Rick Heller of Centerfield is linking to a John Fund article regarding the possibility of California becoming an open primary state. Short version: Fund is profoundly leery of any voting system that could easily reproduce results like the 1991 Louisiana Senate or the 2002 French presidential races. It's hard to blame him, although I would note that in both cases the electorate did not end up electing the lunatic. Still, Rick wants to give it a shot, seeing as he's even less worried about kooks getting elected and he's tired of not having enough centrists* in office.
I'd be much happier with gerrymander-proof Congressional districts, but that's just me. At any rate, I doubt that this will make it past the courts. Granted, Louisiana's did, butthen Louisiana doesn't have 55 Electoral votes. I know that this is cynical of me, but honestly, the existing political parties in CA are happy enough with the status quo - they ought to be; they designed it that way - and thus not in the mood to rock boats. I also believe that this proposal would make Californian elections a bit more complicated, yes? I seem to recall hearing people complain about that sort of thing already, although I could be misremembering...
Moe
*Exactly what is a centrist in this context would be open to debate. I'm not sure that I qualify, from the point of view of that site.
The problem with open primaries is that if one party has a leading candidate, their voters are free to tactically shift in the primary to pick the weakest candidate in the other party - if that party has several candidates without an apparent leader.
This tacitical switching problem won't go away, and it is antithetical to party governance and people choosing their candidates.
GOP conservatives have played this game repeatedly in CA, picking the most conservative choice - who then loses the general election. You might ask why they keep doing the 'losing' thing: they finally got the message with 'Arnold', but only with much grinding of teeth.
Parties have been weakened enough with campaign finance reform. Open primaries will administer the coup de gras.
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | June 17, 2004 at 01:02 AM
Funny, Washington just lost its open primary, leaving only Louisiana, I believe.
"I'd be much happier with gerrymander-proof Congressional districts, but that's just me."
Yes, please. Unfortunately, while this is a bipartisan sentiment, the people who actually make the decisions really, really like being gerrymandered. Calls for a national referendum. This and uncapping the size of the HoR would, I think, do enormous good to Congress. Or maybe they'd just pander a lot more. But regardless, it's what the sweet founders intended.
There was an interesting article in Dr Dobbs of all places, where a guy came up with an algorithm to determine congressional districts that both evened out population per district and kept districts roughly compact (they were basically circular). This would have some weird results, like neighbors being in different districts, and people on the edge of town being in districts with small towns on the edge, but I think it'd be worth it.
Posted by: sidereal | June 17, 2004 at 03:32 AM
Sign me up for anti-gerrymandering regulations, uncapping the size of the House of Representatives, and much smaller Congressional districts. Ain't gonna happen, though, short of armed insurrection.
I heard an interesting proposal not long ago for a relatively simple anti-gerrymandering provision: if you can draw a straight line between any two points in the district, the area through which the line passes must be in the district.
Writing from beautiful Chicago, home of the bar-bell-shaped Congressional district.
Posted by: Dave Schuler | June 17, 2004 at 10:27 AM
Nice idea, but the execution might be very, very difficult, and it still leaves the door open for extremely long, skinny districts. I'd propose something a little different: the ratio of length of the district boundary to its narrowest cross-section can be no greater than some arbitrary number. I'll toss out 6 for the sake of argument.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | June 17, 2004 at 11:50 AM
Oh, and there are state boundaries that automatically violate the anti-concavity rule.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | June 17, 2004 at 11:51 AM
With GIS mapping software it should be fairly trivial to create fair, even, random districts automatically. No human intervention required and no automatically safe seats.
Posted by: Chuchundra | June 17, 2004 at 01:52 PM
Oh, and there are state boundaries that automatically violate the anti-concavity rule.
That's a convexity restriction, I'm fairly sure. Which may or may not be an anti-concavity restriction depending on the company you keep ;)
As I mentioned previously (though perhaps on another site?) Yglesias and De Long had a couple of nice links on the mathematics of "fair" voting districts, where fairness was measured under a number of different metrics. If people are interested, I can probably rustle up some links...
Posted by: Anarch | June 17, 2004 at 02:34 PM
It's the Concavity Creeps!
"We make holes in congressional districts! We make holes in congressional districts!"
Posted by: Gromit | June 17, 2004 at 04:58 PM
Ah, the Holy District. It was only a matter of time.
Or is that Holey?
Posted by: Slartibartfast | June 17, 2004 at 05:29 PM