There seems to be a growing awareness that there’s something odd about the recent election. “How did Obama win the presidential race but Republicans get control of the House?” seems to be a common question. People who have never said “gerrymandering” are saying it now. What even I hadn’t realized was this (emphasis mine).
Although the Republicans won 55 percent of the House seats, they received less than half of the votes for members of the House of Representatives.
– Geoffrey R. Stone
What does this have to do with Big Data? This is not a technical problem. Mostly I think it’s a problem that needs to be addressed at the state level, for example by passing ballot measures requiring that district boundaries be set by an independent directly-elected commission. Maybe those members could even be elected via Approval Voting or Single Transferable Vote – systems which IMO should actually be used to elect the congresscritters themselves, but that’s not feasible without establishing voter familiarity in a different context.
Here’s the technical part. Most of the Big Data “success stories” seem to involve the rich (who can afford to buy/run big clusters) getting richer by exploiting consumers and invading their privacy. Very rarely do I hear about good uses, such as tracking drug interactions or disease spread. Where are the “data scientists” doing real science? Here’s an opportunity, while the election and its consequences are fresh in everybody’s minds, for those tools to do some good. How about if we use Big Data tools and Machine Learning techniques to crunch through demographic data and at least come up with congressional-district proposals that meet some rationally debatable definition of fairness? Obviously the results themselves can’t just be used as is, nor can the algorithms or data sets be enshrined into law, but maybe at least the operative definitions and the results they produce can provide decent starting points for a commission or the people themselves to consider. It seems like a lot better goal than targeting ads, anyway.
You, Sir, are a mensch!
99.5% of people voted for Obama in some of Philadelphia presincts. Osama Bin Laden made a credit card donation to Obama campaign – twice. We cannot even ask voters for ID, what to say about Single Transferrable Vote.
STV doesn’t mean transfer of votes between people. It just means transfer from one candidate to another, to reduce wasted votes etc. More info here (I’ve been hosting this for years since its previous author abandoned it).
http://pl.atyp.us/misc/votefaq.txt
That’s pretty interesting, I was wondering that myself. Gerrymandering is the perfect explanation.
However, as much as us engineers like to solve problems with a technical solution, this is a political problem and will require a political solution – starting with pressure either from the public or the top that it is something that needs to be fixed.
Is “Big Data” really necessary to do significant work in this area? If I’m calculating correctly there are about 125,000 voting precincts in the USA (roughly 137 million registered voters according to wolfram alpha, and average precinct size of 1100 registered voters according to wikipedia). Seems like you could fit information on each precinct (location, total population, registered voters, results from recent election) into a decent sized database and run some simulations on a regular machine. Nothing will ever cross state boundaries, so you could even do it with 50 state-specific databases which would each be much smaller.
Yes, absolutely agreed that it’s primarily a non-technical problem. I’m just trying to think of ways that technology could help.
As for whether even the technical part is really Big Data, I guess it is more about the Machine Learning part. OTOH, the data could get decently big. For example, if one wanted to define fairness in terms of not diluting the vote of certain ethnic or income groups – a significant part of how the Republicans won 55% of the seats with <50% of the votes right now – then you’d have several variables per household or per voter. Then you might mix in information about closeness to poll sites to keep the districts reasonably shaped, so now you’ve got a bunch of road/transit information as well. For a larger state such as CA or NY, that might be a decent amount of data to crunch into a candidate solution.
ugh. can we just get rid of this b.s. of “representational” democracy, already?!
Big data was used to microtarget ads by the Obama campaign. Not by Romney. This was a stunning win by Obama for a number of reasons (and while democrats may have gloated afterwords, chickens are indeed now coming home to roost … the same ones we were told wouldn’t come home to roost, or we were scare-mongers for suggesting it … who knew …)
If you look at the poll breakdowns, whats interesting is how malleable certain segments of the voting public were. And more to the point, this micro targeting worked. While Romney was considered a better person to run the economy by the majority of the population, in this economy, something instilled enough fear of this route in this malleable mass to dissuade them from voting for Romney, and to turn the few that they could over to Obama.
While I found this fascinating, elections do have consequences. I won’t discuss the consequences here, we’ll get to enjoy them (yes that is sarcasm) over the next 4 years. I don’t believe the election was stolen. It was marketed away from Romney, and his team. They had an inadequate description of the nature of the voters, an inadequate team and plan to energize voters. They didn’t lose on the big ideas. They lost on execution, pure and simple. But its the way they lost … and the ramifications going forward … thats most troubling. The president didn’t get a mandate … actually rather lost one. He managed to get enough people to fear Romney more than fearing another 4 years of him. This was negativity writ large, and I found it disgusting.
This said, gerrymandering is precisely why the house remained as it is. Gerrymandering isn’t a GOP thing. Democrats have engaged in it as well in the past. Its a process that favors the party in power at the state level every 10 years (after the census).
If we could create some nice simple non-partisan drawn maps encompassing a fixed number of people per district, with simple boundaries that aren’t constructed to protect politicians jobs, this would be a good thing. A non-party based competition would be even better. There are saner voting systems out there, and we need to use them. We need at least 30 days (I’d argue 90 days) for voting, and yes, real ID should be part of it. More to the point, everyone should be able to vote, and then later check that their vote was counted, and counted correctly, with a receipt for their vote. As can be seen in the Port St. Lucie debacle, it appears that (in that sample) there was fairly bad things going on.
But we should also eliminate the Electoral College. This forces the sort of electioneering that allows the rich with their big data engineering teams to create microtarget adverts that go after malleable masses to create fear among an electorate, suppressing their vote, and thus winning the EC delegates.
Obviously we disagree whether Mr. Obama’s re-election is a good thing or not, history usually sorts these things out over time. But the impact of big data and microtargeting means that elections are going to get meaner, subtler, and less about looking forward, and more about instilling fear, and suppressing votes. This is in no one’s interest.