Gerrymandering

This 2014 essay discussed the issue of same-sex marriage in the context of judicial review principles.  Although the U.S. Supreme Court held that same-sex marriage was a constitutional right in 2015, the reflections in the paper on judicial review were not modified by that decision.

Este plan de trabajo, finalmente cancelado, abarcaba ocho cursos intensivos que preparé en su oportunidad para la Universidad de Sevilla.

Las conferencias y talleres previstos eran los siguientes:

1. Conferencia 1. “Simetrías y geometrías complejas”. Teorías, prácticas y herramientas. Master en Antropología y máster en Gestión del Territorio - 5 días.

2. Conferencia 2. “Estado del arte en ciencias de la complejidad”, Master en
Antropología. Una o dos jornadas de trabajo y planificación de investigaciones.

3. Conferencia 3. “Cambios y convergencias culturales en la música afroamericana y europea, con énfasis en la génesis y fusiones de los géneros barrocos y de los palos caribeños del flamenco”. Instituto de Estudios sobre América Latina-US y máster en Gestión del Patrimonio Andaluz. 1 ó 2 jornadas.

4. Conferencia 4. “Estado de arte en análisis y gestión del espacio y el tiempo. Más allá de la geometría del poder”. Doctorado en Ciencias Económicas, Empresariales y Sociales.1 ó 2 jornadas.

5. Conferencia 5. “Usos políticos de las técnicas avanzadas de la antropología y las
ciencias sociales. Tecnologías, alcances y riesgos”. Participación de la antropología en
proyectos de vigilancia, control social y contra-insurgencia y la aparición de la antropología de la ocupación y la contra-contrainsurgencia. Medio día o jornada completa.

6. Conferencia 6. “Modelos de antropología compleja en contextos urbanos y regionales. El caso de la antropología epidemiológica del COVID-19 y de otras pandemias”. El caso del intercambio con la Universidad Nacional de Colombia y de la Maestría en Tecnologías Urbanas Sostenibles de la Facultad de Ingeniería de  la Universidad de Buenos Aires. Medio día o jornada completa.

7. Conferencia 7. “Modelos complejos adaptativos ante el cambio climático, el
calentamiento global y los procesos de decolonización”. El caso de la agricultura en Indonesia y el choque entre la revolución verde y los dilemas en torno de la agricultura tradicional en el noroeste argentino. Medio día o jornada completa.

8. Conferencia 8. “Luces y sombras de la antropología como disciplina comparativa”.
Desmontaje técnico e ideológico de los métodos comparativos y de las posturas opuestas a la comparación, desde el método comparativo del darwinismo social hasta la decolonización. Medio día o jornada completa

¿Es posible en Chile la distorsión de los resultados electorales producto de actos legislativos, actos administrativos, o ambos, que influyan sustancialmente en las características de los distritos electorales? El presente artículo busca dar respuesta a esta interrogante a través de la interpretación de la Ley N° 18.700, Orgánica Constitucional de Votaciones Populares y Escrutinios (y normas relacionadas) y generando escenarios posibles a partir de ella. Así, también se busca dar una respuesta aproximada al riesgo que puede correr el sistema democrático por este tipo de manipulaciones del sistema electoral.

In 2016, the California Legislature passed Senate Bill 958, requiring the County of Los Angeles to assemble the Los Angeles County Citizens Redistricting Commission (LA County CRC) following the 2020 Federal Census. The LA County CRC’s role is to establish the boundary lines of five single-member Supervisorial Districts (SDs) of the County of Los Angeles Board of Supervisors (BOS), following each Federal decennial Census.

The LA County CRC is to be independent from the influence of the BOS and reasonably representative of the County’s diversity. As the first-ever independent commission in Los Angeles County, the LA County CRC’s approved map is the final map and cannot be redrawn by the BOS.

Los Angeles County is the most populous county in the United States with a population greater than 10 million people. It is home to 25% of California’s population and has a population greater than 41 individual U.S. states. It is the third largest metropolitan economy in the world. It consists of 88 cities, including the City of Los Angeles with 4 million residents, and 122 unincorporated areas.

As background, California is one of eight states that uses a non-partisan approach to redistricting. The County of Los Angeles is one of at least 10 local jurisdictions in California using this approach for the first time in 2021 and is the largest county in the nation to adopt this independent approach at the local level. Thus, the LA County CRC’s approach can serve as a model for other local and state jurisdictions in the coming years.

The report outlines the challenges in setting up a new independent commission, compounded by further challenges of historic proportion, including 2020 Census data delays; new mapping software that was cloud-based and resulted in more than 113 map submissions for review; increased public awareness of the importance for compliance with the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 (52 U.S.C. § 10101 et seq.) and other redistricting criteria; and the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring that the majority of the LA County CRC’s 56 meetings and public hearings had to be held virtually, also “firsts” for any commission in County of Los Angeles history.

Between November 1, 2021, and December 12, 2021, more than 3,200 individuals attended the 14 meetings/public hearings virtually or watched via YouTube. The Commissioners received oral and written testimony from more than 4,600 members of the public.

For more information, go to:
https://redistricting.lacounty.gov/
For media coverage/reporting on the LA County CRC, go to: https://redistricting.lacounty.gov/redistricting-news/

La réforme des institutions en cours s’appuie sur une réforme électorale d’ampleur dont l’objectif est d’améliorer l’efficacité du Parlement et sa représentativité. Une mise en perspective montre, toutefois, qu’elle échouera à atteindre ses objectifs notamment car elle s’avère fondée sur des arguments empiriquement discutables et des postulats contestables. Ses conséquences n’en seront pas moins significatives pour la carte électorale, les députés et les partis politiques. Surtout, la réforme électorale apparaît comme la mesure essentielle de la réforme institutionnelle par ses effets indirects sur le Parlement.

სტატიის მიზანია თანასწორი საარჩევნო უფლების მიზნებისთვის საარჩევნო
გეოგრაფიის და მისით მანიპულირების თეორიული გააზრება, საარჩევნო საზღვრებზე საკონსტიტუციო კონტროლის ფარგლებში გამოვლენილი გამოწვევების
იდენტიფიცირება და პარლამენტში ინიცირებული კონსტიტუციური კანონის პროექტით საარჩევნო საზღვრებით მანიპულირების ნიშნების შეფასება

This article explains how the electoral one-party state of United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) in Malaysia is maintained through constituency delimitation. It examines how the means of inter-state malapportionment, intra-state malapportionment, gerrymandering, pre-delimitation boundary changes and seat increase are used in the on-going delimitation exercises. Malapportionment and gerrymandering in the last cycle of delimitation exercises in 2003–5 had secured Prime Minister Najib Razak a comfortable 60% parliamentary majority in 2013 despite winning only 47% of popular votes. While Razak may sufer greater attrition of votes due to his global fnancial scandal involving Malaysia’s state sovereign fund, 1MDB, he may still win a bigger parliamentary majority in the upcoming election, which must be held latest by August 2018. The article questions if the First- Past-the-Post (FPTP) electoral system, which is not only susceptible to manipulations, but also very winner-takes-all in nature, suits Malaysia’s plural society.

The fairness of delimitation process can only be revived with comprehensive constitutional restructure on the relevant framework. The existing position clearly gives enormous advantage to the ruling party to manipulate the process. Their power may be partly deterred by a denial to two-third majority in the House of Representative, but this control mechanism, which most of the time is difficult to be achieved, is inadequate to counter the government’s wide authority. The problems surrounding the delimitation process are not only about its jurisdiction, but also about the procedure of conducting the review of electoral boundary.

This essay analyzes the significance of García v. Taft, Texas Voting Rights Case, which was heard in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Corpus Christi Division, Civil Action NO. C-84-230, in 1985. The final decision was made in 1989. The case addresses a gerrymandered, at-large election system in the City of Taft, which was used to exclude African/Mexican-American residents from seeking office. The gerrymandered city boundaries did not include a large portion of the Mexican-American and African-American voting block. To this day, a considerable part of this voting block remains outside city boundaries. But this has become irrelevant as the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) and its 1975, 1982, and 2006 extensions of Section 5, were seriously gutted by the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) in 2013. Using this case, I will describe the events as the author of this paper remembers them from the experience as teenage attending meetings and being involved in this action through the lead plaintiffs (Maria and Miguel García) efforts to include their children in the momentous case. In addition to the authors recollections, the oral histories of Maria García and José Garza (attorney for the Mexican American Legal and Educational Defense Fund (MALDEF)) along with newspaper stories, court documents, literature review and presentation and attendance at the Latinos, the VRA and Political Engagement Conference at UT-Austin in November 2015 to examine local Mexican-American history in Texas through political mobilization, racial gerrymandering, and the at-large election process providing an understanding about the 1989 García v. Taft decision.

I discuss three recent rulings by Mexico’s Electoral Supreme Court (TEPJF) on boundary delimitation and describe how the inclusion of minority groups (indigenous population) has evolved in the last three decades. I argue that although there has been a slow but consistent tendency to include minority groups in key stages of redistricting there is still significant room for improvement.

The word “tribalism” has become the new cant expression. Linguist Geoff Nunberg nominated it as the word of the year 2017. The current usage of “political tribalism” stems from Yale Law School professor Amy Chua’s 1918 book Political Tribes: Groups Instinct and the Fate of Nations. She posits a new expanded definition of tribe to include whites, blacks, ethnic groups, religious groups, and even political parties. Chua’s use of the term “political tribes” does nothing to improve on Madison’s term “factions.” Madison’s point was that when a political faction constitutes a majority, a large republic in contrast to a small democracy functions to prevent the majority from infringing on the rights of a minority. But when a faction constitutes a minority, Madison thought that the “republican principle” would take care of the matter.

The problem with Chua’s construct of “tribalism” is that it equally puts the blame on both the Liberal, or Progressives in the Democratic  Party and Conservatives in the Republican Party. More accurately we need to view the current crisis in American Democracy on how the governmental checks and balances envisioned by the Founding Fathers has been broken. The broken system is the result of a number of things, including political gerrymandering, the Supreme Court ruling affording the protection of free speech to Super PACs (political actions committees), and the abandonment of the “fairness doctrine” of the Federal Communications Commission.

Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing political voting districts in order to give one political party or another an advantage in elections. The term gerrymandering dates back to an article in the Boston Gazette in March 1812 accusing Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry of signing a law that drew elections maps in the shape of a salamander to giver his Democratic-Republican Party an advantage. In modern times the tactic has been used by both Democrats and Republicans. But in recent years the tactic has been refined using computers to use voter databases to draw voting districts with more precision.

The Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission case of 2010 created another problem for elections. In this case the conservative non-profit organization Citizens United sought to televise a film critical of Hillary Clinton shortly before the 2008 presidential election. The Federal Elections Commission blocked the broadcast based on the 2002 Bipartison Campaign Reforms Act (known as McCain-Feingold after its sponsors senators Republican of Arizona John McCain and Democrat from Wisconsin Russ Feingold  prohibited any corporation or labor union from electioneering within 30 days of a primary. The Supreme Court ruled that this law violated the right of free speech under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Citizens United  overturned the ban on corporation and union contributions and allowed Super PACs (Political Action Committees) to spend large amounts of money on political advertisements without revealing the donors to their organizations. The Democrats as well have formed super PACs. One of them that supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is Priorities USA Action to which the Hungarian-American George Soros donated $7 million. Ironically, Donald J. Trump won the 2016 election without the benefit of major super PAC contributions.

The Fairness Doctrine was issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1949 requiring the holders of broadcast licenses to present controversial issues in a honest, equitable, and manner. In 1987, under the administration of Ronald Reagan, the FCC declared the Fairness Doctrine as unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Meanwhile, in the late 1990s there was a growing politicization of cable news, which technically came under the jurisdiction of the FCC by virtue of being a broadcast medium. In 1996 Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch founded the Fox News Channel satellite news television network and hired Roger Ailes, a Republic political strategist, to become its CEO of the news operation. Another conservative news outlet was One America News (OAN) founded in July 2013 founded in San Diego, California, by Robert Herring, Sr. of Herring Networks, Inc. OAN is noted for its pro-Trump and anti-abortion coverage and for promoting falsehoods and conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton. Not only did Conservative propagandists take over Fox News and OAN, but there was consolidation of local television stations by Right-Wing communications companies. The largest owner of television stations in the United States is the Sinclair Broadcast Group founded by David D. Smith.

Adding to this radical politicization of the Right-Wing broadcast and print media, there was an attempt to use social media to influence the election by Vladimir Putin and his Russian agents in the Russian Military Intelligence Service (GRU). In June 2016 the Democratic National Committee announced that that their campaign servers had been hacked by an online persona known as Guccifer2.0. In August 2016 the Russian spread fabricated articles on approximately 7,000 pro-Trump social media accounts, using Internet trolls (persons who spread negative information on the Internet), botnets (malicious software that spreads rumors without the website owner’s knowledge), and Twitter accounts (online social media accounts that publish Tweets, i.e., messages originally limited to 140 characters).

The Electoral College was never intended to work the way it was used in the November 2016 election in which the Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton received more popular votes 65,853,514 (48.2%) than the Republican nominee Donald J. Trump 62,984,828 (46.1%). But Trump received 304 votes in the Electoral College to Clinton’s 227. Alexander Hamilton explained the purpose the Electoral College in Federalist Paper Number 68. “Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” What the Founding Fathers were concerned about was what they called the “Tyranny of the Majority.” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg writes that today we are confronted by a “Tyranny of the Minority.”

In conclusion, the real issue for the American Empire is not the development of “political tribalism” on the part of both Democrats and Republicans. It is much more structural. The basic concept of check and balances between the three branches of government (Executive, Judicial, and Legislative) is in danger of breaking down with a minority of Right-wing Republicans dominating all three branches.
One week after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1964, his widow Jacqueline Kennedy invited the journalist Theodore White to her mansion for an interview. At that meeting she mentioned that both she and her husband loved the musical Camelot about King Arthur that ran on Broadway between 1960 and 1963. JFK had been a classmate at Harvard with Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the lyrics for the show. Clearly, Mrs. Kennedy was trying to shape a heroic legend for her husband and his administration. Like all legends it was not based on historical fact, given subsequent scholarship that showed JFK to be an anti-Communist Cold War warrior and to have been forced into intervening in the Civil Rights movement. And yet there is another interpretation of the Arthurian legend that might well apply to the administration of Donald J. Trump, given his stance as a denier of scientific evidence that global warming is part the result of human actions. In 1922 the American poet T. S. Eliot wrote a poem titled “Waste Land” based on his understanding the death of the Fisher King, the possessor of the Holy Grail.

O Brasil discute o “voto distrital”, estando em deliberação no Congresso o chamado “distritão”. Infelizmente a discussão sobre assuntos de tamanha complexidade é posta em debate — isto é, quando existe debate sério — de forma muito simplória. Quase se resume a uma singela discussão ao estilo “prefiro este ou aquele” modelo. Nada muito aprofundado.

Long before Adolf Hitler's appearance clouded democracy's prospects in Germany, election battles had provided a means to disadvantage "enemies of the Reich" in the polling booth. Such battles were waged not only during election campaigns but also when new voting laws were legislated and district boundaries were redrawn. Maps produced during the Imperial era informed voters, statesmen, and social scientists how the principle of the fair and equal vote was compromised at the subnational level, and new maps offer historians an opportunity to consider struggles for influence and power in visual terms. This article argues that local, regional, and national suffrages need to be considered together and in terms of their reciprocal effects. On the one hand, focusing on overlaps and spillovers between electoral politics at different tiers of governance can illuminate the perceptions and attitudes that are constitutive of electoral culture. On the other hand, using cartography to supplement statistical analysis can make election battles more accessible to nonspecialist audiences. Combining these approaches allows us to rethink strategies of political exclusion in Imperial Germany's coexisting suffrage regimes. Focusing on Leipzig and its powerful Social Democratic organization opens a window on larger issues about how Germans conceived questions of political fairness in a democratizing age.

There are several legal and technical challenges to the establishment of a standard for limiting partisan gerrymandering, and a few methods have been proposed thus far. All methods for examining gerrymandering use observations of the results of one or more elections to make inferences about the tendency of a given redistricting plan to lead to biased outcomes. Here we propose an empirical Bayesian framework which allows an analyst to make such inferences accurately by using all available election results for the redistricting plan in question in a robust and consistent statistical model. The framework can be used with any gerrymandering metric. Additionally, we propose a new measure of gerrymandering called the specific asymmetry which we believe will stand up better to judicial and technical tests than any other measure proposed thus far. The specific asymmetry does not rely on propor-tionality of seats and votes, is applicable to any level of statewide partisanship, does not require national results as a baseline, and measures bias at the popular vote that actually occurred as opposed to some other hypothetical popular vote. All other available metrics fall short in at least one of these aspects, which leaves them vulnerable to criticism and manipulation by those seeking to gerrymander or to defend an existing gerrymander. We analyze the magnitude and persistence of partisan bias under a particular dis-tricting plan by using the empirical Bayesian model to compute the expected value of the specific asymmetry. This analysis technique is applied to the United States congressional elections from 1972-2016 to examine the total and net effects of partisan bias in recent history. We also examine the Act 43 map for the Wisconsin State Assembly, which is the subject of Whitford v. Gill.

no-10), published in the Fall 2017 issue of The Public Interest (no. 33). As I am currently preoccupied with writing a book about the Electoral College, my following remarks are incomplete and necessarily selective. A more thorough analysis would require an extended essay, if not a book. But my observations below may be of some interest.

Are race and ethnicity considered most by the majority political party in the process of mapping out congressional districts in different states? Due to the lack of judicial supervision, political parties are able to use gerrymandering to misrepresent minority groups in the United States. To investigate his problem, I look at the racial composition (White, African American, Hispanic / Latino, and Asian) of both gerrymandered and non-gerrymandered congressional districts using the United States Census data. My hypothesis is that race and ethnicity are indirectly the most considered factors used in redistricting to make congressional districts more favorable to the leading political party. This research discusses the influences of gerrymandering on the representation of minority groups in the United States. Representation is one of the key elements of promoting democracy in any nation. My hypothesis was false; political parties focus mostly on the rival party during gerrymandering and minority representation is affected in that process. Gerrymandering could be used to favor minority groups if their political align with that of the leading political party in any given district and minority groups are not well dispersed around the nation.

Allegations of electoral irregularities loomed large prior to and following Malaysia’s 13th general election in May 2013. Yet while these irregularities elicited strong reactions domestically and internationally, they are unlikely to have played a significant role in shaping the
election’s outcome. Rather than how the game was played, it was the very rules of the game itself that were responsible for returning the United Malays National Organization and its Barisan Nasional coalition to power for the 13th consecutive time, as Malaysia’s electoral institutions quietly transformed the incumbent coalition’s 4% deficit in the popular vote into a 20% winning margin of parliamentary seats. This is largely the result of substantial variation in the size of electoral districts, which had the effect of delivering parliamentary seats to Barisan Nasional with significantly fewer votes than were required by the opposition to secure its seats. This article has two primary aims. First, it seeks to understand better malapportionment in Malaysia by examining the degree of distortions at multiple institutional levels. It demonstrates these distortions to be exceptionally high from a comparative perspective. Second, it seeks to understand better the factors responsible for the size variation of electoral districts, specifically the extent to which the non-partisan factors stipulated in the constitution can explain the variation. Several tests are conducted using new data on the density of voters in electoral districts. The results strongly indicate a partisan element to malapportionment. This creates an institutionalized bias against the opposition and risks increasing polarization in the Malaysian polity.

Özet Bu araştırma, 2012 yılında yapılan 6360 sayılı kanunla yapılan değişiklikle gerçekleşen yerel seçim sınırlarına ilişkin düzenlemenin yeniden merkezileşmeye yol açtığını iddia etmekte ve bunu ampirik olarak kanıtlamaktadır. Bu argümanları kanıtlamak için seçim davranışı ile seçmen profili arasındaki ilişkiyi ele alan sivil gönüllülük modeli kullanılmıştır. Araştırmada kullanılan veriler Yüksek Seçim Kurulu (YSK) ve Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu (TÜİK) ile bir gayrimenkul internet sitesi kullanılarak oluşturulan verilerden oluşmaktadır. Bulgular, muhalefet partisinin hâkim olduğu alanların daralmakta olduğunu, bunun da ötesinde, söz konusu düzenlemeyi yapan siyasi iktidarın çeperde yer alan kendi egemenliğindeki alanları dahi yereldeki temsilcilerine bırakmayacak kadar merkezden idare etme eğilimine girdiğini göstermektedir. Bu durum seçim sınırlarına ilişkin yapılan düzenlemenin siyasal iktidarın hakimiyet alanını genişletmesinin ötesinde hegemonik bir biçimde Türkiye'de merkezileşme dinamiklerini yeniden harekete geçirdiğini ve bunun gerçekleşmesi için mekanın araçsallaştırıldığını göstermesi açısından önemlidir. Abstract The aim of this research is to demonstrate empirically that gerrymandering takes place specifically in the municipal elections which first started by the law 6360 in 2012 and not only leads to expansion of the political power's hegemony while limiting the opposition party's electoral boundary but also centralization. In order to prove this argument, civil voluntarism model, which deals with the relationship between electoral behaviors and voter's profile, was used. We use data on voter qualifications and election results from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TSI) and the Supreme Electoral Board (SEB), two state institutions. And we also used an economic data we created from a real estate website. The findings show that the areas dominated by the opposition party are shrinking. Furthermore, the findings show that the ruling party that made this regulation tended to be centralized to the extent that it did not leave its domination areas to their local representatives. In this case, the regulation cannot be seen as a simple arrangement about only expanding of electoral boundaries. It also shows that mobilizes the dynamics of recentralization in Turkey and the place is instrumentalized for this purpose.

So-called democratic states rest upon acts of violence and exclusion which cannot themselves be justified democratically. Yet, much contemporary political theory takes these configurations for granted as the context for philosophical reflection. This paper explores some of the spatio-temporal paradoxes of popular sovereignty as conventionally understood -- i.e., as the authorization of government through the consent of "the people." I argue that, instead of treating the borders of popular sovereignty as given, political philosophy would benefit from greater attention to their continual contestation and critique.

We extend the estimation of the components of partisan biasdi.e., undue advantage conferred to some party in the conversion of votes into legislative seatsdto single-member district systems in the presence of multiple parties. Extant methods to estimate the contributions to partisan bias from malapportion-ment, boundary delimitations, and turnout are limited to two-party competition. In order to assess the spatial dimension of multi-party elections, we propose an empirical procedure combining three existing approaches: a separation method (Grofman et al. 1997), a multi-party estimation method (King 1990), and Monte Carlo simulations of national elections (Linzer, 2012). We apply the proposed method to the study of recent national lower chamber elections in Mexico. Analysis uncovers systematic turnout-based bias in favor of the former hegemonic ruling party that has been offset by district geography substantively helping one or both other major parties.

The ethnic and territorial dispute in Iraq’s divided city of Kirkuk has not been resolved as was required by Iraq’s 2005 constitution. A main historical origin of the dispute is the Arabization policy of Saddam Hussein which institutionalized persecution of non-Arabs in Iraq. Today, the dispute has become a constitutional battle over the identity of the Iraqi state itself which is complicated by the return migration of Kurds into Kirkuk. As one of Iraq’s disputed territories, Kirkuk is literally in the center of this crisis and is often viewed as a microcosm of Iraq’s ethnic diversity. The aim of this paper is to analyze the theory of transitional justice and truth commissions to determine whether or not such a mechanism may reduce the ethnic tension in Kirkuk so that the constitutionally mandated census and referendum can occur peacefully. It is concluded that although reconciliation projects in Iraq have consistently failed, and Kirkuk’s security remains in question, there exists a precedent for an investigatory, or ‘truth,’ commission to succeed in a city within a divided state. However, such a commission will not emerge without public consultation and wide recognition of the lessons from other case studies.

Photo credit: Paul M. Ong Preface The political rights of asian americans, as with other marginalized minorities, have been won through struggle, and one of the basic rights is having our voices heard through voting. Historically asian americans were barred from citizenship, thus by extensions ineligible to vote. Today, there remain numerous barriers to full participation, particularly for encountered immigrants. The efforts to increase voting have focused on helping asian americans to naturalize, register and turn out at the polls. Maximizing opportunities for individuals to become engaged also requires institutional changes. Included in this broader agenda is the ability to have a meaningful and fair chance to elect officials who best represent the group's concerns, interests and priorities. In part, this requires not fragmenting an asian american neighborhood into small and ineffective slivers that are spread over many electoral districts. Whether this will happen in the near future depends on events over the next two to three years, particularly those associated with redistricting, the process of drawing boundaries for electoral districts. asian americans are relatively new to this process, with their first concerted effort occurring after the 1990 census. community-based organizations and public-interest groups now have greater technical and political capacities to participate in redistricting, but there are new challenges. Perhaps the most important is determining whether a neighborhood is a "community of common interest, " a necessary but not sufficient criterion for keeping it intact. The courts have not stated precise standards, but solid evidence will be required, evidence based in large part on sound social science research methods. The University of california aaPI Policy Multi-campus research Program and the UcLa asian american Studies center have developed this series of pamphlets to asian american stakeholders as a way to be more effective in gathering the information needed to determine whether their neighborhoods are communities with common interests.

Gerrymandering is a form of voting manipulation whereby electoral district boundaries are drawn to produce a partisan or political bias in elections. In this paper, we study partisan gerrymandering in the United States to understand its undemocratic outcomes and how the design of election institutions can promote or prevent gerrymandering. We begin with a survey of the history of gerrymandering, with a particular focus on partisan gerrymandering. We then consider the normative standards of fairness in democracy that partisan gerrymandering may violate. Next, we present a typology of partisan gerrymandering based upon the district maps drawn in California, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Jersey for the 2012 elections. Using the partisan symmetry method, we estimate the seats/votes curves of the congressional maps used in 38 states during the 2012 elections. We find that partisan gerrymanders occur almost exclusively when politicians are given control over redistricting. This ana...

A major approach to the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) is to use social choice, in which the AI is designed to act according to the aggregate views of society. This is found in the AI ethics of " coherent extrapolated volition " and " bottom-up ethics ". This paper shows that the normative basis of AI social choice ethics is weak due to the fact that there is no one single aggregate ethical view of society. Instead, the design of social choice AI faces three sets of decisions: standing, concerning whose ethics views are included; measurement, concerning how their views are identified; and aggregation, concerning how individual views are combined to a single view that will guide AI behavior. These decisions must be made up front in the initial AI design— designers cannot " let the AI figure it out ". Each set of decisions poses difficult ethical dilemmas with major consequences for AI behavior, with some decision options yielding pathological or even catastrophic results. Furthermore, non-social choice ethics face similar issues, such as whether to count future generations or the AI itself. These issues can be more important than the question of whether or not to use social choice ethics. Attention should focus on these issues, not on social choice.

Le découpage électoral sous la V e République est marqué par le mythe du gerrymandering ou du « charcutage électoral ». La carte électorale serait découpée à des fi ns électoralistes par les gouvernements, avec des circonscriptions produisant des gains partisans. Cependant, le découpage électoral ne correspond pas à cette représentation cognitive ordinaire. La déconstruction du processus ainsi que l'analyse statistique et cartographique des conséquences électorales démontrent que le découpage électoral n'est pas un facteur explicatif suffisant, autonome et déterminant des résultats électoraux. Il participe néanmoins à faire l'élection, plus à l'avantage des parlementaires que des partis politiques, et à structurer la compétition électorale.

La thèse dont cet ouvrage est issu a reçu le Prix de thèse 2014 de l'Assemblée nationale, le Prix de thèse 2015 de la fondation Mattei Dogan, décerné par l'Association française de science politique, catégorie « Étude de la société française » et le Prix Corbay 2015, décerné par l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques (Institut de France).

Cílem příspěvku je upozornit na problémy, které obsahuje právní úprava volebních obvodů ve volbách do Poslanecké sněmovny, zastupitelstev obcí a Senátu,  a přinést inspiraci pro případnou změnu. Na otázku obsaženou v názvu příspěvku autor odpovídá tak, že se zatím stále kloní spíše k nešikovnosti než k malování mloka. Doporučoval by však prostor pro případnou manipulaci omezit tím, že budou jak v zákonech, tak cestou soudní interpretace stanoveny podstatně přísnější limity pro vytváření a změny volebních obvodů, než je tomu dosud.

Racial redistricting is a form of territorial rearrangement of electoral districts implemented in the United States in 1990s. Its purpose and effect is to increase the number of districts with an African American or Hispanic majority in order to increase the number of elected officials from those minorities. Racial redistricting is thus a public procedure that takes explicit account of the ethno-racial identity of individuals. The emergence of racial redistricting is explained by the fact that, in the political and legal context of the late 1980s, the officials in charge of redistricting had a vested interest in adopting such a scheme in order to ensure their own continued presence in positions of power. However, racial redistricting had hardly been implemented than its constitutionality was challenged. The Supreme Court then defined the conditions for racial classifications to be validly taken into account in the redistricting process. The Court's complex case law is particularly concerned to make the account taken of racial factors in redistricting as invisible as possible. The objective is to ensure more complete integration of African Americans (and Hispanics) into the US political system

This is the draft of a work introducing a broad agenda for constitutional reform to fix the federal government of the United States, overcome the forces of political extremism, and secure the nation's future for all groups across our diverse society. The book explains 30 proposed amendments with brief arguments for each, and concludes with a detailed argument for holding a new constitutional convention to propose such amendments and send them to states for ratification. (If anyone is interested in refereeing or commenting on this draft, please contact me).

The current discussion on the relationship of epistemic justice to democracy focuses on its relationship to deliberative democracy. This paper concerns the relationship of epistemic justice─speci cally, testimonial justice which I call 'epistemic fairness'─to aggregative democracy or democracy by voting. The aim of this paper is to establish that in a good theory of democracy, epistemic fairness is one of the founding principles of the democratic institution of voting, i.e., the principles by which the democratic institution of voting is organized. Under an arguably plausible interpretation, the democratic institution of voting turns out to be committed to realizing epistemic fairness. If a theory of democracy implies that epistemic fairness is a founding principle of the democratic institution of voting, a number of implications follow with respect to the issues related to the practice of voting in actual democracies, such as the problem of gerrymandering or the fairness of the aggregation rule.

Ente di afferenza: Università di Perugia (unipg) Copyright c by Società editrice il Mulino, Bologna. Tutti i diritti sono riservati. Per altre informazioni si veda https://www.rivisteweb.it Licenza d'uso L'articoloè messo a disposizione dell'utente in licenza per uso esclusivamente privato e personale, senza scopo di lucro e senza fini direttamente o indirettamente commerciali. Salvo quanto espressamente previsto dalla licenza d'uso Rivisteweb,è fatto divieto di riprodurre, trasmettere, distribuire o altrimenti utilizzare l'articolo, per qualsiasi scopo o fine. Tutti i diritti sono riservati.

Öz 2012 yılında yürürlüğe giren 6360 Sayılı Kanun kapsamında 13 ilde büyükşehir belediyesi kurulurken bu illerde mevcut ilçelere ilave olarak 26 yeni ilçe kurulmuştur. Büyükşehir belediyesi kurulan illerden biri olan Hatay'da, bu kanun kapsamında yeni ilçeler de oluşturulmuştur. Hatay'da yeni kurulan ilçelerden biri olan Defne ilçesinin kurulması, yerel seçim sonuçlarını da kapsayan ancak bunun da ötesine geçen oldukça önemli tartışmaları beraberinde getirmiştir. Bu çalışmada, Antakya'dan ayrılarak Defne ilçesinin kurulması ve sınırlarının tespitinin, kanun tasarısını hazırlayan iktidar partisinin yerel seçimlere dair stratejisinin bir parçası olduğu öne sürülmektedir. Defne ilçesinin sınırlarının belirlenmesi süreci bir dizi siyasi beklentiler çerçevesinde şekillenmiştir. Bu beklentilerin en önemlisi, Hatay'ın büyükşehir olmasından sonra en büyük ilçe konumuna gelecek olan Antakya'nın belediye başkanlığını elde tutmaktır. Bu nedenle, Defne sınırları içerisine, stratejik taksimatın en yaygın biçimi olan istifleme yöntemi çerçevesinde iktidar partisine oy vermeyen insanların yaşadıkları bölgeler dâhil edilmiştir. İstifleme Defne'de o kadar ileri boyutlarda gerçekleştirilmiştir ki, seçimlerde CHP'nin ve desteklediği adayların rekor düzeylerde oy oranlara ulaştığı bir ilçe konumuna gelmiştir. Defne ilçesinde istiflemenin yapılması neticesinde AKP'li adayların 2014 ve 2019 yerel seçimlerinde Antakya belediye başkanlığını kazanmaları mümkün olmuştur. Defne ilçesinin kurulması örneğinde de görüldüğü üzere, stratejik taksimat yerel seçimlerde de oldukça etkin biçimde kullanılabilmektedir. Abstract In accordance with the law no. 6360 which came into force in 2012, metropolitan municipalities were founded in 13 cities and, in addition to previously existing districts, 26 new districts were founded within those cities. Hatay was among those 13 cities and in addition to foundation of metropolitan municipality, new districts were also founded in the city. Defne district has been one of newly founded districts in Hatay and its foundation caused various important arguments related to some vital issues to come to surface. In this study, it is argued that, foundation of Defne district by snatching it away from Antakya and determination of its borders are parts of the ruling party's local elections strategy who prepared draft of the law. Determination of Defne district's borders has taken place based on a series of political expectations. One of the most important expectations is to win Antakya mayoralty election. Therefore, living quarters of citizens who do not vote for the ruling party have been included within Defne district. Hence, the district has become an area where the main opposing party and its candidates have received record level votes at elections. As a result of packing strategy in Defne district, candidates of the ruling party were able to win Antakya mayoralty during the 2014 and 2019 local elections. As it has been observed in foundation of Defne district, Gerrymandering can be quite effectively applied at local elections.

Focusing on the contemporary US context, this article examines the ethical quandaries raised by partisan gerrymandering, where constituency boundaries are manipulated for electoral benefit. More specifically, it will examine the ethics of retaliatory gerrymandering. Though gerrymandering cannot be defended as a political practice by any agent who assigns intrinsic value to democracy, it might be justified as a 'dirty hands' (DH) practice, where it is allthings-considered justified as a lesser evil that still leaves a moral residue. However, it does not work as a standard DH problem, as the stakes of gerrymandering are usually less extreme and the causes more structural, making the usual language of DH a poor fit. The core moral intuition behind DH, of doing wrong to do right, is still appropriate, but is best understood within the context of retaliation. When others set the terms of the competition to make a practice such as gerrymandering essential for political victory, a proportionate use of these practices might be necessary to compete.

The authors examine constituency changes induced by redistricting and ask three questions:What explains the amount of instability and uncertainty induced by redistricting? Does uncertainty affect legislators’ career choices? How do these changes affect election outcomes? The authors show that partisan redistricting plans are able to produce significant instability between elections, especially for opposing-party incumbents. Their findings have important implications for representation: through redistricting, strategic actors can disrupt the stability that many theorists would consider paramount for the operation of a democratic republic. The authors show that the effects of redistricting go beyond the simple examination of changes in each district’s underlying partisanship.