the remaining seats to the parties with the largest leftover fractions.

A commonly-used one is the highest-averages algorithm. A common variant of it is the d'Hondt algorithm. Each party gets a divisor equal to (number of seats + 1) where the number of seats is what the party has at each round of seat assignment. At each step, one divides the parties' vote totals by the parties' divisors, and whichever one has the largest quotient gets a seat. That party's divisor is then recalculated for the next seat assignment. There are several alternative ways of calculating this divisor, like Sainte-Lague (add 1/2 instead of 1), and like Huntington-Hill (square root of (number of seats)*(number of seats + 1)). The latter is used to decide how many seats each state has in the US House of Representatives.

A mixed version is to get a starting number of seats by rounding down, and then doing the rest of the seats by some highest-averages method like d'Hondt.

So which parts of Massachusetts would the Republicans serve?

They would not represent some geographical subset of the state, but instead their voters for the entire state.

 

[lpetrich]

There is some use for one powerful politician representing a region of people.

Sometimes issues aren't political, and they are confined to specific regions. Regions too small for a representative of a state containing nearly 700,000 square kilometers like Texas has. For example, suppose an earthquake devastated the cities in north eastern California, or a pipeline oil spill contaminates the ground water in eastern Texas. There is a national representative in Washington available to advocate for the people in these regions.

Proportional representation would destroy that geographical non-partisan representation.

There are some ways out of that conundrum.

One is to use multiseat "superdistricts" that are elected with proportional representation. Texas could be divided into North Texas, East Texas, Central Texas, South Texas, and West Texas, for instance.

Another is to use a mixed-member system, a combination of single-member district seats and list seats. One votes for both a politician for one's district and a party. The list seats are assigned to make the overall party composition proportional, or at least as close to proportional as possible.

A variant is a parallel system, where the list seats are proportional only among themselves.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

There is some use for one powerful politician representing a region of people.

Sometimes issues aren't political, and they are confined to specific regions. Regions too small for a representative of a state containing nearly 700,000 square kilometers like Texas has. For example, suppose an earthquake devastated the cities in north eastern California, or a pipeline oil spill contaminates the ground water in eastern Texas. There is a national representative in Washington available to advocate for the people in these regions.

Proportional representation would destroy that geographical non-partisan representation.

There are some ways out of that conundrum.

One is to use multiseat "superdistricts" that are elected with proportional representation. Texas could be divided into North Texas, East Texas, Central Texas, South Texas, and West Texas, for instance.

My idea was to require that all districts must be the same size as the smallest populated district. Districts with more people would get more seats.