Rorschach test

So here's a test for you. What is the image below?

If you answered George W. Bush's liver I'll give you a half point but the correct answer is - its a cartogram. That is a map in which regions have been rescaled according to their population. In this particular case the regions are the US counties, and the color of each region has been keyed according to the percentage of democratic and republican voters. 100% dem = blue and 100% republican = red, 50/50 = purple. The map was produced by some guys at the University of Michigan, the rest are here.

Its pretty fasinating huh? Especially when the traditional county voting map the Republicans would have you look at is like this:

That is basically their justification (even more conclusive than the state-by-state map) for claiming they were given a "mandate" in the 2004 election. The folly of interpreting such a map in that way is the folly that will befall all those lacking the skill of critical analysis and judgement. Votes are a per person thing and shouldn't be represented by a pure geographical mapping when population density isn't constant. It also illustrates precisely the folly of describing the electoral college system of selecting a president based on the electoral college system - although to be fair the electoral college map does do a bit better than the county by county map.

But whatever way you slice and dice the information, the reality is, if one party has one vote more than another in a critical state then the election can swing to that party. The remaining population gets zero representation at the presidential level, in a closely contested election one party or the other will always feel cheated. The senate is no good either - with two senators a piece the most populous states are clearly under-represented, under the current constitution the only solution to balance out the senate would be to redistribute the population evenly among the states! House prices in some states might plummet, and Rhode Island would find itself quite sqashed ( I'm sure any Hong Kong native would feel right at home. ) but on average I think the senate would be better balanced. As far as I know the electoral college would then balance itself out too.

Without constitutional changes or mass migration only the house leaves some hope having yielding true democracy. With its many more representatives and smaller districts you'd expect it to be more, well, representative. However those seats have fallen victim to the dirty trick of gerrymandering that deliberately distorts districts to ensure encumbants stay in power and to take seats away from the opposition in marginal districts.

I think the ideas presented in Krist Novoselic's book "Of Grunge and Government" are probably the best to fix our warped democracy. Instant runoff voting will give the people the opportuntity to vote for who they want without fear of voting for a "spoiler", proportional representation via super constituencies will allow for a great diversity of candidates beyond our current tweedledum and tweedledee two party system, more importantly it will allow that diversity to be represented at government level in proportion to its percentage popularity with the population. Only these things can really give us government by the people and for the people.