[EM] Theoretical Issues In Districting

[Michael Rouse]

Quote: /"Democracy" is voters choosing their leaders. But when 
politicians get to draw their own districts, such as (most 
<http://rangevoting.org/CrossCountryG.html>egregiously) in the USA, the 
result is the opposite -- the politicians choose their voters./

When you want to divide cake evenly between two people, you let one 
person cut the cake, and the other person chooses which slice he gets. 
In this case, let politicians cut the cake however they like (each 
candidate, party, or interested group with enough signatures offers a 
districting map), and then voters choose which one they like best. The 
mechanics of creating a map would be left up to the ones doing the 
suggesting, subject to the normal rules of contiguous districts and 
equal populations. (For the record, I do like the average distance to 
center method, as well as any method that generates centroidal Voronoi 
tessellations).

Once the district maps were created, voters could choose between 
different districting maps for the entire state,*or* (since we have 
cheap computers and printers) each voting precinct might just vote 
between maps of the proposed district they would vote in-- a Republican 
might think it's fine to have a weirdly gerrymandered Republican 
district elsewhere in the state, but may be less likely to vote to 
belong to one. The nice thing about the second method is that it would 
encourage groups to focus not only on a grand, statewide vision, but how 
the voters of each district view their own map. Plus, it would encourage 
groups to combine efforts on district maps that were clearly superior 
(two districting maps of California might be identical except for a half 
dozen districts), and focus their efforts on stressing the importance of 
their differences. ("The Green Party endorses the map created by the 
Democrats, except in districts 5-9, 17, and 22. And here is why our map 
is superior in those areas.") And voters could take into account 
geographic features, historical ties, driving distance, and other 
factors that are really hard to program, and even harder to legislate 
for without creating perverse incentives.

For added fun, voters could pick maps every two years, to be used for 
the following election. How is that for responsive politics?

As a side note, I actually lean to multi-member districts, or even a 
single universal at-large election -- people's political interests don't 
always follow neat geographical boundaries, and a Green in Texas might 
want to vote for someone who lives in San Francisco rather than a 
conservative Democrat in their own state.

Mike Rouse

PS I'm playing with a proxy-range PR system myself -- yes, PR^2 -- but I 
going through the EM archives to see if anyone proposed it first under 
another name. :) Using range ballots, it would take the most 
representative subgroup of candidates for a legislature of a certain 
size, and then give each winner voting power equal to the number of 
ballots that they had the highest score on among all the winning 
candidates. If that sounds in any way similar to another proposal, 
please send me links!

On 6/10/2011 9:35 AM, Warren Smith wrote:
> A preliminary web page on this topic is now available here
>
> http://rangevoting.org/TheorDistrict.html
>
> Your comments would be appreciated to help me improve this page.
>
> [There is a much longer scientific paper in the works by me&  others
> on this, but it unfortunately has been in the works several years
> already :(  I'm too lazy and/or bit off
> more than could chew.]
>

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