Cont: All things Trump + Russia Part 3

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a_unique_person said:
I don't think you read the article, did you?
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My pointing out how the big sort affects districting is a tangential point. A non gerrymandering Virginia map would still favor republicans more than if democrats were evenly distributed through the state.
 
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BobTheCoward said:
Suppose 100 people, districts 33 people, 80 are democrats. Under equal distribution, there would be 3 democrat congressman. If those 80 move into one city, there isn't a compact way to slice the city that doesn't create two districts of 66 democrat. So, republicans are guaranteed a district in this scenario.
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The fact that your example is so extreme and unrealistic actually illustrates my point that in the real world, it would be "fairly immune" to undemocratic effects like gerrymandering. Your scenario assumes all the Democrats live in the city and two districts are carved out there having no Republicans at all, and then another district encompassing the rest of the city and the rest of the state. Even if the district lines were drawn that way for whatever reason, if the two districts in the city are really only 31 Democrats vs. 2 Republicans, Democrats would also win the third district 18 to 16.
 
WilliamSeger said:
The fact that your example is so extreme and unrealistic actually illustrates my point that in the real world, it would be "fairly immune" to undemocratic effects like gerrymandering. Your scenario assumes all the Democrats live in the city and two districts are carved out there having no Republicans at all, and then another district encompassing the rest of the city and the rest of the state. Even if the district lines were drawn that way for whatever reason, if the two districts in the city are really only 31 Democrats vs. 2 Republicans, Democrats would also win the third district 18 to 16.
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A) extreme scenarios are used as illustration. It makes sense to start with the most mathematically simple version. It is a feature, not a bug. We will get separately to if it represents the real world or not.

B)One of the assumptions of the city was it violated compactness and community of interest to bring in two republicans from the rural portion.
 
BobTheCoward said:
A) extreme scenarios are used as illustration. It makes sense to start with the most mathematically simple version. It is a feature, not a bug. We will get separately to if it represents the real world or not.

B)One of the assumptions of the city was it violated compactness and community of interest to bring in two republicans from the rural portion.
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Now, here is some of the empirical stuff

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_...+geography+and+electoral+bias+in+legislatures

This process is likely to undermine the representation of Democrats for three reasons. First, suppose that the initial seed is a precinct in one of the stalactites representing Florida’s large cities, such as Miami, Jacksonville, or Tampa. Such a city is sufficiently large that this process will likely combine extremely Democratic districts with other extremely Democratic districts, thereby forming a district that is overwhelmingly Democratic. Second, outside of little Havana, it is difficult to find a Florida precinct that, when randomly chosen as the initial seed, would produce an analogously extreme Republican district. In addition to being more internally heterogeneous, Republican precincts tend to be located in heterogeneous suburban and rural areas of the state where their nearest neighbors are more diverse. For instance, suppose the initially chosen precinct is rural and extremely pro-Republican. If one strings together neighboring precincts until reaching the population threshold for a district, this will usually require the inclusion of some rather heterogeneous precincts, often including pockets of Democrats in small cities or towns and on the fringes of larger cities. A third reason concerns the locations of small Democratic-leaning towns throughout Florida. Although dense, pro-Democratic cities are often combined together to form Democratic districts along the Eastern Coast, there are also small, isolated, inland pockets of Democratic voters in the manufacturing and transportation agglomerations that sprung up along railroad tracks in the nineteenth century, such as Ocala or Pensacola, and the college towns of Tallahassee and Gainesville. When the size of districts is large relative to these small clusters of Democrats, these towns are often subsumed into predominantly rural, moderately Republican districts, thus wasting Democratic votes in districts that are won by Republicans. The roots of unintentional gerrymandering in Florida can be summarized as follows. The complex process of migration, sorting, and residential segregation that generated a spatial distribution of partisanship has left the Democrats with a more geographically concentrated support base than Republicans. When compact, contiguous districts are imposed onto this geography without regard for partisanship, the result will be a skew in the distribution of partisanship across districts such that with 50% of the votes, Democrats can expect fewer than 50% of the seats.
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BobTheCoward said:
That is the problem. Being good at prosecuting a case does not make someone good at knowing what is supported by evidence. If they knew the latter, then they would be far more reluctant to use things such as bite analysis which would make them worse at winning cases. Doctors are also terrible at evidence based medicine.
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Squeegee Beckenheim said:
We're talking about why Mueller brought lesser charges against Flynn than he could have.
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BobTheCoward said:
And we don't have a peer reviewed researched answer to this question.
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That is beside the point. We are not speculating about the best approach to determine the truth in the light of obstruction - something that is not amenable to peer review anyway. We are speculating why an investigator with experience of investigating organised criminals is bringing lesser charges than he could against Flynn. Pointing out that this is how the FBI typically operates against organised criminals says nothing about whether this is the best approach.

If you want to discuss whether this is the best approach, that would be a derail, but given that the aim is to find out what happened, and the fact that this has worked in persuading lesser criminals to provide evidence against greater criminals, it does seem effective.
 
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