Customer Reviews

Stealing Our Votes: How Politicians Conspire to Control Elections and How to Stop Them

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Okay I'm a little biased and I'll admit that from the start. My dad wrote this book and it is really great. One of the classic problems with our great republic is that the voting district maps are drawn by the politicians, so naturally they draw the districts to help themselves get re-elected. What we can end up with is a state like California which has almost an equal number of democrats and republicans but an overwhelming number of democrats in the state assembly and state senate. This is because the districts have been rigged. The politicians have drawn them so that most of the districts have just enough democrats to assure election of a democrat and the remaining districts have a high concentration of republicans so that most of the republican votes are wasted. Of course the republicans do it any chance they get too (like in Texas). The solution is to have a computer draw the district lines using only three simple rules: Make all the districts have the same population within 1%, use the existing census districts as the building blocks for making the districts (don't split census districts), and "fence" off the state into these equal population districts using the minimum amount of fence. In other words, keep optimizing the size and shape of each of the districts until the sum of the perimeters of all the districts is minimized. This leads to nicely shaped compact districts, leads to a unique solution (there is only one answer with the minimum amount of "fence"), and is a completely unbiased way of drawing the district lines. The fact that there is only one unique "best" answer to this redistricting solution means that anyone can write their own program on any computer using any programming language and they will all independently get exactly the same optimized solution. This book goes into great detail about the history of gerrymandering (drawing district boundaries for political gain), the different kinds of gerrymandering, the devastating affects (elections are rigged, politics gets polarized) , and even the mechanics of how to write the computer program.

I received a complimentary copy of Stealing Our Votes: How Politicians conspire to Control Elections and How to Stop Them, as a member of the Dorrance Publishing Book Review Team. Visit [...] to learn how you can become a member of the Book Review Team.
Dr Clark starts his book with the American Revolution and the principles behind equal voting power and clearly defines why it was such an important principle to America's founding fathers. He takes us on a historical roller coaster ride that begins with early political corruption in attempts to invalidate the vote and ends with present methods used by our electorate to maintain control and power. He clearly defines the various methods used to "steal" our votes and ones used in the past. He even notes how the Supreme Court gained the power it has today, how it began to legislate from the bench, and the interference the Supreme Court had to take on several occasions to preserve citizens voting power.
He defines how computers have made it by far easier to take voting power away from citizens and put it in the hands of politicians, yet how these same computers can resolve the problem. He explains certain mathematical computer programs that can take demographic information available and redistrict in such a way that there is at maximum 1% in variation of population between the districts, making them extremely compact. These programs could maintain voting rights that have consistently been encroached upon.
Though the historical aspects covered by Dr Clark were interesting and frighteningly eye-opening, overall I was dissapointed with Dr Clark. The title of his book suggests that there is a way to stop our corrupt politicians, however, like so many other political fix-it books, there is no actual plan outlined for American Citizens and what they can do as a community to stop this travesty.
It was a well written book, but I am not a mathematician nor a computer programmer. Dr Clark painted no road signs so that the average citizen could follow to implement his magical program.
Dr. Clark's book would be more aptly named "Stealing Our Votes and The Computer Program that Could Stop Gerrymandering."

I'm afraid this isn't going to be the best review in the world, as I read this book over two years ago. Still, I'll give it a go so that it will have at least one review.

The author starts with some history, particularly of gerrymandering. He explains the various kinds of gerrymandering and their purposes. He includes visuals of some particularly egregiously gerrymandered districts that exist right now.

Then he presents his proposal for fixing the redistricting process. As Ronald Reagan said (I didn't know this, myself--it's a quote in the book that I highlighted), "There is only one way to do reapportionment--feed into the computer all the factors except political registration." (Yes, I was suprised, too.)

The author goes into much detail on how districts should be drawn. He says that the criteria are:

1. The population of every district must be within 1 percent of the average population of all districts in the state, and

2. The overall district map of the state must be as compact as possible.

Apparently the author has written software to accomplish this--there's not much detail about the actual software in the book, just what it accomplishes. I'm assuming one can contact him for more details, if one is in a position to implement this plan.

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