Fighting Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is the art of drawing single-seat districts so that one party's voting strength is used more efficiently than a rival's. Typically, a majority party arranges several 55-45 districts for itself for each lonely 90-10 ghetto granted to "the enemy".

To achieve such segregation, tortured district boundaries often end up looking like animals with legs (e.g. salamander). A 19th century politico named Gerry became (in)famous for some of the earliest such districts in America. Gerry + salamander => gerrymander.

When it can be enacted, such exploitation can convert one election's simple majority in the electorate into the next election's supermajority in the legislature, perhaps able to modify its state's Constitution to its own advantage. Thus, gerrymandering can most undemocratically enable a simple majority to arrogate to itself new powers that only a supermajority (or virtual consensus) of the people should properly be allowed to grant.

Failing that, if a once-majority faction's popularity slips, gerrymandering can prop up a 40% electoral minority into a narrow legislative majority that might continue the cycle in the next redistricting. Therefore, gerrymandering can most undemocratically entrench an unpopular minority faction long after it should have been swept from power.

In short, gerrymandering, along with other electoral exploits, cuts at the heart of democracy (enlightened representative government by universal consent of the governed).

Dynamics

Fortunately, both the calculations and process of gerrymandering are prone to systemic weaknesses that can inhibit their abuse:

• Before a faction can draw manifestly unfair districts, it must control all decision points in the process. This usually means having absolute majorities in one or two legislative chambers and perhaps an executive office (e.g. governor) as well. This is generally only possible with a two-party duopoly (the legislative side of the two-party system), so gerrymandering is yet another harmful extension of America's false dichotomy. Therefore, any electoral reform that undermines two-party hegemony (a worthy goal in itself) also inhibits gerrymandering, so fighting one probably means fighting the other. Further, any redistricting reform that puts a decision point beyond reach of political insiders would likewise reduce the risk of gerrymandering.
  
  
• Voter exploitation depends on having clear divisions in the electorate that can be analyzed. The clearest such division is the electoral side of the two-party racket caused by the "bandwagon effect" inherent in our wretched first-past-the-post plurality voting system. The gerrymandering "problem" remains solvable (to our detriment) as long as we are driven into such clear constituencies that can then be manipulated. If voters were freed to express their complex maze of interlocking interests, then gerrymandering would become impossible to analyze for more than one issue or theme at a time (if that). Therefore, any electoral reform that eliminates the "bandwagon effect" (a worthy goal in itself) would also undermine gerrymandering.
  
  
• Gerrymandering depends on knowing what the clear divisions are. This is why so many states require voters to register by party: so that legislators have enough data to disenfranchise large minorities. Therefore, prohibiting politicians from extracting that data would reduce their ability to divide and conquer the electorate.
  
  
• Since redistricting generally occurs only once every ten years, voting patterns must be stable on a comparable time scale for gerrymandering to have value. If voting patterns shifted with every election, then gerrymandering would be useless and could even backfire. Since plurality voting (magnified by a few other rules) perpetuates the artificial two-party trap from election to election, we currently suffer just such immobility. We are nearly stationary prey for map makers to corral even while they give us the illusion of competitive elections. Therefore, electoral changes that liberate voters and their freedom of association will combat gerrymandering and electoral exploitation in general.
  

If state constitutions were modified to exploit gerrymandering's weaknesses along the opportunities I've revealed, then it (and two-party tyranny) would vanish like a bad dream.

Solutions

Supermajority

Requiring legislative supermajorities to redistrict would reduce the chance for any one faction to control all decision points. Unfortunately, State legislatures often have so much difficulty agreeing on new district lines that requiring a supermajority might be impractical.

Independent Redistricting Commission

Even better than making control difficult is to remove it altogether. Just breaking the feedback loop between redistricting and the politicians elected therefrom reduces tyranny somewhat. Going further and deliberately balancing a commission can in practice come close to proportional representation (at least between the presumed two majority parties). Sometimes, miracle of miracles, a commission even produces some competitive districts.

Mandatory Referendum

Referendum is the ultimate in decision point removal. However, the electorate at large can't afford to devote full-time attention and energy to analyzing the pros and cons of very many complex decisions, so referendum should be invoked only sparingly, like when a conflict of interest exists between our representatives' personal ambitions and their public duties. I think that redistricting is one of those decisions, so a referendum would be in order. It could work something like this:

Have a separate referendum for each set of districts (US House, state senate, other state chamber). For each set, allow the governor and each legislator (co)sponsor one and only one legitimate (population balanced) redistricting plan. Require each such plan to be referred to the state's voters at large. Optionally, allow voters to add their own (population balanced) plans via initiative petition.

For each plan, show a map of the district borders and list how many voters voted for each gubernatorial candidate in each proposed district in the last general election. Have voters vote up or down on each plan. For each set of districts, adopt the one plan garnering the greatest number of favorable votes.

I expect only a handful of plans for each set of districts, each having many cosponsors. The winner in each referendum will probably be a plan that neither favors nor shafts any particular faction. Voters may even favor plans that offer competitive districts, which are more likely to be drawn by outsiders and qualified by petition.

Perimeter Formulae

Tighten each district's ratio between perimeter and area, and map makers would have less maneuvering room to skew representation. Unfortunately, that won't stop them from trying.

Approval Voting (AV)

Until it is tried on a large scale, I can't prove that AV completely neutralizes gerrymandering. However, I have many reasons to expect AV to hit multiple points described above:

• AV liberates voters to vote for as many candidates as they please, obliterating the bandwagon effect, and very quickly replacing the two-party system into a multi-party free for all. The first effect of this would be to hopelessly muddy the waters for any map maker hoping to slice and dice the electorate.
  
  
• On top of that, by allowing voters to approve of multiple candidates from multiple parties, AV obscures the informational value of party registration. Therefore, even if we allow such institutionalized corruption to continue, the map makers become less certain of how each voter will respond to unknown future candidates' peculiar and unpredictable policy mixes. Gerrymandering becomes hopelessly complex.
  
  
• If we reduce map makers to analyzing past votes, then AV obscures the meaning of those too. A precinct may have voted for a free-market candidate recently, but it may have been because of other issues (or charisma). With many viable candidates in many races, it will be very difficult for map makers to glean the meaning of individual votes and project a ten year advantage to gerrymandering with any clarity.
  
  
• And furthermore, if each legislature is a sea of shifting coalitions, then gerrymandering becomes impractical. One needs a goose-stepping majority to enact such abuses of power. Even now, merely having a bicameral legislature is often enough to disrupt an attempt. Fragmenting each chamber into many minority caucuses would practically eliminate their ability to conspire against the electorate even if they could figure out how to draw the lines to some advantage. Within a legislative body, various coalitions would still arise, but they'd be realigning on each issue, probably rendering such coalitions too ephemeral to agree on gerrymandered redistricting. District lines drawn to emphasize one side of one issue would scramble the demographics on many other issues. On which issue would a gerrymanderer bias the electorate? Outside the US, parliamentary coalitions sharing an interest in keeping a government in power may be a little more stable, but see Italy's history for the limitations on that motivation.
  
  
• Since AV can efficiently choose a winner from any number of similar and dissimilar candidates, it allows us to eliminate primaries without suffering the spoiler effect.

Nonpartisan Electoral Rules

Combined, these go a long way toward cracking the two-party "system" and therefore liberating voters from tyrants:

1. First, blind the map makers by taking away party registration. Well, that wouldn't totally blind them, but it would reduce the amount of information (ammunition) that we put into their hands to use against us. It's also the first step in erecting a complete wall of separation between Factionalism and Statism, re-establishing freedom of associating and freedom of speech.
   
   
2. Second, eliminate primary elections. Those who worry about the spoiler effect should read up on Approval Voting.
   
   
3. Third, remove party labels from ballots.

Parties would still exist and endorse candidates. I would never propose anything as oppressive of free association and free speech as what commonly passes for "nonpartisan" in many Counties and municipalities. However, I would leave political parties to their own devices for admitting members, endorsing candidates, and communicating those endorsements to voters.

The effect of this separation is indirect yet profound: Once political parties are divorced from the formal electoral process, then the government can no longer justify regulating them and their free speech. Abolishing such abhorrent restrictions removes an entire arsenal of weapons by which America's two major parties entrench themselves in power (both singly and in combination).

Further, If ballots are blind to party affiliation, then access thereto shouldn't depend on it. Therefore, separation of party and state should also abolish outrageous ballot access rules whereby powers that be violate equal protection of the law to grant special privileges to themselves and heap unfair expense upon outside challengers.

Conclusion

The founding fathers may have structured the government with internal checks and balances, but they left legislators entirely too much unfettered latitude to corrupt the electoral process, thereby undermining their elegant structure. If We the People truly want a more perfect union, then we need to finish the structure by defining a few checks and balances connecting the government to its electoral foundation.

Copyright 2003-2008 by Jeffry R. Fisher: Permission is granted to reproduce this article in whole, but only in combination with attribution, the original title, the original URL, and this copyright notice.