@Tulletilsynet Strongly agreed! Why is it sinister to say that people in urban (and I am genuinely not using that as a racial code word, I mean urban vs. suburban) Winston-Salem and High Point have more in common with one another than either do with their respective suburbs/exurbs?

@Tulletilsynet
"The French builders, clearing away as mere rubbish whatever they found and, like their ornamental gardeners, forming everything into an exact level, propose to rest the whole local and general legislature on three bases of three different kinds: one geometrical, one arithmetical, and the third financial; the first of which they call the basis of territory; the second, the basis of population; and the third, the basis of contribution. For the accomplishment of the first of these purposes they divide the area of their country into eighty-three pieces, regularly square, of eighteen leagues by eighteen...When these state surveyors came to take a view of their work of measurement, they soon found that in politics the most fallacious of all things was geometrical demonstration...It was evident that the goodness of the soil, the number of the people, their wealth, and the largeness of their contribution made such infinite variations between square and square as to render mensuration a ridiculous standard of power in the commonwealth, and equality in geometry the most unequal of all measures in the distribution of men."

@Tulletilsynet: Define "transparently partisan."

@Tulletilsynet Or we could just get rid of districts and do proportional representation. And get a pony.

@Tulletilsynet A good counterpoint to this line of reasoning is what's going on in Wisconsin right now. The GOP has introed a redistricting plan so partisan and rushed that they are actually voting today to change a law first so that their plan isn't illegal. (Lawsuits have already been filed over it--as with everything in Wi now.)

The problem is that the similar interests it lumps together creates permanent Dem/GOP districts wherein the GOP has a permanent majority (potentially even if it loses the popular vote). The legislature will now be divided into rep districts that have almost no chance f swinging one way or the other any given year.

Interestingly enough, w/r/t this column, the Wisc. redistricting in Kenosha moved the boundaries just blocks from the sitting senator's house. He's one of the recalled Dems and the way the GOP drew the map, even his GOP challenger has been drawn out of the district for which he's competing. It's so fucked.

@jfruh There is this phrase, "All politics are local". Your local politician needs to address concerns of the local community and fight for specific concerns and projects. Much harder to do this if the voters are dispersed in various areas of the state.

Also if voters are dispersed across a large state, how will they organize themselves, have physical meetings and petition their representative in person?

@Tulletilsynet at the risk of sounding like a slightly unhinged civics class instructor -- gerrymandering is a huge threat to democracy.

gerrymandered districts are designed as "safe districts," that is to say noncompetitive districts, engineered to protect the incumbent by packing them with like-minded constituents. An incumbent with a safe seat is far more likely to maintain extreme political positions in line with the views of their constituents, and less likely to engage in the kinds of compromise so often needed in the legislative process. witness the inability of congress to handle the debt ceiling debacle among other questions.

ideally legislative districts should be drawn on a completely random basis -- without considering partisan, ethnic, or socioeconomic considerations. the more each district is a microcosm of the nation as a whole, the more likely individual representatives will act in the national interest. at least that's how it seems to me, open to hearing other views.

@deepomega Costume: left half of your body is a blue donkey, the right half is a red elephant. A purple stripe of meekness dividing them down the middle maybe?

@frabjous ideally legislative districts should be drawn on a completely random basis -- without considering partisan, ethnic, or socioeconomic considerations. the more each district is a microcosm of the nation as a whole, the more likely individual representatives will act in the national interest. at least that's how it seems to me, open to hearing other views.

OK, I'll bite: if that's so ideal, why bother having localized districts at all, other than the necessity to have someone to bring home the pork? Surely local representation is meant to express the fact that different localities actually have different political views. More to the point, as the country gets more politically polarized, I think that people often end up living around and/or spending time with like-minded people politically, and you'd actually have to do quite a bit of gerrymandering to get your supposedly perfect districts. I'd bet that some (though certainly not all) of the gerrymandered districts may look crazy on paper but represent the ways that people actually live and travel around their regions. Whereas you could draw very coherent-looking shapes on a map that would group together communities that rarely interact in practice.

On the other hand, I agree that politicians drawing safe districts for themselves is nuts. My own personal completely unrealistic suggestion would be to elect the house from multi-member seats (not huge ones: 3 or 4 members) using the Single Transferrable Vote, like they do in Ireland. It's a system where you rank all the candidates you'd vote for in order, and it generally produces proportionality (i.e. if two-thirds of people want an R and one third want a D, you're probably going to get 2 Rs and 1 D, whereas with single-memeber seats you can gerrymander things to produce 3 very safe Rs) and allow minorities to concentrate their voting power by rallying around a candidate. The districts would be big enough that they'd be difficult to gerrymander (many states would only consist of one or two districts anyway) and the outcome would mean that you couldn't completely block out minority opinion anyway.

The problem would be that the districts would be huge -- the Irish ones generally only have a few thousand people -- and counting would take forever and be prone to error. So, sigh.

@jfruh

why bother having localized districts? the simple answer is that local districts are meant to ensure accountability --- the smaller the better in this case (the huge size of federal house districts, with upwards of 400,000 people in them, is in my opinion hugely detrimental to having close citizen interactions with their representatives.) the idea being that citizens should be able to easily contact their representative, keep track of his or her votes, convey their concerns, etc. that's important of course.

re: the Irish example, that's interesting but I have significant qualms about any electoral systems other than Anglo-American first-past-the-post single member districts. not to get too far entangled in this question but I think this model tends to produce more stable and responsible governments. for the perils of proportional representation consider the case of Weimar Germany.

@frabjous not to get too far entangled in this question but I think this model tends to produce more stable and responsible governments. for the perils of proportional representation consider the case of Weimar Germany.

Sure, but take as a counter-example dozens of other governments over the course of the last 100 years, including the quite stable post-war Germany? Meanwhile look at our own House of Representatives over the past 15 years or so and see what single-member districts have gotten us.

The reason I like STV is that you still have a direct representative-to-constituent connection, as opposed to other forms of proportional represenation where people just get put on lists by party bosses. It's not one-to-one -- everyone would have three or four representatives -- but again that can ensure better representation for minority communities (ethnic or political). In our current politics, in many parts of the country reps are listening mostly to the hard core of their own party that they need to win their primaries. No amount of non-gerrymandering is going to fix this in many places -- are you ever going to create a competitive seat in western Nebraska or Brooklyn?

@Jim Demintia
An important point I neglected to mention above is that Victoria Johnson is ... wow. These are great features.