Gerrymandering should be a crime and conviction should mean removal from office and a life long ban on working in politics.
Now we just need a way to do that that isn't vigilante violence.
It is kind of frustrating how every system needs to resist people (usually conservatives) from acting in bad faith.
Now we just need a way to do that
I have some ideas.
that isn't vigilante violence.
Oh. Nevermind...
We need drastic change but not using the one proven method of bringing it!
Classic
Go on, do something then
[Spiderman meme]
VV is a last step, for when the system has evolved into an unmovable corner.
Like when you play tic tac toe and all moves are done, you have to just restart. Eventually, you have to do something different to get a different outcome. Unfortunately if you fuck up your memory (bad history and bad education), you're doomed to fail until you get it right or die.
So, yeah, we need to figure out the right way to do it. Until then and if they don't let us, flip the damn table.
In order to do that, we need a rigorous definition of gerrymandering that isn't just "I know it when I see it." Even if we try to adopt some sort of strict mathematical criteria and algorithm for redistricting (such as optimizing for "compactness" using a Voronoi algorithm), there would always still be some amount of arbitrary human input that could be gamed (such as the location of seeds, in this example). Even if we went so far as to make a rule that everything must be randomized (which would possibly be bad for things like continuity of representation, by the way), we could still end up with people trying to influence the outcome by re-rolling the dice until they got a result they liked.
It's a hard (in both the computational sense and political sense) problem to solve.
I heard of a test that makes sense, minimally. If you reverse the vote of every single person, the opposite party should win. Apparently there are ways of organizing it where that isn't the case.
In my opinion there shouldn't be districts at all. Too much potential for fuckery.
Proportional representation is the way. X% of the vote means X% of seats, no shenanigans
The point of representatives is that they each represent a small portion of the population. If you remove districts, then who are house members representing?
Indeed that's the intention, but in practice gerrymandering often leads to the opposite outcome where urban cores are divided up with large rural areas to suppress one side's votes.
See Utah's districts for the most obvious example of this. It would be logical to group Salt Lake City in one district, Provo + some suburbs in another, then the rural areas in the remaining districts. But instead the city is divided evenly such that each part of the city is in a different district, with every district dominated by large rural areas.
You can have an electoral division of your country without gerrymandering. Cf most european countries.
Most European countries do not use first past the post, but proportional representation with multiple elected representatives per voting district. There is far less incentive for politicians to gerrymander with proportional representation.
When everyone votes along party lines, why does it matter if you have local representation ? Barely any of them actually vote how they think their constituents would want them to vote, they vote however the party tells them to vote.
This is a very cynical point of view that would make it even less possible for independants to be represented in the House, remove town halls from the system, and therefore make the entire system even less democratic and remove the entire point of a representative democracy.
There is zero benefit to this.
The secret is that you need proportional elections within each district. What also implies that they should be bigger...
Or, in other words, just copy Switzerland and you'll be fine.
(Personally, I'm divided. The largest scale your election is, the most voice you give to fringe distributed groups. I can't decide if this is good or bad.)
The more I hear about this Jerry Mander fella, the less I care for him.
You jest, but it was named after a person:
The term "gerrymander" originated in 1812 from the redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry. The newly shaped districts, particularly one in Essex County, were said to resemble a mythological salamander. Federalist party members, critical of the practice, coined the term "Gerry-mander" (later shortened to gerrymander) by combining Gerry's name with "salamander"
Why do votes need to be done by district? Just do it statewide
The purpose is to have the people of smaller areas represented by an individualized Congress member. So the people in say the backwoods of California, aren't being spoken for by all big city people from LA/San Fran etc. When something is going on in your district, you are supposed to have someone who is empathetic to your cause and familiar to it. Then they bring that to the house and make the argument for you.
Aka, when someone brings up a federal code change proposition that will bankrupt the main source of jobs in your town, your legislature is supposed to go to bat, not fall in line and let your town die. 200 jobs being lost doesn't sound like much to a large city, but in a town of 2,000 people that's game over
Good point but for presidential elections, electrical districts don't make any sense. You could just use the total votes for the whole state to allocate electoral votes. Also, if the districts are being manipulated to provide a skewed election result then are the districts really groups of people with similar needs?
Good point but for presidential elections, electrical districts don’t make any sense.
In 48 out of fifty states, they don't matter for presidential elections. I think only Maine and Nebraska split their electoral college votes at all.
Also, if the districts are being manipulated to provide a skewed election result then are the districts really groups of people with similar needs?
The original purpose has indeed been corrupted in many places, and those where it hasn't are tempted into a "race to the bottom" as states with modest but persistent majorities are gerrymandering their states to the hilt. Still, the original idea of electoral districts makes a lot of sense, and even moreso when communications and travel were much slower.
This will lead to the majority of the state getting full say and suppressing minority views. This can be political, racial, etc.
California has a large Republican population. If it goes state wide they get zero voice as the full state will go blue.
These days I'm kinda fine with that, but in principle this is wrong. The same suppression logic can be spread to ethnic groups, etc.
What's even more unfair is area based voting, where your individual vote doesn't count to affect the government, you instead vote for a local representative which in turn effects the government. Your vote for president or prime minister should be direct, not a postcode lottery even without gerrymandering.
I don't think tiered representation is bad if 1: every person's vote is equal regardless of zip code 2: you have instant recall and can just have a representative replaced if they vote against their constituency wishes.
Instant recall would be huge in the US. People here have extremely short memories.
republicans always use the 4th one, and they make it more convoluted each time to adjust for population growth or loss, im guessing thats why they keep redrawing them, because smaller towns or cities often get so low in population overtime.
Hmmm, interesting choice of colors, considering which famously colored party is currently in the news for aggressively gerrymandering...
and the current party using the 4th one the most.
Ah yes, because there are only two parties.
This is entirely an emergent property of FPTP voting. Just do PPV or something, smh my head.
smh my head
yes.
Gerrymandering is the reason I get upset when people assume all texans/southerners are hateful hicks. Lived there for years and the right/left split is pretty balanced, even leaning left on many big issues, in most of the area I've frequented. It's just that poorer areas are rigged to fail and the powers that be have been running dirty campaigns for longer than many of us have been alive.
Just this last cycle, an old friend in the area received two different mail ads for (iirc) Ted "Zodiac" Cruz. One of them was in english and the other spanish. The english one was, for the most part, "honest" (as much as these types can be called honest, I mean) about his platform, while the spanish one explicitly lied in a way that made him seem like he was trying to benefit the immigrant community. Extremely fucked up and not too uncommon, according to a few inter-generational sources. That plus how jurisdictions are divided has made it extremely difficult for the left to get any major wins for the last handful of decades+. The south is even less ruled by the people than the rest of the US and the many decent people just trying their best to survive out there get shit on for what their oppressors choose all the time.
Sorry for the rant and tbc, there are also tons of shitheads out there too. Its just not like what many outsiders assume it is, and everything about the situation pisses me off something rancid.
Obligatory mention of CGP Grey and his fantastic animal kingdom voting series: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY
I will never understand how the highest number of votes isn't winning. Bucha cheatin ass bitches
Number 2 is the actual ideal, not number 1. Number 1 represents, "good," gerrymandering that politicians argue for, but it really only serves them. They get to keep highly partisan electorate that will reelect them no matter what, which means they can be less responsive to the will of their voters. They only have to worry about primary challengers, which aren't very common, and can mostly ignore their electorate without issue.
It's also important to note that this diagram is an oversimplification that can't express the nuances of an actual electorate. While a red and blue binary might be helpful for this example, a plurality of voters identify as independents, and while most of them have preferences towards the right or left, they are movable. The point is that actual voters are more nuanced and less static than this representation.
Number 2 is how distracting would work in an ideal world; it doesn't take into account political alignment at all, but instead just groups people together by proximity. A red victory is unlikely, but still possible if the blue candidate doesn't deliver for his constituents and winds up with low voter turnout. It also steers politicians away from partisan extremism, as they may need to appeal to a non-partisan plurality. That being said, when literal fascists are attempting number 3, we'll have to respond in kind if we want any chance of maintaining our democracy, but in the long term, the solution is no gerrymandering, not, "perfect representation," gerrymandering.
Yeah, a common pattern in pseudo democracies like Hungary...
No no, it's Russia you see.
It's almost like the idea that representation based on land instead of based on people is flawed to begin with.
The United States is not a nation anymore. It’s a corporation. It’s also 100% corrupt. When will people come to terms with this? As long as most people are in denial of this, it will always be so.
why not count each person instead to avoid the issue entirely
Because then the rich wouldn't be able to control everything
I'm not sure that would make much difference. When you control the media companies (including social media), you control what people see and hear. When you control what people see and here, you control what they believe and how they act, to a large extent.
Which is not to say that it wouldn't be an improvement, just that it wouldn't solve that particular problem. At least not directly. Perhaps it would make it easier to implement systemic changes we'd need to truly address it.
Jeff Bezos didn't buy the Washington Post out of a love for journalism, that's for damned sure.
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