Asymmetrical Information

I agree, but how do you redraw the districts? They've been thouroghly meddled with for years, so anything starting from existing district lines seems pretty pointless.

Anyone know how other countries handle this?

Out of curiousity, how committed are people to hard "districts"? Aside from enormous logistical problems (probably not solvable, I admit) and possible Constitutional problems, what would happen if we told people that they could vote in any one district that was within radius X from their residence?

I suspect the logistical problems alone make it farcical, but wouldn't this make it much more pointless to draw wierdly shaped districts?

How about if we go back to the way we did things before the courts got involved. (That's right, this is a relatively new result of activist courts.)

In the day - not too long ago actually - congressional districts were drawn so that they were to be compact, as much as possible. They respected natural and political boundaries.

The problem - according to the courts - was that this resulted in a small but noticable variation in the population between districts. This was deemed to be bad - even though it had been this way for 200 years.

Then the gerrymandering took off, and districts look ridiculous.

The damned California Republicans - for 30 years they let the democrats carve California up in return for safe districts for incumbent Republicans. Redistricting should be mathematical, with the shortest possible perimeter. Absolutely no repeat no political input.

Jerry & Co -

Check out Iowa's system - a nonpartisan commission is authorized by law to draw districts based on population. 2 of our 5 congresscritters had to move to keep their jobs last time, and we have about as many competitive races in our little state as California every election - often more.

Here's a link with more:
http://www.centrists.org/pages/2004/07/7_buck_trust.html

I suppose if there were laws regarding the allowable geometry of districts, that would greatly reduce the ability to gerrymander. For example, mandate that districts only be constructed out of no more than x straight lines, each of minimum length y miles, and each at a right angle to it's neighboring lines (obviously, an exception would be made for state borders). You could still shrink or expand the districts to account for population, but would have a much harder time deliberately carving up the map in a way that favors one party or another.

Zendo Bob, there were some pretty massive discrepancies in population before Westberry v. Sanders changed the rules. (I may be mixing up the state legislative vs. national legislative.)

In Georgia, the Atlanta-based 5th district had 823,680. The rural 9th district had 272,154 residents. The numbers for Michigan were similar, I believe, with far more Detroit residents crammed into a single district than rural Michiganders in their own districts. Because state legislatures were gerrymandered in favor of sparse rural districts, as in state senates based on counties, the rot infested all levels of representation.

I think that the current understanding of the law mandating equality among Congressional districts to the single districts is absurd and pointless. However, it should be possible to allow for a small range (perhaps +/-2%) that would easily allow for town and county boundaries to be widely used and make for fair districts.

But don't romanticize the old days. The system was horribly dysfunctional and led to legislatures that resemble Japan's where farmers had 2-4x as much political power as city-dwellers.

single digits, not single districts.

No one can defend a law that required Pennsylvania to redistrict because of a difference of 14 or 17 voters between one district and another... especially since natural population change had already made the 2000 census numbers used for reapportionment distant from reality.

Two words: Proportional Representation.

Efforts to end gerrymandering would be something that a great many Republicans and a great many Democrats might be able to agree about. Maybe they could even speak with civility to each other for a change. Wouldn't that be nice?

Fling93, I doubt proportional representation has a snowball's chance in hell of getting approved, since it would likely require a Constitutional Amendment.

Brittain33, I like the idea of having to draw and keep it with a small percentage, while at the same time using a geometry that makes sense.

Joe, I took a quick look at your link and it appears to make sense.

If anyone wants to see some real gerrymandering, take a look at North Carolina, especially District 12, and it used to be worse. For the record, I'm in District 13.

Everything worth doing is difficult, and anything else is a band-aid on a gusher.

David:

I'm sure Melvin had to work hard to get a cuisinart district like that. And I wouldn't say this district qualifies for gerrymandering since it looks more like a two headed snake while district thirteen clearly resembles a frog.

What about requiring that the districts be of equal population and have the smallest possible boundary length? With modern computing, this should be much more practical than it used to be.

Caveat--This is just the first thing that popped into my head. There are some issues with it as stated. One is is that you might have to require the smallest boundaries *along roads* to eliminate ambiguity about what district someone's residence is in. Another is that there will be problems with a state like Michigan, with huge lakes as part of its territory. Use only land area, maybe?

Anyway, I'm just throwing it out.

Anyone know how other countries handle this?

Fairly straightforwardly. It only takes the application of a small number of principles. An extract from the approach of the Boundary Commission for England covers most of what is needed:

What is the Boundary Commission?

The Boundary Commission is an independent non-political body set up by Parliament in 1944 to review parliamentary constituencies about every 10 years.

Who are the Commissioners?

The Speaker of the House of Commons is the chairman and the deputy chairman is a High Court judge. Currently, the other two members are a Queen’s Counsel and a former civil servant.

What do they do?

They review constituency boundaries (area by area), consult the public, and make recommendations to the Secretary of State in a report covering the whole of England.

Why do they do it?

The main reason is to ensure that every constituency has about the same number of electors so that everyone’s vote carries the same weight in a general election.

Is it just a numbers game?

No, the Commission also have to consider local boundaries, local ties, geography, and the inconvenience caused by changing boundaries

But they don't even bother to mention the fundemental underlying point, which is that despite the fact that boundaries are ultimately the responsibility of parliament, and despite the fact that there is frequent debate, some of it inspired by political advantage, about the merits of individual decisions, the process as a whole is recognised and respected by all and is recognisably objective and independent, while including a strong element of local consulation.

That's not easily invented, but once you've got it the problem essentially disappears from political debate and controversy.

Gerrymandering will likely end the same day they stop rolling pork down the Capitol steps.

Sorry for posting twice--I just wanted to say something else about Fling93's idea.

I'm not a fan of proportional representation. I prefer the current system--both Congressional districting and the electoral college--which is wrapped around two parties, since it tends to damp out the extremists on each side.

I don't like the fact that it causes the spending patterns we have, or the candidates it comes up with. George Bush is too far to the left for my tastes; he spends like a drunken sailor, signed McCain-Feingold, indicated that he'd reapprove the AWB if it reached his desk, passed steel tariffs, etc. However, I'd rather hold my nose and vote for W than risk having someone like Ralph Nader become a kingmaker in Congress--having a relatively small number of seats that he can use to throw control of whatever house he's in if the coalition he's a part of doesn't give him what he wants. (Substitue Pat Buchanan for Ralph Nader if you're on the other side of the divide.)

When you have only two parties, they have to chase the political center of the country.

Efforts to end gerrymandering would be something that a great many Republicans and a great many Democrats might be able to agree about.

Yes, but the trick is getting a great many Republicans and a great many Democrats in the same state to agree about it. Tall order. :)

CatCube, you are confusing Proportional Representation with the inherently instable parliamentary system, which needs to form a coalition government to select a Prime Minister. There is no need to discard our checks and balances to implement PR. We can keep the president elected separately from Congress. The few extremist representatives would never be kingmakers because there's no need to make kings.

A multi-party Congress would only have to form coalitions per each issue (instead of per-election, which is pretty much how it works now). And the parties that all agree on an issue will vote together on that issue. For example, most of the libertarians would side with liberals on social issues and conservatives on economic issues.

With many parties, voters don't have to choose which issues to compromise in order to badly fit within one of two cobbled-together choices. Odds are there will be a party that matches up to your ideology pretty closely. So the percentage of pro-choice representatives would much more closely mirror the percentage of pro-choice voters, and similarly for almost any other issue.

And minorities (including ideological minorities) would have a representative who will listen to them. Unlike, say, a Republican today in a heavily-Democratic district, and vice versa.

Brittain33 - "the trick is getting a great many Republicans and a great many Democrats in the same state to agree about it."
Yes, but I think that a great many grass-roots Republicans and Democrats in every state would agree about it. It would have to begin at the grass roots and would have to be forced upon the professional politicians of each party.

Jane, for a change, you and I are in complete agreement. If only we could force it down everyone's throats...

This is one of those instances where people haven't thought through the consequences of the idea.

Gerrymandering reform will be just as useless as campaign finance reform.

Most gerrymandering reform ideas are doomed because they do not address the root issue, which is that a winner-take-all system provides no representation for minorities. This results in both parties gaming the system to disenfranchise as many of the opposing voters as possible. Of course, a system that provides minority representation (like Proportional Representation) completely removes this incentive.

Campaign finance is a tougher nut to crack. No matter what you do, corporations will always have an incentive to try and tilt the market rules in their favor (and note that this is true no matter how much or how little government interference currently exists in their market). Clean Elections (voluntary public campaign financing) seems to be the best we can do on that front as far as I know, although I doubt the idea will appeal to libertarians ideologically. Perhaps more on a pragmatic level, though.

Gerrymandering isn't a relatively new feature of activist courts (or of anything else). See Vieth v. Jubelirer:

"Political gerrymanders are not new to the American scene. One scholar traces them back to the Colony of Pennsylvania at the beginning of the 18th century, where several counties conspired to minimize the political power of the city of Philadelphia by refusing to allow it to merge or expand into surrounding jurisdictions, and denying it additional representatives. See E. Griffith, The Rise and Development of the Gerrymander 26-28 (1974) (hereinafter Griffith). In 1732, two members of His Majesty's Council and the attorney general and deputy inspector and comptroller general of affairs of the Province of North Carolina reported that the Governor had proceeded to 'divide old Precincts established by Law, & to enact new Ones in Places, whereby his Arts he has endeavored to prepossess People in a future election according to his desire, his Designs herein being ... either to endeavor by his means to get a Majority of his creatures in the Lower House' or to disrupt the assembly's proceedings. 3 Colonial Records of North Carolina 380-381 (W. Saunders ed. 1886); see also Griffith 29. The political gerrymander remained alive and well (though not yet known by that name) at the time of the framing. There were allegations that Patrick Henry attempted (unsuccessfully) to gerrymander James Madison out of the First Congress. See 2 W. Rives, Life and Times of James Madison 655, n. 1 (reprint 1970); Letter from Thomas Jefferson to William Short, Feb. 9, 1789, reprinted in 5 Works of Thomas Jefferson 451 (P. Ford ed. 1904). And in 1812, of course, there occurred the notoriously outrageous political districting in Massachusetts that gave the gerrymander its name--an amalgam of the names of Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry and the creature ('salamander') which the outline of an election district he was credited with forming was thought to resemble. See Webster's New International Dictionary 1052 (2d ed. 1945). 'By 1840 the gerrymander was a recognized force in party politics and was generally attempted in all legislation enacted for the formation of election districts. It was generally conceded that each party would attempt to gain power which was not proportionate to its numerical strength.' Griffith 123."

I am not remotely surprised that Gerrymandering is being brought up as an issue now. I expected it almost as much as I expected Bill Clinton to talk about campaign finance reform after the '94 elections. (Which he did much to my delight that night with bags under his eyes looking completely shell shocked.)

To anyone saying it is a recent problem, keep in mind that the word was created in the early 1800s. It has become more refined in the computer age but it has been with us basically for the duration of the republic.

To anyone saying it is an issue the Dems and Reps can agree on, I have to ask why you think so? Far left and far right politicians love safe seats that they can't lose. Party bosses like them as a place to stick VIPs who couldn't win any other way. Majority parties like shoving their opponents into as few districts as possible to maximize the number of seats the majority gets. The only way you can get both sides to agree is if they both think there is some advantage in it for them and obviously there isn't.

Charles Leete -- A campaign to end gerrymandering would have to begin at the grass roots and would have to be forced upon the professional politicians of each party. It would have to go the Initiative route. I think that a great many voters in each party might favor such a campaign.

How about combining an end to gerrymandering with greater representation? Are 435 people enough to adequately represent 290,000,000 in the House of Representatives?

You mean a 527 to end gerrymandering? I know people are naive but do you really think a Soros funded group trying to end something we have been doing for 200 years 'for the common good' will go anywhere? Anyone with an ounce of cynicism will smell the Democrats fearing permanent minority status trying to stir things up. "I question the timing" doesn't begin to cover it.

Note I am not arguing that gerrymandering is a good thing. I simply refuse to stop it now that it benefits my side in the hope that the other side won't reinstitute it when the worm turns. Next time the Dems become the majority party, if the stop gerrymandering, then I promise the next next time to not reimplement it. Cross my fingers. I mean heart. That is as far as I go on this road.

Charles, don't worry. You won't live long enough to see the Democrats become a majority again in the House. That's the point of the DeLay school of redistricting that every other state with a solid Republican legislature will follow.

I plan to live a long time.

The thing about the Texas gerrymander is that it gave a majority Republican state a majority of Republican representatives. How is that scandalous? If there is a scandal, it should be that a state leaning one way was sending Representatives to the House that leaned the other.

But even the evil Gerrymander couldn't stop it forever. (The previous Dem one I mean, not the new one.) Instead of flipping at 50.1%, the Gerry allows a once majority party to hold power for a few more years until there is no way to hide all the people who support the other party. I am sure some political scientist can give us the numbers but my own experience is that at 55-45 the dam breaks. Then you lose the legislature by a little and once the new majority redraws the lines, you lose it by a lot. The new majority then has to fall down to the 45% mark for the other side to reclaim the legislature.

All the talk about ending Gerrymandering just means the Dems want to skip reaching 55% and take over at 50.1%. I say no. I have lived with Gerrying all my life and see no reason to believe that they see the 'good government' or 'best practices' light now. Rather it appears to be a cynical attempt to shorten their time in the wilderness.

Speaking of Texas...the democrats have gerrymandered the shit out of that state for decades. Has anyone seen a map of the districts before the republican attempt at correction? Obscene is the only word to describe it. In the democratic mind, what they stole fair and square is theirs forever. Any republican attempt to right this wrong is portrayed as downright dastardly.
Learning of this two years ago is one of the key motivators in my turning away from the democratic party. Hypocrisy is something in which I cannot abide.

It isn't just the Democrats who are complain about gerrymandering. I'm not a Dem, nor is Jane Galt, nor John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, who wrote, 2 years ago, "When one party controls the entire process it routinely engages in blatant gerrymandering. When control over redistricting is split, both parties usually conspire in crafting pro-incumbent gerrymanders. We are now in danger of creating a system that allows elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around."
It's got to the point where only a handful of House seats are competitive. That's not good for anyone except incumbents.

Besides, nobody should consider either party "their side." You're just being used like a cheap rag if you think that way. Both parties are, above all else, very powerful political entities who care mostly about their own political power, and care little about representing you unless your vote matters to them.

With gerrymandering, the less you matter, and the less they need to think about you at all.

The problem with gerrymandering reform is that it's not going to happen unless you shame the politicians into voting against their own class interests. What makes it possible is that there's a hell of a lot of shame to go around.

This IS the time for it - because the last redistricting is over so the politicians won't face the consequences of a change in the system until 2012, and because the age of ubiquitous and almost unlimited computing power has begun. Fair districting methods have always been known, but checking all the possibilities wasn't practical for hand methods. Now, you darn well know that the party in power is using computers to search for the district boundaries most favorable for them. It's clearly fairer to just turn the computer loose to search for the best districting with a neutral set of criteria.

So what are those criteria? I'd say,
1) District boundaries will be clearly defined by roads and bodies of water.
2) Each district will have the same population within 1%.
3) The total length of all district boundaries added together will be as short as possible.

That is, the computer finds every possible districting satisfying 1 and 2, then picks the most compact by #3.

Note that under this scheme, new districts are unlikely to look anything like the old districts. Every ten years, most incumbents will face new districts that are 50% or more different from their old district. I think that's a feature, not a bug, but it sure will upset the incumbents. However, if you added in a requirement for minimum change from existing boundaries, you now have two conflicting optimization criteria, and you'd have to arbitrarily weight this requirement versus the shortest boundary criterion.

Doing this by initiative is sounding more attractive. I think we first need open-source fair redistricting code. Then the initiative would simply read that, "From the 2010 census forth, Congrerssional and state legislative districts will be redrawn using the XYZ Fair Districting computer program." Anyone against obviously wants unfair districting...

To put it slightly differently markm, "Now that we can no longer bludgeon Republicans with the Gerrymander sledgehammer, lets put the hammer away."

I say no thanks. I question the timing.

Charles, the timing isn't as questionable as you think.

Look at the top ten states: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Georgia.

1 (California) has a Democratic gerrymander that won't change in the near future. 1 (Georgia) has a failed Democratic gerrymander that won't yield more than a seat or two to Republicans if and when it's undone.

5 (Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan) have highly-effective Republican gerrymanders. Only Michigan and Pennsylvania are at any risk of full-Democratic control in 2010, and that is very unlikely.

1 (New Jersey) has a bipartisan incumbent-protection commission and is off the table.

That leaves two mega-states, New York and Illinois, that had split government in 2002. They are also the last two states with bipartisan incumbent-protection plans that locked in old Republican advantages. Dennis Hastert drew the Illinois lines; Dick Cheney directed Republicans in the New York State Senate to redraw their state's lines to squeeze out one upstate Democrat and one upstate liberal Republican. Until this week Republicans had a 1-seat majority in the Illinois House delegation. Can you imagine that?

Since 2001, Illinois Democrats took total control of state government. New York Democrats picked up as many as four seats in the State Senate and are likely to have total control of state government by the next redistricting cycle. These are the last two big states that haven't done wipe-out redistricting, and if and when it happens it's going to be very bad for Republicans.

So Republicans do have an interest in fighting gerrymandering, at least in those states. Because Republican chances of holding on to some power in those two states by 2011 are as quixotic as Democratic hopes to hold on to the legislatures in Mississippi and Oklahoma.

Republicans and Democrats alike have an interest in fighting gerrymandering. We all -- except for a few professional politicians -- have an interest in changing a system that makes it pointless for most of us to bother voting in House races.
David Broder gets it right when he says, "At the founding of this republic, House members were given the shortest terms -- half the length of the president's, one-third that of senators -- to ensure that they would be sensitive to any shifts in public opinion. Now they have more job security than the queen of England -- and as little need to seek their subjects' assent."
This ought to be changed.

What is it you want exactly Notary? Do you want competitive races or compact districts?

No matter how you divide Manhattan, it is going to provide several very safe seats. To make it in any way competitive would require torturous redistricting. Districts stretching far into Iowa say.

The same is true of most 'best practice' type plans. Big cities will still be cut up and favor big city interests and small towns and rural areas with have their interests. Artificially mixing them to make races competitive is no better than artifically mixing them to weed out more of the minority party. Most races will still not be competitive.

Beyond that imagine a state with 51%-49% population that is equally divided into districts. Every race would be extremely competitive but a huge number of people would end up being represented by the candidate they didn't vote for. (Then they might cry, say how stupid the other party is, and threaten to secede, but that is another topic.) OTOH if you pack districts to 80-20, then 80% ARE represented by the candidate they voted for. The remaining districts will be 60-40 for the other side and the 60% are represented by someone they voted for. Far fewer people are represented by a candidate from the other party.

What gerrymandering does is mess up proportional representation. States that have 60-40 populations look more like 70-30 if you judge in terms of their legislature and Representatives. Also gerrymanders delay the handover of power when a state switches from one party to the other but if a party is the majority and holds the majority for several elections, they end up breaking the gerrymander and flipping it the other way. This is how it has been for as long as we have been a country.

Sounds to me like an excellent argument for Proportional Representation.

No matter how you divide Manhattan, it is going to provide several very safe seats.

Actually it only provides for 2.5 seats, and one of them was held by a Republican as recently as 1992. :)

Zendo Deb sez:

"How about if we go back to the way we did things before the courts got involved. (That's right, this is a relatively new result of activist courts.)"

Sorry, but if you knew a little etymology you'd know that's just not true. "Gerrymander" was the name given to the salamader-shaped district created by Massachusetts politician Elbridge Gerry in *1812*.

But it goes back further than that:
encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761568985/Gerrymander.html

"The first known instance of gerrymandering in the United States took place in 1709, when various counties in Pennsylvania tried to deprive Philadelphia of due representation. Later examples were a “shoestring” district in Mississippi, about 480 km (about 300 mi) long and 32 km (20 mi) wide, and a district in Pennsylvania shaped like a dumbbell. In 1842 Congress passed the Reapportionment Act, requiring that electoral districts for members of the House of Representatives be compact and contiguous."

It is true that the dourts have made things worse by overriding the Reapportionment Act to make racial gerrymandering mandatory, but the sure didn't inralph phelanvent it.

"Efforts to end gerrymandering would be something that a great many Republicans and a great many Democrats might be able to agree about. "

Yeah. They'd both be *opposed.* Gerrymandering protects incumbents, and guess who gets to write the laws?

catcube sez:
"One is is that you might have to require the smallest boundaries *along roads*"

I'd like to see it along *political boundaries.*

Do not divide up a county unless you absolutely have to.

If dividing a county, do not divide up a town unless you have to. Try to grab entire towns located on the county border to move from one district to the other.

If dividing up a town, try not to divide aldermanic wards.

You shouldn't have to divide up more than one town on a given county/county border. You can't divide up more than one ward on a given through-town border.

If you have to take part of a couunty or town, the transfer should only
go one way: If the district 1/district 2 boundary lies mostly along the county A/county B border, and district 1 is too large, you can put part of county A in district 2, but you can not put a big chunk of county A in district 2 and than a smaller chunck of county B in district 1. No crossing a border both ways.

While finding a mathematical algorthm to produce a unique and fair-appearing district map has turned out to be rfeally hard, some simple rules like the above should be able to reduce the worst excesses.

I'd love it if someone could state these in more elegant form, particularly the last.

He's talking about voters, not politicians.

Charles Leete sez:

"Every race would be extremely competitive but a huge number of people would end up being represented by the candidate they didn't vote for. "

Another way of looking at it is "Every two years, you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting the guy you voted for."

Lot's of competitive races means lots of wooing the center, lots of responsiveness to citizens' concerns, and less of the "hysteresis effect" you describe in an above post - the delay in apolitical change in the public getting reflected in the legislature.

On the downside, it may also mean more inntense porkbarreling, and of course you want to make sure any changes made apply to *both* parties for a long time.

Phelan says "Every two years, you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting the guy you voted for."

But every two years more people won't get the representative they want. 50% will always be stiffed. Gerrymandered it would be closer to 35%.

As to the delay in distribution of seats reflecting the will of the people, that is not an entirely bad thing. It is galling when the minority party finally becomes a majority but still has fewer seats. But another consequence of it is that there is stability in the legislature. I don't particularly want complete flips every couple years as a state oscillates around the 50-50 point. Letting the majority party rule until it is clear that the state has moved away from them(the 55-45 point I mentioned in an earlier post), allows the government to function more smoothly and deal with transitions less often.

As to competitive districts forcing politicians to the center, I agree it does. Why do you hate the extremes so and feel they shouldn't be allowed representatives? Is it really better to have a bunch of moderates elected everywhere than to have a mix of conservatives, moderates, and liberals all elected somewhere? I don't see why.

The first thing is that the choice of redistricting plan should not be made by the people with the greatest conflict of interest--the legislators. In California in the '90s, a panel of retired judges produced a fairly clean map.

I like the idea of giving up on the pursuit of the One True Map, and letting everyone who wants to publicly submit redistricting maps which the committee then judge. Once you can line up a variety of different plans and see how the adherents of a party/faction/interest group can produce a map that just happens to maximise the results in their favor, I think there'd be pressure to weed out all the extremes and pick a map that was more-or-less in the middle. Open Source Redistricting, if you will.

ralph phelan - "Lot's of competitive races means lots of wooing the center, lots of responsiveness to citizens' concerns"
Exactly.
This "wooing of the center" would tend to reduce partisan extremism on both sides.
And increased "responsiveness to citizens' concerns" would tend to reduce the cynical apathy with which so many now regard the elctoral system.
As it is now: "Nationally, more than 85 percent of House incumbents won by landslide majorities of more than 60 percent. In California, with 53 House members, only three fell short of that mark. In Florida, only one of the representatives received less than 60 percent of the vote. The district lines in these and most other states were drawn by partisan legislatures to protect incumbents of both parties from the inconvenience of competition." Broder

This doesn't accurately represent the way the voters are divided. See map
We could do a whole lot better.

Learning of this two years ago is one of the key motivators in my turning away from the democratic party. Hypocrisy is something in which I cannot abide.

In that case, I anticipate your eventual, complete withdrawal from all things political.

In fairness to Zendo Deb, while the courts did not invent gerrymandering, they are a huge impediment to fixing the problem.

We've had quite a few algrithmic and therefore inherently colorblind improvements to the districting process suggested. But so long as the courts are interpreting the Equal RIghts Act in such a way as to disallow any districting plan that doesn't put enough black people in office none of these ideas can be implemented anyway.

ralph phelan - One of the nicer results of the election is that Mr. Bush will have 4 more years in which to replace a lot of bad judges with good ones.
FOUR MORE YEARS of dead terrorists, low taxes, better judges, and -- maybe we could also get a little bit of improvement in the electoral process.

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