#the poll results and timing are convenient given my last series of posts

[beautifulpersonpeach]

So, Jimin won the nsfw poll I posted yesterday... so here’s something of a palette cleanser...

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(I might be telling on myself a bit here but something about Jimin's hands just gets me. How can his duality show even in his hands? Like, it's quite insane if you think about it. Anyway, moving on...)

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(mood break)

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...that's it for now. I'm waiting on one more anon before posting the blanks poll.

[politicsiscomplicated]

Sidestepping Gerrymandering Part 2 - Imagining Pennsylvania’s Multi-Member Districts

The legal fight over Pennsylvania's congressional districts is one of several that has been getting a lot of attention lately.  In Pennsylvania’s case, it is not only because the state’s districts are being challenged in court, but also because the Republican Party has proposed a set of new districts that have about as much partisan bias as the ones struck down by the state Supreme Court.  It's easy to accuse them of purely making an attempt to maintain partisan advantage, and they certainly are, but there is a second issue on top of that.  Those proposed districts are drawn following existing political boundaries like counties and cities, and these are likely to reflect communities of similar people.  Those communities can be combined in ways that result in more or less partisan bias, and the PA Republican Party appears to have achieved that here, but at the same time, if districts based on territorial lines that reflect actual communities still show partisan bias, that reflects other factors like voter self-sorting or regional culture or even people simply being led to support particular sets of policies based on what is actually applicable for their way of life (see, again, FiveThirtyEight’s Gerrymandering Project podcast and article series).

The main issue with Gerrymandering is that it subverts or ignores a large number of the state's voters, in some cases allowing a party to win a plain majority of votes in a state but none of that state's seats.  However, as I described in my previous post, proposed solutions to this only go partway towards reflecting the will of the voters.  Consider how this happens with districts like those the PA Republicans are proposing.  Say a particular county is on its own populous enough to be a district.  That seems like a nice convenient neutral way to draw the district!  But if that county because of its demographics or culture or urbanization happens to have a 60%-40% split between the major parties, except in the most extreme swings due to a party or candidate being highly unpopular*, whichever of those parties is the 40% is nearly guaranteed to have no say whatsoever in their district's politics unless they ally with a faction in the opposing party.

Now add on top of this another overlooked fact of our Congress: with temporary exceptions made for newly-admitted states, the number of voting members of the House has not changed in over a century, when the US had four fewer states and about the third the population (and maybe an eighth the number of eligible voters**) it does now.  This is another reason I suggested multi-member districts elected by single transferable vote in my previous post.  In such a system, although elections still won't quite be proportional***, it is possible for a district to elect members of more than one party (and indeed this sometimes happens in state legislatures with multi-member districts, as in AZ and NH, even though both of those states use a version of our general shitty winner-takes-all voting system).  So what happens if we keep existing district boundaries and just give every district three seats?

Let's look at Pennsylvania and make a rough estimate.  I'll approximate the partisan advantage in each district with a slightly adjusted CPVI****, look only at the two major parties' votes, and assume that each party's percentage of the vote ends up contributing to a candidate of that party.  (These assumptions would actually depend on the policies of each individual candidate, and ranked voting systems like STV make minor-party candidates much easier to elect, but let's assume for now that voters will be very partisan and very set on the major parties, as they usually are under America's current voting system.)  Under STV, a candidate who gets over 1/[total number of representatives per district] will win one of the seats, so in this simple estimate, if a party has over 1/3 of the vote, they will certainly win one seat, and if over 2/3 of the vote, they will certainly win two seats, with the other seat(s) determined by how close the remaining votes are.  Let's say that a margin of anything more than 5% is enough to guarantee you win that extra seat, which seems like a pretty cautious threshold given that voter turnout in each party can change a lot from one election to another.  This means a district split 50-50, or up to 52.5-47.5, will get one Republican, one Democrat, and one "tossup", but a district split 52.6-47.4 will just barely have enough votes to secure that second Republican or Democratic seat (and a district split 85.9-14.1 will just barely have enough votes to secure all three seats for one party).  Again, it would be more variable than this in a real STV system where candidates of the same party are not identical and voters' second or third choices may well cross party lines due to within-party disagreements on issues important to those voters, but this is an estimate of what an "average election" might be like.

With its current Gerrymandered districts, PA has 5 Democrats, 12 Republicans, and one vacant seat that was most recently represented by a 13th Republican, for 27.8% Democrats and 72.2% Republicans.  Not changing the districts' borders at all but simulating STV elections, we would instead get those 18 districts represented by 22 Democrats, 28 Republicans, and 4 tossups (two of them exactly on the 5% cutoff I set, and all four leaning Republican), for 40.7% Democrats, 51.9% Republicans, and 7.4% very competitive races.  Pennsylvania was nearly tied between the major parties in the 2016 presidential election, so this is clearly much closer to representing the state’s overall politics than the current congressional map or its proposed replacement.  And none of these districts is so far skewed towards one party that all three of its seats would go the same way.  This not only underscores how drastic the partisan Gerrymandering of Pennsylvania is but also how many people even within the major parties are currently without representation of their views in their districts.  Given that the Republicans’ newly-proposed map shows you can divide the state up in a way that preserves communities while still securing a huge partisan advantage, but a much more representative system isn’t it clear that multi-member districts could go a long way towards solving the problems Gerrymandering creates?

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Edited to repair a small but important mistake in estimating vote shares.

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*See the many special elections for state and federal legislative seats over the past year in very Republican places where Democrats have performed 20+ percent of the vote better than usual.

**The current number of voting members, 435, was set in 1911 and made permanent in 1929.  Since 1911, the number of eligible voters has grown drastically faster than the overall population because of increasing enfranchisement.  Women were not allowed to vote in most states until 1920; many native Native Americans were not even US citizens until 1924 despite their countries having been annexed by the US en masse in 1871; poll taxes and literacy tests were used as pretexts to prevent legally-registered black voters, as well as poor and non-English-speaking voters of any color, from voting until they were banned in 1964 and 1965 respectively; and the voting age for federal elections was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1971.

***I am strongly against another possible answer, party list proportional representation, because it makes independent candidacies even harder to pull off than our system does (or possibly even completely illegal depending on how it's implemented), and because parties in proportional systems tend to avoid primaries as a method of nominating candidates, while I strongly support the right of the voters rather than party gatekeepers to choose the ideological direction of their party.

****Ideally, I would have averaged the actual margins of victory in the elections since the last redistricting, but some of them were uselessly weird.  In 2016 alone, three candidates were elected with 100% of non-write-in votes because no other candidate appeared on the ballot in their district.  Instead, I'm using the Cook Partisan Voting Index, which is based on the last two presidential elections, adjusted towards the Republicans by 3 percentage points (the average Democratic margin of victory for the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections was 3 points, so adjusting down by that would result in a perfect tie) to reflect how far off each district is from being a 50-50 split between the major parties.  I’m then dividing that new margin in half and adding or subtracting it from 50% to estimate a vote share.