[EL] The answer to the gerrymander; The courts need a standard to assess congressional maps

[Nicholas Stephanopoulos]

Oh, I agree that there are all sorts of problems with single-member
geographic districts, only one of which is that they can't possibly capture
non-territorial communities of interest. It is interesting, though, that
even in this era of instant online communication, people's residential
patterns remain overwhelmingly shaped by geography. The degree of spatial
clustering, with respect to income, education, ethnicity, and the like, is
still staggering.

Nick

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 5:23 PM, Jon Roland <jon.roland at constitution.org>
wrote:
>
> That approach to defining "communities of interest", if if could be
realized, would just be another kind of gerrymandering. But it can't be
realized with single-member districts, no matter how they are drawn. Such
communities no longer organize themselves geographically. They are social
networks now being organized in cyberspace. If you want minority
communities of interest to elect their own representatives, unless you can
define cyberdistricts, you should be pushing for replacing single-member
districting with proxy voting, electing the top n vote-getters who
thereafter cast as many votes in every proceeding as they received in the
last election.
>
> On 01/10/2012 04:02 PM, Nicholas Stephanopoulos wrote:
>
> Almost all states that require districts to correspond to communities of
interest have separate provisions barring political subdivisions from being
divided. The clear implication is that communities of interest are not the
same thing as political subdivisions. It's also true that communities are
shaped not only by people's objective interests but also by their
subjective affiliations; therefore demographic and socioeconomic data alone
should not be used to identify communities (except as a proxy). It's
interesting, however, that the most recent and most extensive definition of
communities of interest -- that found in the California Constitution in the
wake of the state's 2008 and 2010 redistricting initiatives -- makes no
mention of subjective considerations and explicitly refers to objective
factors such as income, occupation, and population density. That
definition, a variant of which was successfully used by California's
Special Masters in the 1970s and 1990s, is as follows:
>
> "A community of interest is a contiguous population which shares common
social and economic interests that should be included within a single
district for purposes of its effective and fair representation.  Examples
of such shared interests are those common to an urban area, a rural area,
an industrial area, or an agricultural area, and those common to areas in
which the people share similar living standards, use the same
transportation facilities, have similar work opportunities, or have access
to the same media of communication relevant to the election process.
Communities of interest shall not include relationships with political
parties, incumbents, or political candidates."
>
> The problem with automated approaches that maximize district compactness,
of course, is that they ignore all the other democratic values that
redistricting is meant to promote: competitiveness, partisan fairness,
minority representation, and, yes, respect for communities of interest.
This is why the automated approaches have never caught on and why I predict
they never will.
>
> Nick
>
> --
>
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