So what if we added in the influence you have by talking about your candidate and maybe the motivation you give like minded friends to actually cast their votes by saying you are coming in late to work to cast yours? Might we dream up an instance where you could tip the balance?
Let's say we get close to believing it possible. Is there a greater chance of your vote counting in a presidential election or a congressional race? We'll assume you are in a "purple" state (sorry, Oklahoma, by the time you are a swing state, the outcome of the election has likely been decided). Does gerrymandering affect your answer? (For those not familiar, gerrymandering is manipulating political lines to pack all of one group in a minimal number of districts/regions to increase the representation of another).
North Carolina's Congressional Districts as of 2013.
A court has ordered redrawing of Districts 1 and 12
(though interestingly, not 4).
Image from US GIS in public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36507070
I've heard complaints of gerrymandering giving minorities representation they did not deserve (reverse discrimination) as well as being responsible for republican gains at the federal level in recent years. Being someone who values credibility and consistency over partisanship, I thought of this as one of those issues where agreeing with one side and not the other (if that ended up being my conclusion) would involve the kinds of subtleties that don't play well in political discussions. It turns out, that is not the case and there is a very simple approach to this issue that is consistent.
North Carolina Congressional Districts 1973-1982
Image from US GIS in public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36507057
Let's imagine a state with 15 districts; we'll make this state a rectangle 300 miles long and 500 miles wide, so each district can be a square 100 miles to a side. Imagine then that these districts have ~ 500k residents and are fairly uniform, 67 percent one group and 33 percent another (I'll call them republicrats and democans, but you can plug in racial/ethnic groups, environmentalists and industrialists or any other opposing factions that might exemplify the greatest political differences in our fictitious state that I will call Eastconsin).
In a perfect world, we would expect 10 republicrats and 5 democans sent to the House of Representatives based on a 67/33% split. But what does our Congressional delegation actually look like?
This:
Republicrats get 100% of the seats despite democans being 33% of the population. While this may seem far fetched, the idea of a state having some sizeable minority worthy of representation, but not concentrated enough to gain that in any reasonable geographic divisions is very real.
Brian Olson created this map by minimizing distances from any census block to the center of the district.
Optimizing compactness takes partisanship out of the equation and works well if groups are segregated enough.
See this map and other work here
Of course, this is not fair. Could it be fixed? Certainly. One way would be to try to segregate the two parties to the greatest extent possible, perhaps if the uniformity between the districts but the democans in one district lived along the borders and in the corners, clustering with democans in another. We might be able to obtain 10 districts of 500k republicrats and 5 with 500k democans. Not much diversity within districts and unlikely we will see something like this in real life, but it works out well:
Never one to leave well enough alone, let's imagine a democan takes office and is tasked with redrawing districts. This clever fellow realizes that packing all of his sympathizing partisans together isn't necessary to win a district. He can put 250 001 of his guys in a district with 249 999 republicrats and still win. He starts digging through the numbers and finds that the 33% figure we have been using for his party is rounded and there are actually 33.33467% or 2 500 010 democans in the state. This is enough to take 50% +1 in 10 districts.
Here, the goal is to to have two different configurations of districts: first, 50% +1 democans per district until we run out of democans and then all the rest are pure republicrat. This is a bit of an exaggeration, as the person drawing the map wouldn't want to leave it for a small turnout differential to decide the election (in any of the salmon colored districts, two more democans than republicrats staying home on election day results in a tie; three, a loss for the democans), nor would they want to risk a moderate opponent pulling a handful of "their" voters. So, most likely, we would have 9 democan dominated districts with 55 000 + vote margins and 6 still packed with republicrats.
I'll end with that simple approach to what is a proper or improper use of gerrymandering. The answer has to do with diffusion of important groups. If a group with a need for political representation exists as a large enough proportion of a state to deserve representation in Congress does not have that representation or is under-represented by one or more seats, this is a valid tool to use until it somehow infringes on the representation of another group. If districts are gerrymandered in such a way as to over-represent a group, it is invalid. Such is the case of North Carolina, a "purple" state that went for Romney by a 3 percent margin in 2012 and Obama by a 0.3 percent margin in 2008, but has a 10-3 ratio of republican-democratic representation in Congress. Also, looking at the CPVI (a measure of partisan leaning) for each district, the democrats are +17, +17 and +23 in their favor in the three districts they hold, while republicans have no district more than +12 in their favor (this demonstrates real world vs my ideal examples).
Now, my previous post pointed out part of the reason for divisive partisanship and one step toward resolving that. I think this one goes further, as it shows how we could have a republican dominated House of Representatives for 15 out of the last 21 years despite having a democratic president for 13 of those years. It is a large part of the reason why party discipline and the steady march to the right while the country slips left has cost them more in presidential elections than congressional. But mostly, it makes your vote count less no matter which side you are on if you are in one of the many states that allow partisan redistricting.
Citations for images of 2013 and 1973-1982 maps above, as offered by Wikipedia.org :
By Authors: 1) All GIS data presented in this project was originally collected and published by the United States Department of the Interior. 2) US district GIS shapefile data created in association with the UCLA by Jeffrey B. Lewis, Brandon DeVine, Lincoln Pitcher, and Kenneth C. Martis. (2013) Digital Boundary Definitions of United States Congressional Districts, 1789-2012. 3) Data was rendered using ArcGIS® software by Esri. 4) File developed for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere by 7partparadigm. - US Department of the Interior, public data retrieved from http://cdmaps.polisci.ucla.edu on October 18, 2014., Public Domain,
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