On Tuesday, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ordered that no remedy was necessary for the racist partisan gerrymander in Texas. The 5 conservative justices, including Kennedy, apparently believe it’s likely that when the case is heard, they’ll overturn the lower court’s finding that Texas engaged in illegal racial packing and cracking (that is, deliberately diluting minority voting power by making a few districts with far more than enough minority voters to win, and many more with not quite enough minority voters to win).
This order is not just anti-Democratic, it’s anti-democratic. For 19 of the last 23 years, Republicans have controlled the House of Representatives, the exception being the backlash against George Bush’s at-the-time-jawdropping misrule. They’ve also cemented one-party rule in more and more and more states: they control both houses of the legislature in 32, have actual veto-proof majorities in 17 of those, and hold governorships in 33.
In both Congress and state houses, gerrymandering is a key part of that dominance. In 2012, Democrats got more votes than Republicans in the US House, but Republicans got more seats. Even when Republicans won more votes in the two elections since then, they still got over 5% more than their proportional share of seats. That could easily happen again in 2018 if we’re not sufficiently energized.
Gerrymandering is not the only tool in the Republican bag of dirty tricks and unfair advantages. Nearly-empty Western states give them a disproportional edge in the Senate (which is why giving statehood to DC and a clear option of statehood to PR needs to be high on the Democratic agenda for next time we take Congress). They blatantly stole Garland’s SCOTUS seat and gave it to Gorsuch. Republicans have been doing their best at voter suppression of Democratic groups in various states, and with the Kobach commission, they’re trying to take this national. Right-to-mooch (aka right-to-work) and other anti-union laws have directly attacked Democratic funding and organizing, while post-citizens-united dark money has been funnelled into shadowy PACs. And the shadowiest of all is run from Moscow, with a demonstrated propensity for illegal hacking.
But of all of these unfair advantages, gerrymandering is one of the largest and most consistent. It may not feel like that right now, given that a nationwide swing of under 1%, or a targeted swing far less than that, would have given us President Hillary Clinton. But the fact is, gerrymandering can impact 5% of seats or more, election after election, while the largest estimates of the impact of any one of those other factors would struggle to reach 3%.
So, what’s the solution to gerrymandering?
There are two main ways to fight it: we can fight it piecemeal, or we can cut it off at the root.
I think attacking it at the root is the right answer in the long run, and below I’ll mostly focus on that. But we should still fight it piecemeal, so here are a few of those smaller battles:
- There’s been progress on statistical ways to measure gerrymandering, and court cases on that basis have some promise. Kennedy came down on the wrong side on this for Texas, but he’s not completely a lost cause. Still, if we lose Kennedy or RBG, this would become pointless.
- Initiatives and referenda for nonpartisan redistricting.
The problem is that better redistricting isn’t enough. Even districts that are drawn without partisan intent tend to favor Republicans, because Democrats are naturally “packed” (in urban cores) and “cracked” (in suburbs).
Which brings us to the ultimate solution: proportional representation. Use a voting method that guarantees that no more than a small minority of votes are wasted, rather than the majority that are today. This means changes to ballot format and/or counting process.
There are several possible proportional representation methods. Any one of them would end gerrymandering, period. So how do we choose which one to adopt?
The methods used by other countries (such as Germany’s “MMP” or Ireland’s “STV”) are very good overall, but still have some downsides compared to our current voting method (usually called FPTP, first past the post). These downsides are minor in the grand scheme of things, but reform opponents would blow them out of proportion, and I think it would be hard to pass these reforms on a national level.
But, using more modern principles of mechanism design, it’s possible to create proportional methods that have basically no downsides compared to FPTP. One such method is PLACE voting (it stands for Proportional, Locally-Accountable, Candidate Endorsement voting, but you just call it PLACE). This method has simple ballots, individual accountability, and local representation, just like FPTP; but it fixes the disproportionality, without needing redistricting. It also encourages higher turnout and would not lead to excessive party fragmentation.
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I’m going to explain PLACE below, but before I do, I want to tell you a story about my own experience with voting reform. (In doing so, I’m going to make it easy for anybody who wanted to dox me, but please don’t.)
A few years ago, an organized group of a few hundred alt-right science fiction fans (eventually two related subgroups, who called themselves the “sad puppies” and “rabid puppies”; I’ll just call them “puppies”) tried to take over the Hugo Award nomination process. Thousands of fans vote on these every year, but since they typically spread their nominations over a wide number of possible works, and the puppies were concentrating their nominations on just a few, in 2015 the puppies managed to sweep several nominations categories.
Understandably, the regular fans were upset. They had the numbers to ensure that puppy nominees wouldn’t actually get any awards, but that would mean giving no award at all in various categories. They were looking for a solution.
That’s where I came in. Though this problem doesn’t sound very much like gerrymandering, the solution is actually the same: proportional voting methods. If the minority of puppy nominators could only get a proportional minority of puppy nominees in each category, there would have been no need to give any rocket trophies to Noah Ward (no award). With my long-time expertise on voting methods (I’ve been an activist on this issue for over 2 decades, I’m a board member at the nonpartisan voting nonprofit electology.org, and I’m a PhD candidate in statistics from Harvard with a thesis on voting), I helped them design a proportional method for their nominations, now known as E Pluribus Hugo, which used the same ballot format they were already used to.
Now, this is quite a sophisticated community as a whole, and one that’s pretty much by definition interested in new ideas. Even without my help, some of them were already thinking in terms of improved voting methods, and I’m sure that one way or another they would have addressed the issue without me. But I could help design something that would work with a minimum of disruption. After passing votes in 2015 and 2016, E Pluribus Hugo became part of the Hugo rules. This year was the first year it was used, and the puppies got no more than one nominee per category.
I learned some important lessons from that process:
- People are, understandably, suspicious of vote-counting rules they don’t fully understand. And there are plenty of science-fiction fans who didn’t really understand or even want to understand the EPH voting method; despite what you might think, that community has as many math-phobes as any other.
- But even those who were initially suspicious could be convinced.
- Two big factors in convincing people were a familiar ballot and voting process, and simulated results from previous years. The counting can be a magic black box to some people, as long as they can see that they like the results.
Now, the USA is over ten thousand times bigger than the World Science Fiction Society. A national proportional representation reform is going to be a lot more work. But I think that those lessons still apply.
We don’t have to convince 51% of American voters that this is a good idea. We just have to convince about 55% of them to vote Democratic (enough to overcome Republicans’ unfair advantages), and then convince Democratic politicians that it’s both a good idea and specifically in their interest. Obviously that takes grassroots support, but if just a third of Democratic voters support this and the other two thirds are neutral, this can pass.
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So. How does PLACE voting work? Like FPTP, it uses districts, and ensures one winner per district. But it does so in a way that ensures proportionality, wastes fewer votes, and represents minority groups while still encouraging “big tent” parties.
- Before the election, candidates can officially endorse each other. From the perspective of a given candidate, that divides the other candidates into 4 tiers: same party endorsed, same party not endorsed, other party endorsed, and other party not endorsed. (Independent candidates could use the same number tiers without considering party.) If they endorse members of the same party, they must endorse at least 2; this slightly discourages fake candidates who are running purely as vote-funnels.
- In the election, voters either choose a candidate from their district, or write in one from another district. Write-ins are done using error-resistant codes from a list available in each voting booth. Voters may also simply vote for a party or mark their ballot as non-transferrable, those these latter options are probably not optimal for most.
- Each ballot is transformed into a preference order, using the endorsements of the chosen candidate, combined with the initial tallies. (Except for ballots marked as non-transferrable.) Within each tier of endorsement, preferences are ordered by initial vote tally. Say you voted for candidate A, who had endorsed B, C, D, and E within their party, was in the same party as F, G, H, and I, and had endorsed J, K, L, and M outside their party. Say also that the initial tallies were in order of English letter frequency (more votes for the letters with the lowest scrabble score). Your filled-in preferences would be A, E>D>C>B, I>H>F>G, L>M>K>J.
- All but the strongest candidates in each district are eliminated. Usually that leaves 2 per district, but occasionally it will be 1 or 3 if that’s how many strong candidates there are in a district. See the full rules if you’re curious about exactly when that would happen. The overall effect of this step is to ensure that each district is happy with its main candidate and to discourage smaller splinter parties.
- Votes from the eliminated candidates are transferred, and the elimination/transfer process continues until all winners are chosen. This uses a well-studied process known as “Single Transferrable Vote” which ensures that each winner gets a full quota of votes with no more than 1 quota wasted overall. So if there were 9 districts in a state, each winner would have at least 10% of the statewide vote (90% of the average district), with less than 10% wasted.
- Each winning party splits any districts that they did not win as “extra territory” for their winning candidates. Thus even if you are in the minority in your district and so the local winner is from a party you hate, you will be a constituent from the “extra territory” for some winner from a party you support more, and they will listen to your petitions.
This method has several advantages.
- Ballot format is basically familiar, and quite simple. The only possibly new aspects are a write-in slot and a (relatively unimportant, except for constitutional reasons) “do not delegate” option.
- By the same token, it’s easy to simulate the result of past elections, assuming that voters would have voted similarly to the actual election. This can reassure both voters and politicians that the results are reasonable — basically the same as FPTP, only more proportional. Note that since gerrymandering tends to favor Republicans overall, a more-proportional result will also be more Democratic.
- Candidates with a particular connection to a particular community or set of issues could pull in votes from across the state. This would encourage higher turnout and increase minority representation. Even if a particular candidate like that got not enough (or significantly more than enough) votes to win, any votes which didn’t go to elect them would be transferred to other candidates they’d endorsed. Thus they could use those endorsements to make sure that their votes continued to support candidates sympathetic to their community or interest group. Thus, the voting method itself would help minority groups organize and strengthen the voice of their leaders.
- Representation is still local, and this method is compatible with all existing US law (including the 1967 federal statute requiring single-member districts).
- Candidates are individually accountable to voters, and voters in practice have the power to throw out even well-ensconced party insiders.
These advantages above are all on top of the basic advantages of any proportional method: no gerrymandering and fewer wasted votes.
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PLACE voting is a very new proposal. The basic ideas have been around for a long time (mostly about a hundred years), but PLACE-like combinations of those ideas have been around for only about 5 years, and PLACE itself is just months old. So it’s worth mentioning a few older proportional representation methods too.
- In mixed member proportional (MMP) methods like Germany’s, only some winners are chosen by district, while the rest are chosen nationally to even out the party proportions. This is a great method, but it would be hard to make it work with our federal system (different states of different sizes), candidates are less personally-accountable than in PLACE, and voters might not like having two different kinds of representative.
- In single transferrable vote (STV), super-districts of around 5 seats each are drawn up, and voters rank the candidates in their district in preference order. It has good proportionality and accountability, but ballots and voting are very complex, and vote-tallying must be centralized (which decreases security).
These methods would both be good if they could pass. But since they would represent a bigger change from FPTP than PLACE would, they’d be harder to pass. In particular, incumbent Democrats would probably be nervous about losing their seat because of the change, something that simulations show would not be likely under PLACE.
Still, it’s worth mentioning that Rep Beyer (D-VA) has introduced a bill to require all states to use STV for US House elections. This is obviously not going to pass in a Republican congress, but it’s good to start the conversation. I think that he should look at proposing PLACE next year.
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I’ve written this diary from my perspective as a Democratic voter. I think that ending gerrymandering could net Democrats an extra 5% in the US House and most state legislatures, and that the additional turnout prompted by this method could give a few percent more. But I do want to point out that I think that proportional representation is a win/win for far more than just Democratic interests.
- Third-parties could win significant numbers of seats, though they’d still have to come in at least second-place in some district to do so. Even when they didn’t win, their endorsements could be a key factor in deciding which major-party candidates won, thus ensuring that their issues got attention.
- Moderate republicans would get candidates they actually liked, instead of being stuck either in Democratic districts or in Republican districts where the crazies rule the primary.
- Independents would have more reason to vote, and their votes would have a visible impact, instead of getting hidden in the two-party total.
- Negative campaigning would be discouraged. If local candidate A starts throwing mud at local candidate B, disgusted voters are free to ignore them both and choose an out-of-district candidate to vote for.
So I want to re-emphasize that my organization, electology.org, is non-partisan. I think voting reform is clearly good for Democrats, but we’re not the only ones it’s good for.
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TL;DR: Proportional representation can fix gerrymandering once and for all, and PR reform is feasible.
Links for more info:
electology.org (primarily focused on single-winner reform, related but not the same)
EndFPTP reddit and EndFPTP slack channel: like-minded discussion and organization