"Simple question" What does "not-gerrymandered" look like?

[Starlight]

I turn around and say, if you are going to fight against it, you have to define the goal. Then you have to defend that goal.

An aside: If you're not already aware of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem you may want to read about it. Basically, when you want to combine a set of people's preferences into an outcome (as election systems try to do, but also economic systems do and so do various other systems in society), there are a number of principles that most people agree that such a system ideally ought to satisfy. I suggest you read about some of those principles in the link above if you're not aware of them.


Back on your subject of fair election outcomes, the goal with respect to lack-of-gerrymandering is to have fair elections and representative outcomes. I don't think that's in need of much defending. It's commonly expressed in the idiom "one person one vote" which represents the idea that no person's vote should have any more effect on the outcome than any other person's. One person's vote ought not to be worth 10 other people's vote because of the state they live in, nor because of the district they live in or the way that district is drawn - that would be against that fundamental principle of democracy where every person's vote ought to matter equally.

If you look at a couple of pieces of research into gerrymandering you quickly see this principle in play with this words used. e.g. This one is labelled "Making Everyone's Vote Count: Computer Detection of Gerrymandering". The concern expressed in that title is that some people's votes aren't counting as much as other people's - i.e. the "one person one vote" democratic principle is being violated. In this paper published last year the abstract makes clear what the concerning principle is: "Partisan gerrymandering is a major cause for voter disenfranchisement in United States. ...[a mathematical way to measure this is] via the so-called “efficiency gap” that computes the absolute difference of wasted votes between two political parties in a two-party system" So they are trying to minimize "voter disenfranchisement" by minimizing the "wasted vote" differential. Again this is the same "one person one vote" aka "everyone's votes should count equally in determining the result" principle.

[CivilDiscourse]

An aside: If you're not already aware of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem you may want to read about it. Basically, when you want to combine a set of people's preferences into an outcome (as election systems try to do, but also economic systems do and so do various other systems in society), there are a number of principles that most people agree that such a system ideally ought to satisfy. I suggest you read about some of those principles in the link above if you're not aware of them.


Back on your subject of fair election outcomes, the goal with respect to lack-of-gerrymandering is to have fair elections and representative outcomes. I don't think that's in need of much defending. It's commonly expressed in the idiom "one person one vote" which represents the idea that no person's vote should have any more effect on the outcome than any other person's. One person's vote ought not to be worth 10 other people's vote because of the state they live in, nor because of the district they live in or the way that district is drawn - that would be against that fundamental principle of democracy where every person's vote ought to matter equally.

If you look at a couple of pieces of research into gerrymandering you quickly see this principle in play with this words used. e.g. This one is labelled "Making Everyone's Vote Count: Computer Detection of Gerrymandering". The concern expressed in that title is that some people's votes aren't counting as much as other people's - i.e. the "one person one vote" democratic principle is being violated. In this paper published last year the abstract makes clear what the concerning principle is: "Partisan gerrymandering is a major cause for voter disenfranchisement in United States. ...[a mathematical way to measure this is] via the so-called “efficiency gap” that computes the absolute difference of wasted votes between two political parties in a two-party system" So they are trying to minimize "voter disenfranchisement" by minimizing the "wasted vote" differential. Again this is the same "one person one vote" aka "everyone's votes should count equally in determining the result" principle.

Here's the problem. The efficiency Gap measurement has it's own problem. It assumes that competitive districts are the goal. But, that falls flat in an unbalanced state. Lets take Wyoming as an example. 57% Republican, 25% Democrat. 18% undecided. The state republicans have a 2:1 advantage over democrats. By all accounts, with a 2:1 advantage, republicans should win pretty much any race. The only way to create a competitive race (i.e. efficiency gap minimization) would be to artificially inflate the strength of democrats somewhere. They have to find some-way to make that 25% of voters artificially stronger in the face of the 50+ republicans. Why does that make sense?