[EM] Redistricting, now with racial demographics

[Aaron Armitage]

--- On Sun, 7/19/09, James Gilmour <jgilmour at globalnet.co.uk> wrote:

> You may be interested to know that the Boundary Commission
> for Scotland experimented with some computer-based
> algorithms for drawing
> district boundaries when fed the geographical locations of
> all our electors.  They abandoned them all because they
> found it was
> taking longer to tidy up the machine-produced boundaries
> than it would to do the whole job "manually" by sensible
> amalgamations of
> postal units (very small) on a good GIS.  The
> minimising algorithms have difficulty recognising and
> accommodating the physical
> features like mountains and uncrossable rivers, which as
> Kathy pointed out, must be taken properly into account in
> looking for
> sensible boundaries.  Incidentally, our Boundary
> Commissions are all independent of the politicians, so we
> don't have the "incumbent
> problem" that is endemic in the USA and completely distorts
> the whole system.
> 

I would think that presetting the desired boundaries would avoid that.

> 
> > And I have this notion that it would be good to have a
> bicameral  
> > legislature with one house elected at-large PR and one
> elected from  
> > single member locality districts.
> 
> I thought you already had a bicameral legislature, together
> with a "separation of powers" for the Executive? 

Yes, but both houses are elected with single member plurality. This
is true at the federal level and, as far as I know, in 49 of the states.
The one exception has a single chamber elected using single-member
plurality districts.

 The
> main problem with
> electing one house by PR and the other house from
> single-member districts is that, no matter what voting
> system you use within the
> single-member districts, that house will not be properly
> representative of the voters, in contrast to the "PR"
> house.  I don't know
> how long the electors would tolerate that, especially if
> there were real differences of political representation in
> the two houses
> and both houses were of similar power in the overall
> political system.
> 

At the federal level the Senate is elected with no reference to
population, so that Wyoming and California have the same representation.
This is actually entrenched in the Constitution in such a way that it
would be easiler to abolish the Senate entirely than to introduce any
form of proportionality into it. And this is accepted by almost everybody.
I suspect that as long as both chambers are elected the public will
accept it, and in the event of serious differences of perspective between
the two a substantial part of public opinion will be more in favor of the
conflict itself than either side. We like checks and balances, after all.

> I would just elect both houses by STV-PR but form the
> districts on a different basis, which should be easy if the
> "upper" house had
> fewer members than the "lower" house.

I see no reason for having two houses, in that case.