Gerrymandering is in the news. As I'm sure my readers realize, cutting up a territory in (allegedly) weird ways is arguably anti-democratic, whoever does it. I inserted "allegedly" above, because what constitutes a fair, non-weird district is controversial. Ensuring, for example, that Blacks get as few representatives as possible is clearly discriminatory but whether doing that to rich people or bookworms or landtaxers should also be prohibited may not seem so clear. And suppose that sort of unfortunate outcome happens by mistake, say as the result of a disinterested computer program making its cuts "randomly"--is that still a type of unfair discrimination that should be illegal? It does seem sort of obvious that whether gerrymandering to maximize the number of representatives belonging to a particular political party is (a) illegal, or (b) a response to what the other party has already done; there's a good chance that it is destructive of the fundamental tenet of both state and Federal democracy that requires that everybody's vote be treated equally. Unfortunately, it seems always to be quite difficult to prove whan a principle of that type has been violated.#

Consider a hypothetical country (I'll call it "Simplistan) that, like the U.S. is a Federal polity; i.e., it contains a bunch of subsidiary  jurisdictions, divided geographically. In fact, let's say it also has 50 of them, called "provinces." Suppose this Simplistan is also similar to the U.S. in that it separates--at least to some extent--its executive and legislative functions on both province and national levels. But there's a fundamental difference too. While many scholars think the number of representatives in the U.S. Congress has become insufficient over time because of population growth, Simplistan  sees things differently. Its Constitution doesn't consider having provinces send a lot of representatives to its national legislature (its "Federal Assembly") to be a good thing. 

You see, Simplistan's founders believed that the more legislators mucking around with laws, the worse the result would be. Not only would the process be more inefficient and expensive, but the result would be more confused. They agreed that every citizen in each state must be represented in their Assembly, but they thought that, so long as the executive in each state was handled by a different individual, one national representative is best. 

Obviously, Simplistanians can't have any problems with gerrymanders because their provinces aren't cut up at all. It might seem though, that their country is terribly undemocratic though, because it sends the same number of representatives (1) from each province, whether that subsidiary jurisdiction is big or small, densely populated, or mostly forest. It would be undemocratic, of course, to give each province one vote in the Assembly if some provinces are much more populous than others, because authentic democracy requires that each resident--and so each vote of the general populous be treated equally. 

Both the majority of Simplistans and their Constitution recognize this fundamental principle of democracy, but instead of handling it by having some provinces send more representatives, they weight the authority of those representatives in Assembly. The more populous the province, the more vote-weight its representative gets in Assembly activities. 

So, every few years there is an election is Simplistan in which each province elects one Executive and one Assemblyperson. The math here is unsurprisingly simple, and it might be good arrangement if one individual really were capable of reflecting the views of hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions!--of constitutents. Even if the Assembly staffs were large and also reflected the number of votes received, even if the Assemblypersons were some combination of human empathy and AI there would be the problem that Assembly activities don't consist solely of voting and constituent service. There's also speechmaking, committee work, and various other sorts of deliberation. It would likely be impossible to mete that out in mathematically correct bundles. 

The Simplistanians neglect that, but its an important omission. Democracy seems to involve other aspects besides ultimate equality of popular vote in law-making. The problem is, at least the way the U.S. government is organized, if representatives are added, even in such a way that the clever Simplistanian trick of weighting votes in the Assembly by the number of votes received by the representative voting is retained, gerrymandering becomes a problem. As soon as  more than one representative is elected in any province, if the jurisdictions are cut up geographically and one winner represents each smaller district, the precise places in which the district lines are placed will have huge effects on who gets elected. 

Because of this, democratic theorists have long pushed both for neutral, rather than partisan-oriented methods for cutting up subsidiary federal entities and for replacing single winner-take-all geographical sub-districts with multi-winner arrangements. As I have indicated in a number of blog entries here, I think Approval Voting is best for single-winner elections, and, to their eternal credit, Simplistanians use that method to elect both their Executives and their Assemblypersons. 

In my view, however, Approval is not a particularly good choice for use in elections with multiple winners. There are a bunch of alternatives. Some like ranked choice for example. Others push for a form of party list or other types of Proportional Representation. I think any of them would be excellent changes, but FWIW, I  believe that the simplest and best choice is the Single, Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV). According to that method, which can be used only where there will be multiple winners, every resident gets exactly one vote, and if there are to be, say, ten representatives elected, the top ten vote-getters win. What could be simpler?

SNTV has received a ton of criticism over the years, however, and I don't deny that the objections have been on point. The scheme has caused problems in various countries that have sometimes been quite severe. The thing is, all those defects have resulted from the fact that the jurisdictions in question have failed to understand what even the Simplistanians have grasped. For democratic principles to be enforced, the votes of all representatives in any Federal legislature must be weighted by the votes received by such legislators when they were elected. Put that principle in place, and none of the problems resulting from past uses of SNTV would have occurred.# 

In a word, cutting up geographical territories is bound to be bad, whether intentionally so, or by accident, and whether it's a first strike or retaliatory. Fighting fire with fire just gets more people burned.  We simply have to get rid of single-winner districts.

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#For an interesting recent discussion of whether federalism can be expected to provide protection against a national autocracy that engages in deliberately discriminatory gerrymandering--or, perhaps, will just make things less democratic at home, see James Gardner, "Can Federalism Protect Subnational Liberal Democracy from Central Authoritarianism?" here. (As usual, I object to the definition of "populism" as a necessarily anti-democratic force in the paper, but I suppose that's pretty much to be expected at this point.)

##See Chapter 8 of my book for a discussion of both the historical shortcomings of SNTV and my claim that the problems it has no doubt engendered would never have occurred if the authority of individual representatives in the legislatures to which they have been elected had been weighted by the votes they received in those elections.