On 12/03/2012 02:00 PM, Jonathan Denn wrote:
Fair Redistricting or Ending Gerrymandering is always a great "grievance" among electoral reformers. But the "solution" is much more elusive. Do you folks ever venture into that area?
I'd prefer dissolving that particular problem to solving it. Use a multiwinner method like STV and the incentive to do gerrymandering pretty much disappears. The subsequent proliferation of parties makes it much harder to get a majority to support the gerrymander in the first place, too. Or give the task to a nonpartisan group or organization, such as the independent commissions in Canada or Australia.
It is *possible* to add restrictions, such as compactness minima, that make it harder to do gerrymandering, but that also limits the ability to make districts follow communities of interest. These restrictions make the process more blind, but not just blind to malicious tweaking. Again, I think it is better to remove the incentive, because that's what ultimately causes the gerrymandering.
(Norway uses party list PR and each highest-level administrative region is a district for the purposes of party list PR. These regions have different populations and so elect different numbers of MPs. Even if the incentive was there, gerrymandering would be practically impossible -- it would be like trying to gerrymander state boundaries to bias the Senate.)
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