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i've always wondered instead of a commission you could just agree ahead of time on some rules on how redistricting would be performed and then just have the rules execute at a fixed time period. i assume one problem with this is people would try and simulate the rules in the future and try to choose rules that would benefit them. i guess maybe the current districting is so ridiculous that it would be difficult to come up with rules that can handle that as an initial state and be somewhat stable.
It's relatively straightforward to figure out how any given rule would alter the existing electoral chances. Announce your commission, and people will figure out what ruleset gives them the best advantage, and then insist that this ruleset is clearly the "unbiased, optimal" rule and that the commission should adopt it.
Agreed that this makes districting quite the tough nut to crack.
I had a thought that I should learn more about the history behind the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, which was ratified by the very people that it took power away from. I did a little bit of reading, but there are competing historical perspectives that I'll have to ruminate on further.
There are definitely parallels in terms of national/state-level dynamics, impinging on one another. It also seems unlikely to me to propose that people at that time were simply naive to the possibility that such a rule change would be likely to advantage/disadvantage them. Some explanations try to argue that some of the main implications had already effectively come about via other means, so it wasn't a terribly sharp break. I don't know.
In any event, perhaps worth ruminating on and reading more history. It seems not entirely impossible to come up with something, but perhaps it is the case that nationalized interests are too entrenched and 'smart' to the scene that even minor steps will be more effectively blocked. In that case, we'd probably need to be more clever to messy up the predictive capabilities.
I haven't totally given up on toying with various schemes, but it is a difficult problem that is seriously resistant to most flippant proposals.
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Obviously we should give each party a bull's hide, and they may claim any land it encloses as their own.
The party which won the last popular vote must provide two bulls between four and six years of age, white and without blemish, sharing a sire. The party which lost the last popular vote must pick their bull first; the party which won will then get to slaughter, eat, and enclose their lands to offset this advantage of picking the slightly larger bull.
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Sometimes the old ways are best.
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I've always favored assigning voters to districts by valid dice roll. Nothing up my sleeves there, must be fair.
Is statistical joke, if unclear: each individual district becomes a random sample of the whole and converges to such, such that this is the worst possible gerrymander. But I didn't do anything obviously against the rules like taking race into account.
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To be fair, there's not a correct answer to how districts should be drawn. One view is that districts should be competitive, as this encourages moderation and tends to be more proportional. Another is that districts should do their best to represent communities of interest, as that will make it more straightforward for elected officials to represent their constituents coherently. Yet another is simple compactness: districts should be as regular as possible.
There are arguments for and against all of them, but none of them is obviously right and not all are amenable to algorithmic solutions.
What's interesting to me is the latter argument. Putting political advantage aside, an ideal district would be not competitive in the slightest. The reason being that districts exist to serve the needs of the local, and a politician with 100% of the vote is perfectly representing everyone in the district rather than half.
You're thinking too much in terms of the general election. In an election where a politician gets 100% of the votes, the process (primary/party otherwise) by which they were selected is the real election.
It's not a stable equilibrium point.
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I guess that's a valid question these days - do we even want national legislators to represent a specific geography? My big-city House rep I can see is a party line liberal; that represents the district and I don't begrudge it, but when I look up her votes the single thing she broke with the party on was HR3633 (cryptocurrency regulation framework). I look up her social media, and 90% of her posting is on national issues, boosting other national politicians, Gaza, etc. My impression is that the idea of truly local representation has been broken for a while and that this dates back to the late 00s with the start of political nationalization and the decade-long earmark ban.
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