http://www.wral.com/news/state/nccapitol/story/11147887/

Quote :

" NC group: Panel, not lawmakers, should draw districts RALEIGH, N.C. — People who want to take the politics out of the process of drawing congressional and legislative districts every decade pushed their plans at the State Capitol Tuesday. The North Carolina Coalition for Lobbying and Government Reform wants the state Senate to pass legislation that would have the General Assembly's non-partisan professional staff, instead of lawmakers, redraw legislative and congressional districts. Speakers who urged passage of the bill Tuesday included former state GOP chairman William Cobey, UNC law professor Gene Nichol, Rev. Earl Johnson, chairman of the Raleigh-Wake Citizens Association, and Richard Harkrader, CEO of Durham-based Carolina Solar Energy. The state House approved the measure 88-27 last year. The bill is sponsored by two Democrats and two Republicans. The bill would direct the General Assembly's Legislative Service Office to draw the maps behind closed doors without partisan influence and following certain redistricting principles. Lawmakers could take over the process if they reject the first three plans. That method is based on a procedure that the state of Iowa has used for four redistricting rounds. "

I am surprised the support... its not perfect, but a step in the right direction.

Another good article that talks about gerrymandering: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/how-to-turn-republicans-and-democrats-into-americans/8521/?single_page=true

5/29/2012 11:22:33 AM

tl;dr

5/29/2012 11:25:45 AM

This was meant to be posted in the soapbox, my bad

5/29/2012 11:26:41 AM

If you have no idea what's going on in this thread, check these out for reference:

5/29/2012 11:34:41 AM

Districts being drawn to protect incumbents are a huge problem. Officials in protected seats can get away with political backset because there are no repercussions. The country is pretty evenly split, yet every year nationally only a handful of seats are really up for grabs. It's one of the main reasons politics has gotten increasingly unresponsive to what is right for the country.

5/29/2012 12:51:38 PM

A panel can still be corrupted.

5/29/2012 1:01:12 PM

^ I agree... and its the "draw the maps behind closed doors" aspect that has me curious. The public won't know how they draw the districts?

Its a step in the right direction, but corruption is so rampant.

Here is something interesting I found:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/09/gerrymandering-math
Drawn Together: Can Math Nerds Beat Gerrymandering?
How to spot a gerrymandered congressional district.

From the Math Nerd article: "North Carolina's 12th, which has the country's third-highest gerrymandering score."

It also talks about using computer algorithms to create districts as well.... called the shortest splitline algorithm. http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html

NC redistricted based on the shortest splitline algorithm:



[Edited on May 29, 2012 at 1:15 PM. Reason : splitline algorithm]

5/29/2012 1:12:27 PM

lol, they used bitcoins as the money icon

5/29/2012 1:13:35 PM

Quote :

"non-partisan professional staff"

LOL! Riiiiiiiiiiight.

There isn't a way to reform the system in this state in a way that won't offend a lot of people. There's no objective way to split up districts. No matter what, it will be arbitrary, it's just a matter of whether or not the people doing it subscribe to some theory of social engineering. There are only imperfect solutions for an inherently imperfect system.

You could eliminate districts. That would probably be better off. How about proportional representation? State-wide votes. Top 14 individuals voted (or however many rep spots there are) gets a seat.

[Edited on May 29, 2012 at 1:19 PM. Reason : ]

5/29/2012 1:18:45 PM

Quote :

"There's no objective way to split up districts. No matter what, it will be arbitrary,"

Of course, the method you select will be arbitrary, however, using an algorithm is pretty objective. Math doesn't care about voters or area or whatnot. It's just going to divide everything up the same. Before implementing, you make the code for it open source and available for review by the public.

5/29/2012 1:46:58 PM

The voting rights act also makes it incredibly difficult to produce population proportionate districts because it protects minority districts and forces the creation of minority districts when possible, which is frankly, pretty fucking stupid.

There are a lot of bad holdovers from the time when our constitution was written because it wasn't possible to do things in the fairest way, but rather the fairest way that could most easily be executed at the time. It would be much fairer to have statewide proportional elections, but because that would be massively more time consuming in 1780 (have to collect all the votes, count by hand, etc.) you instead create smaller districts who can collect and count their own votes and produce a quicker, more accurate result. Now this is a non issue, but that holdover for convenience still exists.

The electoral college was designed as protection from a purely democratic process because it was thought that the people could not be trusted to directly elect a president (similar to the way the senate was not a directly elected group). Now many states have made their electoral representatives vote according to the vote of the districts they represent, but many are still not bound by that.

There's a lot of things wrong with our voting process, but fundamentally the way that we draw our districts is one of the worst.

5/29/2012 1:51:18 PM

Quote :

"Drawn Together: Can Math Nerds Beat Gerrymandering? How to spot a gerrymandered congressional district."

you don't need half a brain to see our state is gerrymandered, much less be a math nerd. the 12th district is so blatantly gerrymandered it's unbelievable.

5/29/2012 2:04:04 PM

Illinois still takes the cake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois%27s_4th_congressional_district

5/29/2012 2:12:04 PM

i don't understand why they don't use county lines. just group the counties together to get to the right population size.

5/29/2012 2:16:01 PM

Because it's not in the best interest of the politicians.

But even beyond that, why do county lines matter? Is there something inherently good about county lines that they should be considered in an election for statewide government?

5/29/2012 2:18:40 PM

Quote :

"But even beyond that, why do county lines matter?"

they don't, would just be an easy way to do it. why do state lines matter?

5/29/2012 2:55:31 PM

Because we have a two house congress with protection for smaller states (yet another holdover from post colonial America). Besides, even with grouping counties you would still have to split some of them and then you have massive disputes about how you do that, which counties to split, where to split them, etc.

From the standpoint of fairness state borders mean nothing though. We desperately need reforms which will never happen because our current system favors those already in power and there is no incentive for them to change that.

[Edited on May 29, 2012 at 3:02 PM. Reason : asdfs]

5/29/2012 3:00:03 PM

The interesting question with using county lines is what happens when a particular county is too big for a single district? Mecklenburg and Wake counties are about a tenth of the state population each.

Agreed with some of the other comments too: in theory, a non-partisan board is nice and all, but how do you pick who goes on that board?

Quote :

"You could eliminate districts. That would probably be better off. How about proportional representation? State-wide votes. Top 14 individuals voted (or however many rep spots there are) gets a seat."

I think the problem with eliminating districts though is that certain regions may feel they will be underrepresented in the end. Candidates may decide to focus on just the three main metro areas (Charlotte, Triangle and Triad) and ignore the mountains, coast and everything else. I prefer a mix of the two: maybe seven or so districts so we have reps focused on regional needs and a slate of six at-large or proportional representatives to represent the interests of the state as a whole.

5/29/2012 3:20:40 PM

^How would that help? Wouldn't you just end up with candidates trying to win the popular vote and focusing only on Raleigh, Charlotte, and the triad just like you would if they were all based on the popular vote?

There are some major issues with winner take all elections that have to be addressed along with looking at things like districting.

5/29/2012 3:39:22 PM

IMO we can all learn from the long-running example of Iowa and the more recent example of California.

Also the shortest-splitline algorithm suffers from the problem of regularly splitting up communities of interest, and it almost certainly would end up violating the Voting Rights Act.

[Edited on May 30, 2012 at 3:41 AM. Reason : still a neat-o idea in theory

5/30/2012 3:39:59 AM

^ I agree with you on the algorithm to draw the districts, but wonder if that could be used as a guideline and issues with communities being cut through could be fixed through some form of additional algorithm to determine how best not to split up a community.

Anyway, there is no perfect answer. Corruption will continue unfortunately with the system as it currently stands.



District 12 is only allowed to exist as it is because of the "Voting Rights Act". Can't wait until my district 4 looks like Italy...think the last time Chapel Hill and Fayetville were in the same district was in the 1800s. Blah, I fucking hate politicians; they can kiss my unaffiliated ass.

[Edited on May 30, 2012 at 7:57 AM. Reason : map is of the redistricting plans]

5/30/2012 7:56:08 AM

Quote :

"problem of regularly splitting up communities of interest"

Just for clarification,

What are communities of interest?
Why is it problematic?

5/30/2012 11:46:54 AM

Draw every district to be a 50% Republican and 50% Democratic registered voters.

5/31/2012 1:48:37 PM

^You can't do that unless the state as a whole is like that.

5/31/2012 5:54:04 PM

Gerrymandering exists because of the judicial administration of the coting rights act, which at this point is destroying representative government for the benefit of a few majority minority districts. You can trace much of the increased number of safe seats and increased partisanship in Congress to this system. Shouldn't Obama put some dent into implicit assumption that a strong black candidate can't win in the broader population?

5/31/2012 6:11:03 PM

^ I think the acts or whatever they are to give a minority a majority are stupid. What are they going to do when whites are a minority in California?

6/1/2012 12:59:37 AM

^^It existed before that, but I agree that the Voting Rights Act actually requires a bit of gerrymandering.

[Edited on June 1, 2012 at 1:39 AM. Reason : Even worse shit was done before, like all At-Large districts or refusals to redistrict.

6/1/2012 1:38:36 AM

Well obviiusly its origins predate the voting rights act but much of the creative districting we see today in the south in particular is in fact compelled by the voting rights act. It also makes it easier to manipulate since he politically motivated line drawing (see brad miller district) doesnt stand out as much. That having been said I'm not sold on this proposal being the answer, especially if the criteria used will be the same.

[Edited on June 1, 2012 at 10:24 AM. Reason : .]

6/1/2012 10:18:22 AM