Gerrymandering & how to fix it

Wayne Dawkins wrote an article in The Guardian in October 2014 talking about Gerrymandering in the US.  The thing that struck me the most about the article is the title: In America, voters don’t pick their politicians. Politicians pick their voters.

The scary thing about Gerrymandering is that most people don’t know what it is, or why they should care.

Wikipedia defines gerrymandering as “a practice intended to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries.” The Wikipedia article has a great visual showing how, depending on how an area is carved-up into districts, there can be a big influence on who wins. Politicians, along with help from their parties draw voting district boundaries. They are doing that knowing a ton of information such as the political party affiliation and other information (such as race) about the voters. So how does that give them an advantage? Well, if they cram all of a particular type of voter into a single district, that changes the makeup of the other districts around it, and instead of each district being a “toss-up” (ie decided by the voters), they accept that they will lose a district, but will win several others.

So why should you care? Well, everyone’s complaining about gridlock in Washington, and this is one of the reasons that exists. If a politician represents a district that is very highly concentrated in voters for their party, there is virtually no risk that they will be voted-out at the next election. Without having to worry about being voted-out, they can pursue other agenda’s (or get nothing done at all) without fear of losing their next election. If their district was a “toss-up” district, that could go either-way during an election, they would be much more focused on the needs and wants and interests of their district, rather than the larger overarching goals of their political party.

So how do we fix it? Well right now the courts don’t seem to be winning the battle, and the polarization of politics in the US means that the politicians are certainly not going to fix it. My suggestion… use computers to draw district boundaries!  You get both political parties together, and you get them to agree on the rules and the priority of the rules, and you create algorithms based on those rules to draw the boundaries.  So what kind of rules? Well, first of all, it makes sense for people living in a similar area to be in the same district. Another rule could be that urban and rural areas could be kept together as much as possible, etc. It would also make sense to keep district boundaries within the same state, and keep the number of voters in each district as similar as possible. Note that I’m not talking about rules that are based on registered political party, ethnicity, etc…  If the rules had to be agreed-to by both political parties (and ideally an independent citizen-led watchdog group), we’d have many more districts that make sense, better represent the needs of the voters within them, and aren’t “fixed” to give one political party or another an advantage.

Maybe we could get back to a system that has the voters picking their politicians, instead of the other way around…