Gerrymandering is Bad Because Basing Political Representation Purely on the Geography of Subdivisions is a Bad Idea

Gerrymandering is in the news. As I'm sure my readers realize, cutting up a territory in (allegedly) weird ways is arguably anti-democratic, whoever does it. I inserted "allegedly" above, because what constitutes a fair, non-weird district is controversial. Ensuring, for example, that Blacks get as few representatives as possible is clearly discriminatory but whether doing that to rich people or bookworms or landtaxers should also be prohibited may not seem so clear. And suppose that sort of unfortunate outcome happens by mistake, say as the result of a disinterested computer program making its cuts "randomly":  is that still a type of unfair discrimination that should be illegal? It does seem obvious that whether or not gerrymandering to maximize the number of representatives belonging to a particular political party is (a) illegal, or (b) a response to what the other party has already done; there's a good chance that it is destructive of the fundamental tenet of both state and Federal democracy that requires that everybody's vote be treated equally. Unfortunately, it seems always to be quite difficult to prove that a principle of that type has been violated.#

Consider a hypothetical country (I'll call it "Simplistan) that, like the U.S., is a Federal polity; i.e., it contains a bunch of subsidiary  jurisdictions, divided geographically. In fact, let's say it also has 50 of them, called "provinces." Suppose Simplistan is also similar to the U.S. in that it separates--at least to some extent--its executive and legislative functions on both province and national levels. But there's a fundamental difference too. While many scholars think the number of representatives in the U.S. Congress has become insufficient over time because of population growth, Simplistan sees things differently. Its constitution doesn't consider having provinces send a lot of representatives to its national legislature (its "Federal Assembly") to be a good thing. 

You see, Simplistan's founders believed that the more legislators available to muck around with lawmaking, the worse the result will be. Not only would the process be more inefficient and expensive in their view, but the result will be more confused. Therefore, while their founding mothers agreed that every citizen in each province must be represented in their Assembly, they also insisted that, so long as the executive in each state is handled by a different individual, one national representative is best. 

Obviously, Simplistanians can't have any problems with gerrymanders because their provinces aren't cut up at all. It might seem though, that their country is terribly undemocratic, because it sends the same number of representatives (viz., 1) from each province, whether that subsidiary jurisdiction is big or small, densely populated or mostly forest. As suggested, it seems undemocratic to give each province one vote in the Assembly if some provinces are much more populous than others, because authentic democracy requires that each resident--and so each vote of the general populous be treated equally. 

Both the majority of Simplistanianls and their Constitution recognize this fundamental principle of democracy, but instead of handling it by having the more populous provinces send more representatives, they weight the authority of all the representatives in their Assembly. The more populous the province, the more vote-weight its representative gets in Assembly activities. 

So, every few years there is an election is Simplistan in which each province elects one Executive and one Assemblyperson. The math here is unsurprisingly simple, and it would almost make for a good arrangement if one individual were actually capable of reflecting the views of hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions!--of constituents. And even if the Assembly members were afforded large staffs in sizes that also reflect the number of votes received (and each member were also some incredible combination of deep human empathy and AI-likr comprehensiveness and speed), there would be a remaining problem. Assembly activities don't consist solely of voting and constituent service. There's also speechmaking, committee work, and various other sorts of deliberative activities. It would be extremely difficult--if not impossible--to mete out all of the various types of "legislative authority" in anything like mathematically appropriate bundles. 

The Simplistanians ignore that difficulty, and its a crucial omission. It's hard to deny that democratic representation involves other aspects besides ensuring the ultimate equality of the populace in vote weights. Thus, in a democratic polity in which more than one representative is sent from various subsidiary districts, even if the clever Simplistanian trick of weighting votes in the Assembly by the number of votes received by the representative voting is utilized, gerrymandering will be a problem whenever geography is the sole determinant of who is in which political district. So, if Simplistan were to decide to start sending more than one representative from any of its provinces, if the subsidiary jurisdictions are geographically determined and exactly one winner represents all the voters in each of these districts, the precise placement of the district lines will have immense  effects on who gets elected. 

Because of this problem, democratic theorists have long pushed either for neutral--rather than partisan-oriented--methods for cutting up subsidiary federal entities, or for replacing single, winner-take-all geographical sub-districts with multi-winner arrangements. As I have indicated in a number of blog entries here, I think Approval Voting is best for single-winner elections, and, to their eternal credit, Simplistanians use that method to elect both their Executives and their Assemblypersons. 

In my view, however, Approval is not a particularly good choice for use in elections with multiple winners. Fortunately, there are a bunch of good alternatives. Some scholars prefer ranked choice voting. Others push for a form of party list or other type of Proportional Representation. I think a number of these would be excellent alternatives to our current system, but, FWIW, I  believe that the simplest and best choice is what's called the Single, Non-Transferable Vote ('SNTV'). 

Under SNTV, a procedure that can be used only where there are to be multiple winners, every resident gets exactly one vote, and if there are to be, say, ten representatives elected, all and only the top ten vote-getters win seats. What could be simpler?

           

SNTV has received a ton of criticism over the years, though, and I don't deny that the objections have been on point. The scheme has caused sometimes sever problems in various countries that have used it. The thing is, all those defects have resulted from the fact that the jurisdictions in question have failed to understand what the Simplistanians grasp: for democratic principles to be enforced, the votes of all representatives in any Federal legislature must be weighted by the votes received by such legislators when they were elected. If that principle had been in place, none of the problems resulting from past uses of SNTV would have occurred.# 

In a word, cutting up geographical territories is bound to be undemocratic, whether intentionally so or not, and whether or not the (allegedly) weird lines happen to be produced on a "first strike" or retaliatory basis. After all, fighting fire with fire will almost always result in more people getting burned. The only solution is to get rid of geographical, single-winner legislative districts entirely.

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#For an interesting recent discussion of whether federalism can be expected to provide protection against a national autocracy that engages in deliberately discriminatory gerrymandering--or, perhaps, will just make things less democratic at home, see James Gardner, "Can Federalism Protect Subnational Liberal Democracy from Central Authoritarianism?" here. (As usual, I object to the definition of "populism" as a necessarily anti-democratic force in the paper, but I suppose that's pretty much to be expected at this point.)

##See Chapter 8 of my book for a discussion of both the historical shortcomings of SNTV and my claim that the problems it has no doubt engendered would never have occurred if the authority of individual representatives in the legislatures to which they have been elected had been weighted by the votes they received in those elections.