Saturday, December 06, 2003
And Gerrymanders As The Beaver
The New Yorker: Fact: The Great Election Grab
(NOTE: Story on this page likely changes once a week. Check archives for article if its title doesn't match the above.)
I think there's a sense in my country (the United States) among most of the people that what goes on with politicians is not their business.
No, really. I get the sense than when people like my father look at the nightly news and they start talking about the next election, their eyes glaze over. Because they already know who they're going to vote for, so why bother taking up precious brainspace thinking about it.
Brainspace. That's what I call that intersection of number of free neurons, time and job that limits the number of things you can think about in your life. It's a limit I run up against all the time. Everyone else does too, they can't help but run up against it, because in a sense the number of things you can think about are the number of things you do think about. Every one of these things that doesn't arise directly from your soul is unspeakable blasphemy.
And yet... politics is an inherently blasphemous process. The article linked to descibes how blasphemous it has become. It is a story that needs, needs to be read by everyone you can find. The more people you find, the more chance you'll find someone whose eyes won't glaze over when he sees it, those people who are armored by smugness and certainty. The armor must be cracked.
The article is a piece on the facts of gerrymandering and how it's done these days. You remember gerrymandering, invented in 1811 it involves drawing congressional districts in order to favor the incumbents. Every man gets a vote for senators and representatives, but your votes go into a pool with those of other people. Gerrymandering is about deciding where the lines of those pools are drawn. It is part of the dark, rotten core of American political life, just one example of how far the ideal of democracy has been tainted. It's been around for almost 200 years and no one's done anything to stop it because the people who can are the ones who can do it, and they're almost always reluctant to deny themselves the advantage they had to fight against to get in power in the first place.
The problem with this is that it's difficult to draw district lines that don't favor someone. Indeed, drawing the lines so that districts are always evenly distributed is almost as bad as what we have now, because a region with a lot of people of one party should be favored towards that party. Now, gerrymandering has progressed to the point where computer programs are used to draw districts, and as the article shows, you can move the lines around with your mouse and design districts, plainly showing party counts as you move them, to maximum advantage easily.
There is only one solution to this. Find the two most honest, least knowledgeable about voter densities and districting members of Congress, one for each party. Lock them in a room with a map of the United States showing state outlines and nothing the hell else. Give them a transparency with a regularly-spaced grid printed on it, and five minutes to center the grid on each state and trace its outline with a pen. You'll end up with a lot of districts with few, if any, people at all. You can take care of that ahead of time by declaring that districts with, say, less than 5,000 people should be merged with the lowest-population adjacent cell, or more than 300,000 (pulling these numbers out of of air) should be split diagonally down the middle. Also, the districts will be poorly suited for many other things. Certainly they won't be convenient, but democracy itself is by nature inconvenient. But the people doing it should by no means know what they are doing, because if there's one thing that's obvious about the political climate in the US today, is whatever angle either side can find to gain an edge is immediately and enthusiastically pounced upon, and that the pouncing people congratulate themselves afterwards for doing it.
The New Yorker: Fact: The Great Election Grab
(NOTE: Story on this page likely changes once a week. Check archives for article if its title doesn't match the above.)
I think there's a sense in my country (the United States) among most of the people that what goes on with politicians is not their business.
No, really. I get the sense than when people like my father look at the nightly news and they start talking about the next election, their eyes glaze over. Because they already know who they're going to vote for, so why bother taking up precious brainspace thinking about it.
Brainspace. That's what I call that intersection of number of free neurons, time and job that limits the number of things you can think about in your life. It's a limit I run up against all the time. Everyone else does too, they can't help but run up against it, because in a sense the number of things you can think about are the number of things you do think about. Every one of these things that doesn't arise directly from your soul is unspeakable blasphemy.
And yet... politics is an inherently blasphemous process. The article linked to descibes how blasphemous it has become. It is a story that needs, needs to be read by everyone you can find. The more people you find, the more chance you'll find someone whose eyes won't glaze over when he sees it, those people who are armored by smugness and certainty. The armor must be cracked.
The article is a piece on the facts of gerrymandering and how it's done these days. You remember gerrymandering, invented in 1811 it involves drawing congressional districts in order to favor the incumbents. Every man gets a vote for senators and representatives, but your votes go into a pool with those of other people. Gerrymandering is about deciding where the lines of those pools are drawn. It is part of the dark, rotten core of American political life, just one example of how far the ideal of democracy has been tainted. It's been around for almost 200 years and no one's done anything to stop it because the people who can are the ones who can do it, and they're almost always reluctant to deny themselves the advantage they had to fight against to get in power in the first place.
The problem with this is that it's difficult to draw district lines that don't favor someone. Indeed, drawing the lines so that districts are always evenly distributed is almost as bad as what we have now, because a region with a lot of people of one party should be favored towards that party. Now, gerrymandering has progressed to the point where computer programs are used to draw districts, and as the article shows, you can move the lines around with your mouse and design districts, plainly showing party counts as you move them, to maximum advantage easily.
There is only one solution to this. Find the two most honest, least knowledgeable about voter densities and districting members of Congress, one for each party. Lock them in a room with a map of the United States showing state outlines and nothing the hell else. Give them a transparency with a regularly-spaced grid printed on it, and five minutes to center the grid on each state and trace its outline with a pen. You'll end up with a lot of districts with few, if any, people at all. You can take care of that ahead of time by declaring that districts with, say, less than 5,000 people should be merged with the lowest-population adjacent cell, or more than 300,000 (pulling these numbers out of of air) should be split diagonally down the middle. Also, the districts will be poorly suited for many other things. Certainly they won't be convenient, but democracy itself is by nature inconvenient. But the people doing it should by no means know what they are doing, because if there's one thing that's obvious about the political climate in the US today, is whatever angle either side can find to gain an edge is immediately and enthusiastically pounced upon, and that the pouncing people congratulate themselves afterwards for doing it.
