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this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Gerrymandering is despicable, as are the conservative Justices that allow it. Look at this ridiculous map.
It designates one Democratic district and six Republican districts.
Current voter registration is 44.98% Democrat, and 44.62% Republican.
This is exactly how Republicans maintain their control in the House.
Even with the demotivation caused by gerrymandering, the 2020 only election broke about 5:4 in favor of Republicans. In the 2022 midterms, it was 2:1, but only 3:2 when you take out the two districts where the Republican was unopposed.
A huge part of America's problem right now comes from worshipping "Constitutional Democracy v2.0" when many other countries are running version 4 or 5.
First Past the Post, no ranked choice voting, an imbalanced legislature, an Electoral College based on the numbers from that legislature, and contemplating no constitutional role for parties, all that has ossified the political culture. You get parties locking in temporary gains and pushing advantages to the hilt because after all there's no parties in MUH CONSTITUTION. Even if we assume the remaining 9% of voters in SC are all embarrassed republicans, that's still 5:4, like the presidential numbers tend to break. In what fucking world should that result in a 6:1 ratio in the house delegation?
I get that maybe you have to consider letting some people be a bit overrepresented to get them to buy-in, that's at the heart of many federal systems, but the degree and the manner in the US has become full-on toxic.
I wonder to what extent this is driving polarisation. I've been thinking a lot recently about what it would take to be able to break bread with someone who was very right wing politically. I see a lot of right wing people who I have a lot of common ground with, if I recognise that the material conditions they're living under are making them desperate for an alternative. Ofc, I'm not keen on the fact that many of them believe that people like me (queer, leftists at universities) are to blame for those material conditions, but I like to imagine a world where we could work on the same team against the things that are actually to blame.
I think the gerrymandering in the US probably makes it so that each party has less reason to court voters of the other side. I can imagine what it must feel like to be a republican in a super blue state — even if you do vote, it won't matter, and then every choice the elected government makes would perpetuate this idea of the big bad "other". I wonder how much this affects things though, given that the polarisation is driven by many complex factors
I guess they think some votes are more important than others.
Some votes are worth 5/5, and others are worth 3/5.
Well... if the area is ~45% dems and they are represented with 1 district out of 7, then they have ~14% representation.
3/5 of 45% would be ~27% representation, but currently they have just over 3/10
…whoosh
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise
I didnt whoosh at all, im showing how the dems representation is HALF that of the 3/5 compromise for this given area
For the non-Americans in the thread, it's worth pointing out that the 3/5 compromise didn't give slaves representation at 3/5 the normal level, it gave the slaveowners overrepresentation in congress based on counting every 5 slaves as 3 additional people for apportioning the House of Representatives by population. The southern states wanted full "representation", while the northern states wanted zero, but the latter would have been better -- allowing that abolition was not on the table -- because it would have diluted southern influence in the lower house of Congress.
Thanks for adding the context, I forget how global this platform is sometimes
The crux of this issue (and the Supreme Court identified this while more liberal leaning) is that it's really fucking hard to measure gerrymandering-ness this is a pretty rational question to ask (though we should be bopping obviously gerrymandered districts down in the meantime). There's no obvious natural way to divide a state into districts and while we do have measures we can use to highlight voter disenfranchisement I think it's arguable that the closest we can get to a natural district map isn't really optimized for enfranchisement either. We tend to want districts to compose entire regions (i.e. the Philadelphia metro area) even though those regions introduce disenfranchisement due to previous redlining and other racist policies.
This problem is pretty hard to solve in an unimpeachable manner.
That’s true, but no matter the outcome, the total district representation should not deviate far from the state party distribution, as it does in this case.
Yup, for anyone who hasn't heard it, I'd highly recommend people listen to FiveThirtyEight's Gerrymandering Project. While this isn't to say that gerrymandering isn't a problem, it's not as simple as many people make it out to be. Especially with the high level of self-sorting which has been going on, packing lots of Democratic votes in a single district tends to happen, even without trying.
I'm not sure where they're getting that information. SC does not have registration by party at all. It's literally not information that the state collects.
The website states they get their voter registration data from L2 Data.
https://l2-data.com/states/