The Fractured Right to Vote: Democracy, Discretion, and Designing Electoral Districts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Electoral boundary commissions and Parliament have recently transformed Canada’s federal electoral map. The 2015 election was contested on a new map of 338 ridings, after 30 were added to the House of Commons by the Fair Representation Act and the ten commissions determined their boundaries within the provinces. Introduced in 1964, the system of independent, non-partisan commissions drawing the maps has achieved great success in eliminating the previously entrenched practice of gerrymandering. The extensive discretion granted to commissions to set boundaries, however, generates a new series of potential problems that can undermine the fairness of the electoral map. This article takes the new map as an opportune time to analyze the Canadian experience with electoral boundary commissions. It considers the use of discretion by federal electoral boundary commissions and poses several questions. What type of discretion do boundary commissions possess? How have the commissions interpreted and applied this discretion? Has the ample leeway for discretionary decision-making granted to the commissions furthered the fundamental values underlying Canadian redistricting? To address these questions, this article considers the most recent federal electoral maps initially established in 2004 and 2014.This article demonstrates that the ten provincial commissions have adopted divergent approaches to their task of establishing electoral boundaries. These approaches are at times in direct conflict with one another on the meaning and scope of fundamental principles of redistricting, such as representation by population, community of interest, and minority representation. The presence of these conflicting approaches has gone beyond reasonable disagreements over the specific content of the relevant legislative and constitutional principles. The exercise of the discretion held by the commissions in these competing ways has frustrated the principle of the political equality of all citizens. This article argues that the discretion granted to Canadian electoral boundary commissions should be restructured in order to better achieve a common realization of the right to vote.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".