![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
minority voting rights
Yesterday's Supreme Court decision in Allen v. Milligan, somewhat surprisingly, doesn't further eviscerate the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (as amended in 1982): by a 6-3 margin, the Court agreed with a Federal appeals court that the Alabama map of Congressional districts wrongly denied its 27% black population a fair voice in electing Representatives. I haven't read the details of the appeals-court or Supreme court decision, but the case appears to involve the usual "packing and cracking": putting most of the state's black voters in one district, which almost always elects a black Democrat, so that the remaining six districts have a white Republican majority and almost always elect white Republicans.
Justice Clarence Thomas, in dissent, complains that the Court cannot force a state to use race as a criterion in drawing district boundaries; racism is racism, even in the interest of a minority. Of course, his criticism on this point is one-sided and hypocritical: he seldom objects when a state uses race as a criterion in favor of a white majority, as long as they're not so foolish as to put it in writing. But what if the state didn't use race as a criterion in favor of a white majority? Would he have a legitimate point?
What would a truly race-blind redistricting system look like? It could use not geography, but something with no correlation with race or political party, such as your Social Security number or your birthday (as a number from 1-366). If your Social Security number, divided by 7, has a remainder of 1, you're in district 1; a remainder of 2, district 2; and so on. Absolutely and utterly race-blind, and disastrous for minority representation, because every district in the state would be 27% black; considering the importance of race in Alabama politics, it would be rare to ever see a black representative elected at all.
In Justice Thomas's dream world, the end of overt racism by government would lead to race becoming irrelevant to politics, people would win elections on individual merit, unaffected by race, and in the long run the percentage of black elected officials might resemble the percentage of blacks in the population. But in the real world, that could be a very long run indeed, and it's not clear that Alabama society would actually move in that direction at all; in the interim, black Alabamans would have even less representation than they have now.
The fundamental problem actually isn't about race; it applies to race, political party, sexual orientation and identification, and any other characteristic (call it X) that voters see as politically important. Single-seat, winner-take-all elections amplify majorities. If 60% of voters have characteristic X, an X-blind electoral map will generally give at least 60%, but usually far more than 60%, of the seats to candidates with characteristic X.
You can try to fix this with X-based redistricting, ensuring that only about 60% of the districts have pro-X majorities, but that has several problems. First, it leads to weirdly shaped, unnatural districts, such as the one that gave "gerrymandering" its name. Second, it requires government to explicitly consider X, and to discriminate on the basis of X, in its official proceedings, and that feels wrong, even if saying so puts me in agreement with Clarence Thomas (which also feels wrong). Third, it intentionally involves creating districts in which the general election is a foregone conclusion, and all the real action happens in primaries, which are dominated by more-extreme members of the respective parties. And fourth, what if political decisions depend not only on X, but on unrelated characteristic Y? Do we need to draw districts representing every possible combination of X and Y values?
Some democracies have tried to resolve this using proportional representation by party: if Party Z gets 30% of the votes, Party Z gets roughly 30% of the seats in a legislature (or one house of a legislature, or something). Unfortunately, this (a) fails to recognize any politically-important characteristic that isn't (yet) associated with a political party, and (b) gives political parties an official status in the (state or Federal) Constitution, whereas I would prefer to burn political parties to the ground.
A better answer is a voting system that tends to produce proportional representation (in a state's Congressional delegation or its state legislature), not only by race or party but by whatever characteristic voters feel is important. This cannot happen as long as each district elects a single winner independently; you need either a way for votes in one district to affect outcomes in another, or (more plausibly) multi-seat districts. And you need a way for each voter to express a preference, not only for a single candidate, but for a whole class of candidates who have characteristics that voter considers important (race, party, sexual orientation/identity, musical talent, business acumen, etc; the voter doesn't need to say or even consciously know what the characteristics are). That could in principle mean voters rank the candidates from first to last, or assign each candidate an independent numeric score from 1 to 10, or check off all the candidates they "approve" of, but you definitely need more than a single name per voter.
There are a lot of voting systems out there, each designed to solve a different problem and placing different priorities on the desirable properties of a voting system. I know of one designed specifically to achieve proportional representation, without pre-judging what characteristics voters will find important: Single Transferrable Vote, which is reminiscent of Instant Runoff but applied to multi-seat districts. Each voter ranks all the candidates in the district, and the system first looks at all the first-place votes. Any candidate with at least a threshold number of first-place votes is elected, and the ballots that listed that candidate in first place are removed from the pool, those voters having had their say. (There are variants involving redistributing the "surplus votes" over the threshold.) Of the remaining candidates, some with especially small numbers of first-place votes are eliminated, and we look at the second-place candidates on the ballots that chose them first. This continues in multiple rounds until all the seats are filled.
The system has many of the same problems as IRV: it pays more attention to whom you vote for than whom you vote against, thus favoring divisive candidates over consensus candidates; it's sensitive to "butterfly effects", in that a handful of votes changing hands between minor candidates can have a cascading effect on major candidates; and it's non-parallelizable, in that you can't do any substantial part of the counting work at the precinct level, you have to do everything globally. And it's even more complicated, difficult to explain, and difficult to justify than IRV. Among other things, there's no single obviously-right way to choose the thresholds for "elected" and "eliminated", nor any single obviously-right way to decide which surplus votes to redistribute. But it does a very good job of producing proportional representation, if there are enough seats per district (ideally, a single district for the whole state).
Is there a way to achieve something like proportional representation, but with a simpler, easier-to-understand, easier-to-justify voting system? I'm a big fan of the Borda count for single-seat elections; maybe that could be adapted? In the Borda system, if you vote for 7 candidates, your first choice gets 7 points, your second 6 points, and so on. So if there are 7 seats to fill, it seems natural to give them to the candidates with the top 7 point totals. The result won't be as nearly proportional as STV would produce, but you would expect a coherent, disciplined minority party to be able to elect a few top candidates over lower-ranked candidates of the majority party. But I don't think that works. I'm still working through the algebra, but it looks as though a majority party can fill all the seats, no matter what minority parties do, simply by telling its voters to rank the majority-party candidates randomly and ahead of all the other-party candidates. Furthermore, the majority party's advantage increases with the addition of minor, long-shot candidates -- not because they take votes away from either "real" party, but because they decrease the point ratio between a party's top-ranked and last-ranked candidates, and whenever this ratio is less than the ratio in party allegiance among voters, the majority party wins.
You could perhaps fix the above problem by doing a Borda count in which the number of candidates you can vote for (and thus the maximum number of points you give any one of them) is substantially less than the number of seats to fill. But that defeats one of the appeals of the Borda system: the fact that you can meaningfully downvote a candidate by ranking it last, and downvotes matter just as much as upvotes. I think Borda just doesn't work for multi-seat elections.
Justice Clarence Thomas, in dissent, complains that the Court cannot force a state to use race as a criterion in drawing district boundaries; racism is racism, even in the interest of a minority. Of course, his criticism on this point is one-sided and hypocritical: he seldom objects when a state uses race as a criterion in favor of a white majority, as long as they're not so foolish as to put it in writing. But what if the state didn't use race as a criterion in favor of a white majority? Would he have a legitimate point?
What would a truly race-blind redistricting system look like? It could use not geography, but something with no correlation with race or political party, such as your Social Security number or your birthday (as a number from 1-366). If your Social Security number, divided by 7, has a remainder of 1, you're in district 1; a remainder of 2, district 2; and so on. Absolutely and utterly race-blind, and disastrous for minority representation, because every district in the state would be 27% black; considering the importance of race in Alabama politics, it would be rare to ever see a black representative elected at all.
In Justice Thomas's dream world, the end of overt racism by government would lead to race becoming irrelevant to politics, people would win elections on individual merit, unaffected by race, and in the long run the percentage of black elected officials might resemble the percentage of blacks in the population. But in the real world, that could be a very long run indeed, and it's not clear that Alabama society would actually move in that direction at all; in the interim, black Alabamans would have even less representation than they have now.
The fundamental problem actually isn't about race; it applies to race, political party, sexual orientation and identification, and any other characteristic (call it X) that voters see as politically important. Single-seat, winner-take-all elections amplify majorities. If 60% of voters have characteristic X, an X-blind electoral map will generally give at least 60%, but usually far more than 60%, of the seats to candidates with characteristic X.
You can try to fix this with X-based redistricting, ensuring that only about 60% of the districts have pro-X majorities, but that has several problems. First, it leads to weirdly shaped, unnatural districts, such as the one that gave "gerrymandering" its name. Second, it requires government to explicitly consider X, and to discriminate on the basis of X, in its official proceedings, and that feels wrong, even if saying so puts me in agreement with Clarence Thomas (which also feels wrong). Third, it intentionally involves creating districts in which the general election is a foregone conclusion, and all the real action happens in primaries, which are dominated by more-extreme members of the respective parties. And fourth, what if political decisions depend not only on X, but on unrelated characteristic Y? Do we need to draw districts representing every possible combination of X and Y values?
Some democracies have tried to resolve this using proportional representation by party: if Party Z gets 30% of the votes, Party Z gets roughly 30% of the seats in a legislature (or one house of a legislature, or something). Unfortunately, this (a) fails to recognize any politically-important characteristic that isn't (yet) associated with a political party, and (b) gives political parties an official status in the (state or Federal) Constitution, whereas I would prefer to burn political parties to the ground.
A better answer is a voting system that tends to produce proportional representation (in a state's Congressional delegation or its state legislature), not only by race or party but by whatever characteristic voters feel is important. This cannot happen as long as each district elects a single winner independently; you need either a way for votes in one district to affect outcomes in another, or (more plausibly) multi-seat districts. And you need a way for each voter to express a preference, not only for a single candidate, but for a whole class of candidates who have characteristics that voter considers important (race, party, sexual orientation/identity, musical talent, business acumen, etc; the voter doesn't need to say or even consciously know what the characteristics are). That could in principle mean voters rank the candidates from first to last, or assign each candidate an independent numeric score from 1 to 10, or check off all the candidates they "approve" of, but you definitely need more than a single name per voter.
There are a lot of voting systems out there, each designed to solve a different problem and placing different priorities on the desirable properties of a voting system. I know of one designed specifically to achieve proportional representation, without pre-judging what characteristics voters will find important: Single Transferrable Vote, which is reminiscent of Instant Runoff but applied to multi-seat districts. Each voter ranks all the candidates in the district, and the system first looks at all the first-place votes. Any candidate with at least a threshold number of first-place votes is elected, and the ballots that listed that candidate in first place are removed from the pool, those voters having had their say. (There are variants involving redistributing the "surplus votes" over the threshold.) Of the remaining candidates, some with especially small numbers of first-place votes are eliminated, and we look at the second-place candidates on the ballots that chose them first. This continues in multiple rounds until all the seats are filled.
The system has many of the same problems as IRV: it pays more attention to whom you vote for than whom you vote against, thus favoring divisive candidates over consensus candidates; it's sensitive to "butterfly effects", in that a handful of votes changing hands between minor candidates can have a cascading effect on major candidates; and it's non-parallelizable, in that you can't do any substantial part of the counting work at the precinct level, you have to do everything globally. And it's even more complicated, difficult to explain, and difficult to justify than IRV. Among other things, there's no single obviously-right way to choose the thresholds for "elected" and "eliminated", nor any single obviously-right way to decide which surplus votes to redistribute. But it does a very good job of producing proportional representation, if there are enough seats per district (ideally, a single district for the whole state).
Is there a way to achieve something like proportional representation, but with a simpler, easier-to-understand, easier-to-justify voting system? I'm a big fan of the Borda count for single-seat elections; maybe that could be adapted? In the Borda system, if you vote for 7 candidates, your first choice gets 7 points, your second 6 points, and so on. So if there are 7 seats to fill, it seems natural to give them to the candidates with the top 7 point totals. The result won't be as nearly proportional as STV would produce, but you would expect a coherent, disciplined minority party to be able to elect a few top candidates over lower-ranked candidates of the majority party. But I don't think that works. I'm still working through the algebra, but it looks as though a majority party can fill all the seats, no matter what minority parties do, simply by telling its voters to rank the majority-party candidates randomly and ahead of all the other-party candidates. Furthermore, the majority party's advantage increases with the addition of minor, long-shot candidates -- not because they take votes away from either "real" party, but because they decrease the point ratio between a party's top-ranked and last-ranked candidates, and whenever this ratio is less than the ratio in party allegiance among voters, the majority party wins.
You could perhaps fix the above problem by doing a Borda count in which the number of candidates you can vote for (and thus the maximum number of points you give any one of them) is substantially less than the number of seats to fill. But that defeats one of the appeals of the Borda system: the fact that you can meaningfully downvote a candidate by ranking it last, and downvotes matter just as much as upvotes. I think Borda just doesn't work for multi-seat elections.
no subject
I presume the designers of IRV and STV came up with the "fewest first-place votes" rule to minimize the number of ballots they would be reinterpreting, and this would lose that property, but in exchange it allows people to meaningfully vote against a really divisive candidate who's unacceptable to a large fraction of voters.