A bit of thinking, and a bit of personal history.
I see no value in splitline.
. It happily mixes city and rural and suburbs - city and rural
each should be kept together, as should suburbs, though suburbs fit
with either of the first two.
. It happily mixes new collections of people, giving them little
opportunity to get together and work together.
1990 - NY-28 includes Kimgston on the Hudson, Ithaca on the Finger
Lakes, and Owego where I live. FAR from compact.
1992 - NY-26 inherits above NY-28 description. Assemblyman Hinchey
from near Kingston is completing 18 years in Albany and gets elected
to Congress.
2002 - NY-22 inherits above NY-28 description. How tightly can a
waist be bound? Near Nichols NY-22 northern boundary, on the
Susquehanna River, is less than 5 miles from PA.
. Congressman Hinchey, completing 10 years, is reelected.
2012 - Hinchey is completing 20 years. NY will have two less
congressmen. NY's habit is to keep current districts, amended as
needed for census results, so what to do?
. NYC area needs to lose one and a scandal leaves nothing to save
in NY-9 - so dump that one.
. NY-26 is having a special election, so that seems like a good
prospect. Hochul's win makes her deserve a full term, so look
elsewhere.
Dave Ketchum
On Jun 14, 2011, at 10:33 AM, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org
) wrote:
I think Justin Levitt's view of optimal districting, is basically
this.
(Although perhaps this is a caricature? I'm not trying to caricature,
I'm just trying to present just an honest picture of what, as far as I
can tell JL thinks -- but I'm only going by his emails, not his paper
"weighing the potential of citizen redistricting" which he emailed me
the pdf of 2 times, but both times my computer refused to open it
claiming file was invalid/corrupted etc. Can anybody else obtain/read
that paper? Perhaps if you can convert it to postscript it'd fix it?)
Justin Levitt's view as described by WDS:
There should be some committee of beneficent people, unbiased by party
politics, who draw the districts in such a way as to help everybody,
because they have beneficent "purposes" in mind. These people should
not care about how the map looks, they should care about what purposes
it accomplishes. (JL made the analogy of "Susan Boyle," a singer who,
he claimed, did not have a very good visual appearance, but sung well,
and, JL said, that proves appearance does not matter, what matters is
results.) JL disparages mathematical approaches, because with them
the human element is sacrificed, and because they concentrate on
appearance, not -- what really matters -- results.
These beneficent people need to cluster people with common interests
into common districts, so that their representatives will be able "to
know what they represent." But what exactly is a "common interest?"
What qualifies, and what does not? Does "lovers of feathered animals
who also like
mining gravel" count as a "common interest"? Does "likes reality TV
shows" count? And what if you are BOTH Black, AND a Commie Sympathizer
(2 "interests" simultaneously) but can only be located in one
district? Then what? Well, the beneficent people will decide those
things. They're kind of like your big brother, helping everybody to
overcome those annoying real-world problems to get good results.
What will be the net effect of this? Well, it will be essentially
this. That committee
will decide (a) what are the top issues of the day and (b) who wins on
each issue. But they will
not have total power on (b) because gerrymandering is only capable of
making a 26% minority win a 2-way choice, not a 24% minority. So
subject to those limitations they'll effectively BE the government.
So then the question arises: how are they to be elected, or appointed,
or randomly chosen, or what? It's a bit difficult to elect them,
because almost all people do not even know who even a single such
committee member is, and also do not know what each one did and how
each one affected the district maps, and even with maximum possible
effort to make the process transparent (which, as far as I know, has
never happened in the prior history of the universe, but I suppose it
could) it would still be very hard for Joe Voter to understand+know
that. They could be appointed, in which case you can be damn sure
the appointer will have a pretty good idea how each appointee will
behave, and now this appointer will effectively be the government. Of
course the committee-candidates could try to overcome that by lying to
him. Finally, they could be randomly chosen, in which case the main
decisions made by our government will basically be decided by dice
rolls. Perhaps the best such system would be something like the way
juries are selected -- random selection followed by a deterministic
winnowing conducted by the legislature. In that case I daresay the
committee would be biased to try to help some legislative majority
keep their seats, but not as biased as if the legislature itself did
the districting; and there still will be a great deal of randomness
involved.
A committee member like Justin Levitt himself might have enormous
influence due to (let's say)
his comparative expertise at using computer district-drawing systems,
and his philosophy which
might differ considerably from the others' philosophies.
All this would, compared to the splitline algorithm, produce districts
at enormously higher cost in time and money (but still small compared
to the cost of the whole government) and based on
almost all prior history also usually worse by various mathematical
compactness measures. Some US states might get districted in quite
different ways than other states. As far as I know, JL concedes those
points, but still says the results will be better his way.
In particular, I think JL is under the impression that the civil
rights advances during the 1960s were due to gerrymandering intended
to create majority-black districts.
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