How Congress Was Stolen – How Gerrymandering Makes Washington Go Round

Have any of you ever heard of the term Gerrymandering?  It is a weird word, with a fairly unknown meaning.  Gerrymandering is the process by which a group in control of the legislature of a state or country, will draw voting district lines in a way that allows them to have more representatives than their percentage of the population would allow normally.  It also allows wealthy donors to find the candidates who will most likely provide the swing vote in a decision that benefits the donor, and donate less money to greater effect.  While I am going to write mostly about what has been done by Republicans over the last few decades, this is not limited to Republicans alone, they just have done it more in the last few decades.

I am going to talk about a simple example of gerrymandering, then you can extrapolate it out to see how it would work in reality.

 Now who do you think has the power to decide how the district lines are drawn?  It is usually the party in power in the state where they are redrawing the lines.  That means that after the Republican party spent the 1980s on “Operation Red State”, which was a plan to take control of as many state and local legislatures as possible so that they could redraw the lines to give them as much of an advantage as possible.  They did this because they saw the country moving more and more ideologically away from their positions.  Instead of changing their values to more accurately reflect their constituents, they used what power they could to take away the power of people who disagreed with them.

Before I go on, I want to say that this is all legal.  It is something that they were allowed to do under the law.  However, what has resulted is districts that look like this:

I don’t know about you, but those districts are only that shape for one reason, to take power away from one group and give it to another.  This process is one by which the Republican party has managed to control the House of Representatives for so many years, even as the country is shifting away from them.  I know you can point to a year here or there where the Democrats were in control, but in this case the exceptions prove the rule when you look at all the other factors responsible.

How does this effect people like you and me.  The answer to that is both simple and complicated.  The simple answer is this, if you live in a district that has been shaped for political advantage, then your vote counts less (or more) than it normally should.  The more complicated answer has to do with wealthy campaign contributions and what effect it has on business and tax laws.  If these lines have been drawn so that the majority of districts, even with a minority of overall individuals, all have representatives who are favorable to big business, then these businesses need to contribute less money to win control of areas that will provide them with tax breaks.  Is it any surprise that money in politics is the root of many of these problems? Who do you think donates to campaigns in close races?  Who do you think benefits the most from gerrymandering?  Hint: it isn’t you and me, this doesn’t benefit us at all.

One solution, though it may not be possible in the U.S., is to adopt a system where we take the popular vote in a state, and allow that state to send representatives based on the popular vote, instead of by district.  For example, in Texas the state (heavily gerrymandered) voted 52% Rep, 43% Dem, and 5% Ind.  However their representatives are 24 Rep, 12 Dem, and 0 Ind.  If this was split up based on popular vote, then the Rep would have 19 representatives, Dems would have 16 representatives and Independents would have 1 representative.  That seems an inherently more balanced way to adjudicate the system.

Another possible solution would be to enact laws that say a district must maintain a certain density, so that it is not sprawling out all over the place.  If we were to redraw districts so that they made geographic and population sense, instead of political sense, much of this would disappear.  There are no states that look like some of these gerrymandered districts, and amazingly enough the U.S. Senate which is two senators per state, is fairly close to the national distribution of left and right leaning individuals.  With no gerrymandering, it is possible to have fair and balanced elections.

If you are like me, you don’t just want to understand a problem, you want to know what you can do about it.  There are a few things you can do:

1. You can write your congressperson asking for them to work hard on campaign finance reform
2. You can also contact your congress people and ask for non-partisan redistricting in your state
3. You can push for laws governing the drawing of districts that prevent this sort of thing from ever happening again
4. You can educate yourself more and pass information like this along
5. You can research which candidates actually support (and have voted to support) ending gerrymandering

 

Thanks for reading, and I know this one was dry, but it is an important lesson.
– Jeremy Larsen

Speaker, Author, Progressive

The Scariest Part About the Election – It’s Not That Trump Won, It’s How He Did It

I read an article today that actually scared me more than I have been in a while, about one of the tools that was used in this election.  I want to clarify first I am not trying to invalidate the win, there was nothing illegal (I don’t think, talk to a lawyer) about what was done, Donald Trump is the president of the United States, for better or worse.  Instead I want to talk about his use of a data analytics and marketing firm called “Cambridge Analytics”.  This probably sounds boring to you, as “Big Data” and “Analytics” are automatic buzzwords for boring and pointless.  I would have agreed with you before reading this article.  Now I am just scared. With GOOD reason.  Our election was hacked, not in the old meaning, of breaking into encrypted systems, but in the new meaning of finding a way to manipulate existing systems to provide a massive advantage to the manipulator.  PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE read more, even if it is boring.

To make a long story somewhat shorter, in the 1980s psychologists came up with a set of personality traits that were along 5 continuums: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.  This, while useful, was usually hampered by the data collection process, a painstaking questionnaire that no one wanted to fill out. That is until Dr. Kosinski came along.  In the 2000s a young psychological researcher named Dr. Michal Kosinski came up with some apps and measurements that allowed, using Facebook like data, him to predict with startling accuracy different personality traits and things that would likely follow from it.  If you want to know more about him and his work, check out this link http://www.michalkosinski.com/.

In 2014 a young researcher at Cambridge name dAleksandr Kogan, approached Dr. Kosinski about using his work and his MyPersonality database to benefit a company, and offered him a lot of money, but was unwilling to say any more, as he was bound by a Non Disclosure Agreement.  The company in question was part of a series of shell corporations hiding the actual owners of the companies.  Needless to say these companies had helped to influence elections through targeted marketing in countries all over the world.  One of the subsidiaries of this parent company was “Cambridge Analytics”. This subsidiary is largely responsible for much of the marketing and ads on the leave side of Brexit just a little while before.

Through painstaking effort this group had managed to reverse engineer the analytics models that Kosinski had created years before.  They could use this ability to target individuals for tailor made marketing.  They could predict beliefs and reactions of individuals to various marketing and canvassing tactics.  They could target their advertising for far cheaper than ever before, by paying Facebook minute amounts to target individuals who met certain criteria, and exclude those who would produce no benefit from the ads.  If you think this is getting creepier by the minute, keep reading it gets worse.

In 2016 Donald Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytics to run their targeted data mining operation.  They would find news (real or fake) articles and target individuals who were most likely to respond to those articles.  Whether this was to activate their supporters, or spread doubts to people who may be on the fence about their opponents, they targeted individuals based on the Facebook and online behavior.  When you add this to the fake news created by alt-right “news” organizations, or the mass amount of election related propaganda pushed out by Russia, Cambridge Analytics could make these stories show up in your news feed at JUST the right time to influence your behavior.  This is still only the beginning.

In addition to their online marketing, Cambridge analytics also developed an app for their canvassers that used the same data to predict individual behaviors and allow their canvassers to ignore houses that would be unreceptive to them.  It provided scripts and talking points based on what would resonate with particular residents in said household.  Imagine this, a canvasser outside your house looks on their phone, and is able to tell what political issues are important to you, what your most likely hot buttons are, what percentage chance you are of changing your mind, and much more, simply from their analytics company analyzing your private data, all legally of course.  Did I mention Steve Bannon was a member of the Board of Directors for the parent company owning Cambridge Analytics.

EVERY single one of Trump’s talking points was scripted.  They were confusing on purpose.  They were all over the place on purpose.  This was so that his marketing team could use different words with different people.  He knew his voter base better than progressives knew ourselves.  He knew they didn’t watch the “mainstream news”.  He knew they got most of their news from Facebook articles, and websites that provided confirmation bias.  He knew how to reach them, and what words to use on EACH, INDIVIDUAL PERSON for maximum effect.

This constitutes no violations of the law that I know of.  It is a brilliant tactic that was used effectively in this campaign.  It is a simple advancement of what was already done by campaigns in more general terms, and using similar algorithms to behaviorally targeted adds made all of these tactics far more customizable.  Donald Trump won using this tactic.  He won fair and square.  He is now the president of our country.

That he won isn’t scary.  Looking back, it can almost be called inevitable with the state of the nation and the tactics that were used.  What is scary however is the fact that the methods he used are infinitely replicatable.  Now that this information is out there, Democrats will use it too.  So will large companies that can afford it.  So will “foreign actors” who want to cause our country harm.  So will every person that has an agenda and the funding to back it up.  Without going into the monotonous, minute detail, these algorithms allow the users to know about me and you than we can probably remember ourselves, and can predict our behavior with frightening accuracy.  Think about this for a minute, EVERY single like, comment, interaction on Facebook provides one more piece of data to allow people with money to manipulate me and you.

If you aren’t scared enough, just think what this means for the future, we are only in the second, almost the third of the five stages of analytics.  These stages get ever scarier.  Stage one is descriptive analytics, these allow us to analyze trends and see what happened.  We have been doing this for decades (well centuries in more minor forms).  These allow people to decide what they think will influence future events.  Stage two is predictive analytics.  Predictive analytics allows people to see what may happen in the future, it also allows people to start to predict what effect their actions will have which starts moving into stage three.  Stage three, where we are just now getting to, is prescriptive analytics.  This allows people to analyze what actions they may want to take to achieve the results they desire.  It not only predicts, but prescribes behaviors going forward.  The fourth stage is even worse, it takes prescriptive analytics to the next level, analyzing potential outcomes and prescribing behaviors to head off those outcomes, before they have even happened.  This brings us to the fifth and final stage of analytics, where, given enough data, these people can with minute actions shape events that seem completely unrelated.  This is where ideas like the butterfly effect come into play.

If you are scared enough to take some action I am going to leave you with some ideas that can possibly save us from going down the darkest roads this may offer.

• Restrict your privacy settings on EVERY from of online interaction as much as humanly possible
• Educate yourself about how this stuff is moving forward in our world
• Call your congress people, local officials, asking (even begging if you have to) for better regulation of privacy
• File lawsuits if you feel your privacy has been violated by companies collecting your data
• Do your best to seek out sources of media off of Facebook and offline, anything where you have no idea where the content comes from
• Fight against the invasions of privacy for convenience and refuse to let more groups than absolutely need to have your data

Thanks for reading, and feel free to comment, like, share, or even contact me personally with any questions you may have.

Jeremy Larsen
Author, Speaker, Progressive

(P.S. if you want the original article I read find it here:  https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win)