Speaking of Redistricting...

I've been playing with an idea (4.00 / 1)

that districts should be cut in such a way as to balance urban, suburban and rural constituencies to as equal a degree as possible within as many districts as possible.

Certainly the legislators should not design their own districts. That is just bad in any way you look at it.

Often it is thought that we should cut along county, city, town and neighborhood boundaries as best as we can.

However, those boundaries are often fairly arbitrary in and of themselves and in no way guarantee competitive districts or districts distributed in such a way as to reflect the electorate as a whole. In fact, Nate Silver at 538 made a very good case awhile back that it has a very disproportionate effect in lumping urban voters together and separating rural voters into their own districts. He made the case that this tends to favor Republicans to a greater degree then their numbers ought to provide. I think we see that clearly in our state senate districts.

Above and beyond the simple numbers though it occurred to me that by creating these non-competitive districts... wholly urban democratic strongholds and wholly rural republican strongholds... we enable these districts to elect extremists that don't have to worry about being too extreme and don't have to worry about the viewpoints of their opposites.

BY creating districts in which equal proportions of urban and rural (suburban as well but in particular urban and rural) voters are present a representative would have to consider the needs, wants and desires of both their rural and urban constituents. These districts would also likely be more competitive and therefore make for Representatives that are more responsive to their constituents. It would almost guarantee that no extremists would be elected in such districts and the moderate voters in the district would swing away from the extremist and throw them out of office.

It might cost us a few urban liberals but think of all the extremist republicans that would get tossed out of office and think of the rebirth of the moderate Republican. Yes, it would make for a Republican Party that is a stronger foe but it would be good all around to push the fringe element back onto the fringe where they belong rather than allowing them hold so much power by having so many Republican strongholds for them to base their power in.

Peace,

Andrew  

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by: Andrew C. White @ Tue May 04, 2010 at 18:42:04 PM UTC

Interesting ideas (4.00 / 2)

I always thought a publicly-transparent computer program could be designed to draw districts to take into account maximum competitiveness and alignment with municipal borders would be a good idea because it would completely remove the human element and thus any conflicts of interest

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by: Roatti @ Tue May 04, 2010 at 18:59:13 PM UTC

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There is no way to completely remove (4.00 / 1)

the human element. Someone has to program the computer and someone has to decide and agree upon the specs of the program.

And someone has to agree on who gets to do that agreeing on who gets to write the specs. :)

And so on....

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by: Andrew C. White @ Tue May 04, 2010 at 21:33:01 PM UTC

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I gotta disagree (4.00 / 2)

I think it's much better to have a legislature where some members are pushing urban needs, while others are supporting suburban causes, and still others backing rural requirements.

By mixing the districts, the odds are that very few people will truly represent rural needs, since in a mixed district the people with the experience to garner large numbers of votes will most likely come from the more densely populated areas.

I'd like to see Nate Silver's analysis, though; it may prove interesting.

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by: Dan Jacoby @ Tue May 04, 2010 at 19:08:34 PM UTC

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Two thoughts on that though (0.00 / 0)

one is that if a given legislator is only beholden to a particular constituency (urban, rural, suburban) then they have no incentive to compromise with their counterparts whereas if they are beholden in part to each constituency then they have a strong incentive to try and understand a given issue from all sides and try and craft legislation that best meets the needs of all their constituents.

Second, the idea is to balance to populations of urban and rural so that urban does not dominate rural as we have in several upstate districts now. If you take a mostly urban district and steal in some, but not enough, rural votes then yes, the rural voters get screwed. Ask some of our friends here from outside of Erie County how that works. The requirement here would be to balance the number of voters so that the rural folks can't be ignored.

As pointed out in a comment below, it was a 538 post but not one of Nate's. See the link below.

Peace,

Andrew

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by: Andrew C. White @ Tue May 04, 2010 at 21:26:49 PM UTC

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I can't quite see this working because (0.00 / 0)

while lots of us focus on the need for competitive races - and I completely agree with the need for more of them - the other aspect of this that has to be remembered for any plan to work over the long run is that people need to feel represented.

Your blending approach seems likely to me to leave a lot of voters and candidates confused about what exactly their district is, which issues need focus, and what kind of community it's supposed to be.

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by: simonstl @ Wed May 05, 2010 at 05:53:00 AM UTC

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I hear you (4.00 / 1)

and I'm not sure how to predict the effect but I'm looking at these well defined, hard core districts as being a big part of our current problems.

I wonder if that blending might actually be a good thing as it would require people coming together to understand the needs of different communities.

I don't know. But I do know that the current separation between communities, between urban and rural, between right and left, between have's and have not's, that we are experiencing is a big, big problem that needs a solution.

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by: Andrew C. White @ Wed May 05, 2010 at 12:55:37 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

The problem with contiguous compact districts (4.00 / 1)

I made a similar point drawing on that 538 post (not one by Nate Silver, btw) in a previous thread on redistricting.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com...

Yes, the basic argument is that when districts are drawn in a compact and contiguous manner, you end up packing all the urban liberals into a handful of districts. This tilts the so-called "fair" redistricting that goo goos like towards Republicans.

I'm not sure if I'm a big fan of creating each district as proportional as possible to the larger population of the state as you suggest. In a state like New York, you'd end up with no one representing the interests of rural voters. I'm not happy with what Aubertine did with the farm workers bill, but I have to say that it makes sense to have someone with power representing farmers in the state legislature. In an ideal world, there would be a large enough Democratic majority to overcome Aubertine's objections, but that could come with future redistricting.

What your post helps illustrate, however, is that just about every factor one uses to draw districts is somewhat arbitrary. Although I sympathize with the goo goos much of the time, they are often on a high horse with having an independent commission drawing compact contiguous districts. There is evidence that such a plan hurts capital "D" Democrats but I fail to see how it would be more lower-case "d" democratic.

I agree that voters should choose legislators and not the other way around, but I'm not convinced that compact contiguous is the way to go. Bravo for coming up with another reasonable idea. Does anyone else have another?

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by: ttwsglen @ Tue May 04, 2010 at 19:35:41 PM UTC

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Thanks for the link to 538 (0.00 / 0)

I was too lazy to go back and find it.

I'm not sure about targeting the proportionality of the districts to the state as a whole. That is one approach and it makes some amount of sense. However I am not sold on the idea as I think it has it's own problems. I'm not sure what to replace it with though either.

But at this point I am convinced that the "compact contiguous" guideline is a serious mistake that does nothing by itself to advance competitiveness or democracy.

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by: Andrew C. White @ Tue May 04, 2010 at 21:30:20 PM UTC

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