[EL] Flaws in Politico and NY Times articles about gerrymandering

[Kogan, Vladimir]

To add to this point Rob makes: “As along as  accept winner-take-all electoral rules that make general election participation irrelevant in most districts, we can expect such results - and also the basic conflict between having fair representation and having electoral competition. If we moved toward multi-seat districts with ranked choice voting (that is,single transferable), you can have both.”

While I don’t disagree with the general argument, it is important to note that the lack of competitiveness produced by commission maps is not simply due to winner-take-all electoral rules. Once you require that the commission maps comply with VRA, are geographically compact, respect communities of interest, and various other requirements that are written in, you make drawing competitive districts even harder. A great deal of uncompetitiveness is baked in directly into the criteria both commissions are required to follow.


[The Ohio State University]
Vladimir Kogan, Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
2004 Derby Hall | 154 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1373
510/415-4074 Mobile
614/292-9498 Office
614/292-1146 Fax
http://u.osu.edu/kogan.18/
kogan.18 at osu.edu<mailto:kogan.18 at osu.edu>


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