Your proposal is intriguing, and I'm always in favor of seeking win-win situations.
But ... I suspect that legislators who currently have the power to gerrymander outrageously won't be willing to settle for the power to gerrymander just a little bit.
I suspect that they will gladly fight in court to preserve their power. And if somehow they're forced to use independent commissions, they'll do their best to stack those. And they won't worry about the possibility that sometime in the future the other side will prevail and gerrymander against them.
(Did Mitch McConnell hold back on stacking the Supreme Court because he worried that the Democrats would someday be in power and do the same? No---he used his power when he had it.)
In other words, won't the legislators who are in the majority see this as a lose-win situation for them?
The "win-win" idea sounds resonable, but as always "the devil is in the details" and I am skeptical that legislatures (in either NY or NC) could agree on how to construct reasonable "ensembles" by which to evaluate newly drawn maps. So, really nice idea, but I doubt it will work. Now a couple of specific issues. You say "With the Court’s recent conservative shift, it is unclear how the Court would rule on a similar suit today." about
with Kavanaugh replacing Kennedy and Barrett replacing Ginsburg, I don't think the current court would be other than 6-3 the other way ... do you?
I read the first part of the Bangia et al article from which you included the right half of their figure 5. While the figure supports your (and their) argument, it (and the left half of that figure) have an "artifact" which, IMHO, deserves explanation but has none. Bangia et al note that "the distribution of the 6th most Republican distict is quite peaked" (in both halves of the figure) but do not comment on the fact that the same peak, at the same democratic vote fraction is there in the 5th and 7th (and to a lesser degree in the 4th) most Republican districts (MRDs). I find this quite surprising and to me it deserves an explanation. The histograms for the 2-4 and 8-10 MRDs have a "sort of" unimodal distribution resembling your "schematic view". To me it is not that surprising the extreme districts have weird histograms, but that the MRDs 5-7 have this weird peak, while MRDs 2-4 and 8-10 do not makes me wonder what is going on.
Lee,
Your proposal is intriguing, and I'm always in favor of seeking win-win situations.
But ... I suspect that legislators who currently have the power to gerrymander outrageously won't be willing to settle for the power to gerrymander just a little bit.
I suspect that they will gladly fight in court to preserve their power. And if somehow they're forced to use independent commissions, they'll do their best to stack those. And they won't worry about the possibility that sometime in the future the other side will prevail and gerrymander against them.
(Did Mitch McConnell hold back on stacking the Supreme Court because he worried that the Democrats would someday be in power and do the same? No---he used his power when he had it.)
In other words, won't the legislators who are in the majority see this as a lose-win situation for them?
I would agree with this if the % to which the maps are gerrymandered would be limited to a small %. What would you recommend?
The "win-win" idea sounds resonable, but as always "the devil is in the details" and I am skeptical that legislatures (in either NY or NC) could agree on how to construct reasonable "ensembles" by which to evaluate newly drawn maps. So, really nice idea, but I doubt it will work. Now a couple of specific issues. You say "With the Court’s recent conservative shift, it is unclear how the Court would rule on a similar suit today." about
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/arizona-state-legislature-v-arizona-independent-redistricting-commission/
with Kavanaugh replacing Kennedy and Barrett replacing Ginsburg, I don't think the current court would be other than 6-3 the other way ... do you?
I read the first part of the Bangia et al article from which you included the right half of their figure 5. While the figure supports your (and their) argument, it (and the left half of that figure) have an "artifact" which, IMHO, deserves explanation but has none. Bangia et al note that "the distribution of the 6th most Republican distict is quite peaked" (in both halves of the figure) but do not comment on the fact that the same peak, at the same democratic vote fraction is there in the 5th and 7th (and to a lesser degree in the 4th) most Republican districts (MRDs). I find this quite surprising and to me it deserves an explanation. The histograms for the 2-4 and 8-10 MRDs have a "sort of" unimodal distribution resembling your "schematic view". To me it is not that surprising the extreme districts have weird histograms, but that the MRDs 5-7 have this weird peak, while MRDs 2-4 and 8-10 do not makes me wonder what is going on.
As you can tell you got my attention.