Gerrymandering Part 1: WTF?

What the hell is this?

Impractical cardboard earmuffs? Rhode Island and Anti-Rhode Island about to disappear in a flash of cosmic rays?

…or how about this?

A top-heavy steam shovel falling off a cliff? The Big Dipper viewed from inside a black hole?

…or this?

Did someone build a bridge to from Norway to Panama, and did Spain grow antlers?

No. These are United States Congressional districts under the influence of gerrymandering (from top to bottom, Illinois-4, Texas-2, and Texas-33).

What is gerrymandering, and how does it work?

Gerrymandering is the art and science of drawing the borders of Congressional districts to give an advantage to a political party or some other segment of the population.

Article 1 Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution says that the House of Representatives is elected by voters every two years. The number of representatives that each state gets is proportional to the population of the state, recalculated every ten years from the results of the decennial U.S. census. And that’s it.

The Constitution gives no details on how the representatives are distributed within the state, and different states had different practices. It took an act of Congress, the Apportionment Act of 1842, to standardize the process. Ever since, each state has been divided into districts, with one representative per district. This makes good sense – the citizens of Watertown, New York have very different needs from the citizens of Lower Manhattan, and they deserve to elect a representative who they believe will best meet their needs.

So how do you go from this general principle of local representatives to specific districts to be represented? In general, it’s up to each state legislature to divide the state into congressional districts. Districts must be contiguous (covering a single area, with no holes or outlying areas), and must have approximately equal populations. Other than that, and a few other legal requirements and guidelines we’ll look at later, it’s entirely up to the state legislature.

Leaving something so fundamental to the political process in the hands of a potentially partisan state legislature is a recipe for parties using the process to their advantage – and indeed, history has shown that creative assignment of congressional districts is one of democracy’s most effective cheat codes.

The "Gerrymander" political cartoon from 1812, showing the salamander-shaped district created by Elbridge Gerry as an actual salamander
The Gerrymander illustration by Elkanah Tisdale, 1812

The name comes from the first famous proponent of the practice, former Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry. In 1812, Gerry was in charge of designing Massachusetts’s 20 electoral districts (Massachusetts elected representatives by district even before the Apportionment Act of 1842 required it).

Gerry was a member of the Democratic-Republican Party in a state with a majority of voters from the opposing Federalist Party. He figured out the One Weird Trick to guarantee his party a House seat by connecting multiple Democratic-Republican strongholds west of Boston into a single long, narrow district. Federalists looked at a map of the district and noticed that it looked like a salamander, so they named it the “Gerrymander.” The carton shown here helped popularize the name, and solidified the opposition to Gerry’s proposal. The name stuck, and has been adopted worldwide – as a verb, adjective, and noun to describe the practice and its effects. (Interesting aside: Gerry’s name is pronounced with a hard G, as in gay, while the eponymous practice of gerrymandering is pronounced with a soft G, as in “Genesis Device.” I have no idea how that change happened).

An illustration of how gerrymandering can lead to different representation for the same voters
Image by Wikipedia user M.Boli

This diagram from Wikipedia is a great simple illustration of how gerrymandering works in practice. The rectangle shows an imaginary state where 60 percent of voters vote for the Blue Party and 40 percent for the Yellow Party. Where the state legislature draws the lines around districts will have a massive effect on how the state is represented.

It is easily possible to draw lines resulting in a majority of representatives for the Yellow Party, despite a clear voter preference for the Blue Party – or alternatively, to elect only Blue representatives, ignoring the opinions of 40 percent of voters. Or, hopefully, to design a legislature that really represents the will of the people.

Stay tuned, because over the next several weeks (or months?), we’ll be taking a deep, deep dive into gerrymandering, with lots of maps and datasets to guide us. Along the way, we’ll explore the reasons for gerrymandering, the strategies used to enact it, and how it is employed (or not) in countries around the world. And, maybe most importantly, we’ll go state by state to look for ways to draw electoral district maps more fairly.

Coming up on Wednesday: a simple measure of how gerrymandered a state is, based solely on how weird the shape of the district is. This will make more sense once I tell you about the metric, but an obvious question is: what is the most weirdly-shaped district in the entire United States?

Right here. It’s the district I lived in from 2003 to 2021: Maryland’s 3rd district. Behold:

Maryland’s 3rd Congressional District (?!!)

Shall perish from the Earth

man in yellow dress shirt sitting on chair
Who is this guy? Why does he want government of the people to perish? Why does he hate America? WHAT IS HE HIDING?

Photo by Ramaz Bluashvili on Pexels.com

When people share quotes from scientific articles but refuse to link to the full article, you should immediately be suspicious.

It’s a more extreme example than you’ll encounter in real life, but absolutely captures the spirit of the argument style: let me share this quote from the Gettysburg Address.

œNow we are engaged in a great civil war. It is entirely fitting and proper that we should do this. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall perish from the Earth.

Lincoln (1863)

So what should you do if you encounter this in real life? Ask to see the full article – politely but firmly, and repeatedly if necessary.

Sometimes the full article is hidden behind a paywall, but my friend can get you access through his employer. Send me the reference and he will send you the article.

Guess the outlier!

Here’s a quick and timely data science post.

I made a graph (histogram) of the ages of quarterbacks currently playing in the National (American) Football League. The graph is below. Age labels are along the bottom, increasing to the right. Along the left are labels of the number of quarterbacks at each age, increasing going up.

Look at that bar waaaaaaaaaaay oooooooover theeeeeeeeere to the right. Who do you think that is?

A graph (histogram) of NFL quarterback ages (n = 108). Click for a larger view.

Some stats

This guy, WTF?

Number of quarterbacks: 120

Average (mean) age: 27.6 years

Standard deviation (a measure of how spread out the data is): 4.5 years

Conclusion

Love him or hate him, Tom Brady is a freak of nature.

Want to see it for yourself?

Download my Excel spreadsheet!

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

Welcome back to what is inexplicably my most popular blog topic ever: the announcement of this year’s long-awaited Best Sexy [Thing That Is Inherently Not Sexy] Halloween Costume Contest!

What is the Best Sexy [Thing That Is Inherently Not Sexy] Halloween Costume Contest, you ask? It’s an annual event on my social media, now entering its sixth year (although we skipped 2020), celebrating (?) the weirdness that is Halloween as celebrated on Earth, and especially as celebrated in the United States. Specifically, the weirdness of Halloween costumes.

What is so weird about Halloween Costumes?

Imagine that you are a woman (easy for about 50% of you) and that your favorite animal is a moose (easy for me). You want nothing more than to go out with your friends and celebrate the majestic moose.

Behold, the ONLY women’s moose costume I could find on the Internet:

And there is the problem: for just about any costume idea you can imagine, there are no costumes available in women’s sizes for that idea – instead, there are just SEXY costumes. And Sexy Moose is not even in the Top 100 weirdest.

And so in 2015, I decided to take the moose by the antlers and sponsor a contest. I invite you to suggest the best, weirdest, most WTF examples of sexy Halloween costumes. In particular, I invite you to suggest costumes that bring sexy to things that are totally, completely, Inherently Not Sexy.

Presenting the winners from previous years, and the people who suggested them:

2015: Sexy Orca

Suggested by Jeremy Berg

2016: Sexy Scrabble

Suggested by Kelly Simms

2017: Sexy Green Poo

Suggested by Aimee Shoff

2018: Sexy Marcel Duchamp Art Gallery Urinal

Suggested by Christina Rawls

2019: Sexy Mr. Rogers

Suggested by Elliot Kresmer

I’ve already gotten several great suggestions for costumes this year, which I will review on Friday. In the meantime, keep those suggestions coming!

American Democracy Update

During the wild ride that was the 2020 election, I created a new way of visualizing election maps. I started by making a new electoral vote map to replace the one that gets shoved in our faces every four years, but it quickly became clear that my new style of map would be just as useful for showing the legislative branch.

Instead of showing a traditional map that massively distorts the apparent legislative power of large-area states and large-area congressional districts, I made each seat the same size. And because many House districts have completely ridiculous shapes, I displayed each district as the same shape – a hexagon, for easiest tessellation.

The result is two maps – one for the U.S. Senate and one for the U.S. House of Representatives – that show the distribution of political power in the U.S. legislature as it really is. From there, it’s easy to add the names and political parties of each representative to give a comprehensive picture of the legislature.

We last looked at this picture this March, with an update on the Senate, followed by an update on the House. How does it look today?

There has been no change in the membership of the Senate – see the map below, where Senators are shown by name in the approximate location of the state they represent, color coded by party. Red means Republican, blue means Democratic, and light blue means Independent Senators who have joined the Democratic Caucus.

The current United States Senate (click to open a larger version in a new tab)

Meanwhile there have been several changes in the House:

The current United States House of Representatives (click to open a larger version in a new tab)
  • Two elections have finally been settled after multiple recounts, and the candidates have finally taken their seats
  • It’s been a bad year for deaths in the House
    • On December 29, 2020 – before he could even take office – Luke Letlow (R-LA-5) died of COVID-19. A special election was held on March 20, 2021, which was won by his widow Julia Letlow (R-LA-5).
    • On February 7, 2021, Ron Wright (R-TX-6) died, also of COVID-19. A special election was held on July 27th, won by Jake Ellzey (R-TX-6).
    • On April 6, 2021, Alcee Hastings (D-FL-20) died of pancreatic cancer at age 84. A special election will be held on January 11, 2022 to name his replacement.
  • In happier news, some representatives have left for other jobs
    • On January 15, 2021, Cedric Richmond (D-LA-2) resigned to become Director of the Office of Public Liaison in President Biden’s cabinet. A special election on May 11th chose Troy Carter (D-LA-2) as his replacement.
    • On March 10th, Marcia Fudge (D-OH-11) resigned to become the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. A special election to replace her will be held on November 2nd.
    • On March 16th, Deb Haaland (D-NM-2) resigned to become Secretary of the Interior. On June 1st, a special election chose Melanie Stansbury (D-NM-2) to replace her.
    • On May 16th, Steve Stivers (R-OH-15) resigned to become the President and CEO of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. A special election to replace him will be held on November 2nd.

So the current party count is: 220 Democratic, 212 Republican, 3 vacant seats. Here is the map again; be sure to click on it for a larger version where you can more easily read the names of the representatives.

The current United States House of Representatives (click to open a larger version in a new tab)

As membership changes, more updates to come… American Democracy updates!