Hello from the antipodes,

Whether multi-seat electoral districts with proportional (STV, party-list) or semi-proportional (cumulative or limited vote) voting systems are easier or harder to gerrymander than are single-seaters, depends heavily on two factors: the minimum number of seats per district, and whether even numbers are allowed.

There is a huge difference between, say, Ireland (with 3-, 4- and 5-seat districts) and Tasmania, Malta and the Australian Capital Territory (which use only 5- and/or 7-seaters). Once every district has at least five seats, and an odd number (so that a party or coalition with over 50% of the votes in a district is guaranteed more than half of its seats), the potential gains from gerrymandering boundaries, in the sense of deliberately manipulating where the borderlines are placed, dwindles almost to vanishing point.

By contrast, Ireland in the 1970s saw the refinement of the art of "Tullymandering" (named after the Minister who drew up the electoral boundaries for the 1974 [?] Dail Eireann election). The secret here is to put as many 3-seaters as possible in your own stronghold areas, and as many 4-seaters as you can in the opposing party's fiefdoms. Suppose that, based on population, each side's stronghold regions are entitled to 24 seats out of 48. You divide your own area into eight three-seaters. PR gives you two seats out of three in every district, making the result there 16-8. But you divide your opponents' areas into six four-seaters. Under normal circumstances, each electorate is deadlocked 2-2 in its representation. So both sides win 12 of 24 seats. Overall, you've won 28 out of 48 seats with as little as 50.1% of the votes in your half of the state and 40.1% of the votes in your opponents' half.

[I did say "under normal circumstances" -- the Tullymander backfired because the Minister's party polled so poorly in the four-seater districts that it dropped below the 40% threshold needed to hold two seats, and so was annihilated!]

Once you get over 5 seats, this becomes harder, especially since larger multi-seat electorates will (on balance) each contain a larger percentage of the total electorate and therefore be more evenly balanced. (If your state has 49 single-seaters, there'll very probably be a handful that are 70% safe for one party; but it's very likely, if the state had seven 7-seaters, that in a district accounting for 14-15% of the whole state the "red" and "blue" voters will cancel out more evenly).

Regarding cumulative voting: Here's a query for those who know more about US voting machines than I do ... Suppose one wanted to introduce a crude form of "semi-preferential" Cumulative Vote. The voter could approve as many candidates as she liked (or up to the number of seats). Her vote is then divided equally among the candidates she votes for -- the system used in Peoria, I believe -- instead of dividing your votes 2-2-1, say, you vote for three candidates and they each get 0.333 of your vote.

Then the lowest candidates are eliminated one by one. If one of the three candidates you vote for is eliminated, your vote is re-adjusted so as to give 0.500 to the two surviving candidates only. This continues until the number of candidates equals vacancies plus one, or until the required number of candidates have reached the Droop quota. (Note that with a single seat this would reduce to simple Approval Voting.) So if your party ran, say, five candidates for five seats, you could vote for all of them and the system would reduce the number of surviving candidates to the maximum number your party's total vote was capable of electing.

What I am curious about is this: Are existing US voting machines capable of, say, scanning ballots and saying "43,838 ballots contain votes for Smith, Jones and Brown... 31,622 ballots contain votes for Smith, Jones and Weinberger ..." -- or is that too complicated?

Cheers all
Tom

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Dr Tom Round
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Guy-Uriel Charles <gcharles@umn.edu> Sent by: owner-election-law_gl@majordomo.lls.edu
12-02-2004 06:58

To: Mark Rush <RushM@wlu.edu> cc: election-law@majordomo.lls.edu Subject: Re: Charles and single-member districts


A few responses to Mark Rush's points:

First, while all electoral structures are manipulable single-member districting presents greater opportunities for manipulation and are manipulable in ways that are not as transparent than say at large electoral systems. This point is supported by scholarship by Rae, Riker, Amy, and Colomer. In fact, Rush himself has stated: "Gerrymandering is a natural product of the single-member plurality system (SMP) of representation built upon geographically determined constituencies that uses the first-past-the-post method of counting votes." Gerrymandering [in the US]: out of the political thicket and into the quagmire. 682-685 in PS 27 (4), Dec. 94.

The point of my piece, as Paul Johnston noted, was that multi-member districting in combination with some other device (I used cumulative voting, but only as illustrative) reduces the opportunity for gerrymandering in a manner that should be constitutionally significant.


Second, Mark Rush's second point is unclear. The fact that campaign finance laws may favour incumbents is not an argument in favour of other incumbent-preferring devices. Indeed, many scholars have argued (with some receptivity from the Courts) that courts ought to strike down electoral rules that can be justified solely as incumbent protection devices.

As an aside, though I'm a bit over half-way through Larios v. Cox, I'm struck by the manner in which that court is reacting to what it perceives to be a partisan gerrymander and to a lesser extent an incumbent-protection plan. It is also interesting that the Court uses the equi-population principle to object to what it understands to be a partisan and incumbent protecting gerrymander.

Let me also add that there is a debate within the political science literature on whether and how campaign finance laws advantage incumbents.

Third, Mark Rush, fundamentally misunderstands my associational argument. Voters form all sorts of blocs, partisan, ideological, racial, etc. The question is whether the state can determine which blocs are salient and which ones are not. On Mark Rush's specific points. I'll leave it up to him to decide whether Larry Bartels is a student of American politics, but his 2000 APSR article characterises Mark Rush's claims as "exaggerated and outdated." See also Marc Hetherington's 2001 APSR piece.

The FindLaw piece is a preview of a longer law review article. I'll post to SSRN when it is finished. Responses to criticisms of my proposal will have to await the longer piece. The associational argument is developed in 91 California Law Review 1209 (2003) for those interested.

guy

Mark Rush wrote: This sort of argument against SMDs is a bit too simplistic.

First, multi-member districts can be used to gerrymander just as easily as SMDs. The list had a discussion about this earlier. Dick Katz, I believe cited Doug Rae's work on this.

Second, the complaint about incumbent entrenchment is a red herring. Campaign finance laws do as much if not more to advantage incumbents than any redistricting.

Finally, the associational rights argument is weak. It works only if we can assume that voters really do form partisan blocs. Any student of American politics knows that this simply is not true. American split tickets, have notoriously weak partisan identification and, as I noted in a book and two articles, when they are redistricted, they tend to change their voting patterns. (This makes perfect sense: change the choices, change their behaviour).


Mark E. Rush Professor of Politics Washington and Lee University Lexington, VA 24450 http://home.wlu.edu/~rushm
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Guy-Uriel E. Charles Associate Professor of Law University of Minnesota Law School
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