<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff">
Quote: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:
separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Times New Roman';
font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal;
letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2;
text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal;
widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; font-size: medium;"><span
class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;"><i>"Democracy"
is voters choosing their leaders. But when politicians get to
draw their own districts, such as (<a
href="http://rangevoting.org/CrossCountryG.html">most</a><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>egregiously) in the
USA, the result is the opposite – the politicians choose their
voters.</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span><br>
<br>
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).<span
class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 16px;
font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal;
letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2;
text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal;
widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span"
style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"></span></span><br>
<br>
Once the district maps were created, voters could choose between
different districting maps for the entire state,<b> or</b> (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. <br>
<br>
For added fun, voters could pick maps every two years, to be used
for the following election. How is that for responsive politics?<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
Mike Rouse<br>
<br>
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!<br>
<br>
On 6/10/2011 9:35 AM, Warren Smith wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:BANLkTin0x5nCNAVrytRs-TV+Ey723OFKsg@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">A preliminary web page on this topic is now available here
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://rangevoting.org/TheorDistrict.html">http://rangevoting.org/TheorDistrict.html</a>
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.]
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
</body>
</html>