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 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.)
In my country Germany the system is that every party above 5% can send representatives according to their percentage of votes. Then there are districts, who have to have size of approximately 250.000 inhabitants with German citizenship, who send a representative of the party with the most votes.
There a laws in place to not seperate counties, towns and cities when district lines have to be redrawn.
It’s a bit simplified of course.
Obligatory mention of CGP Grey and his fantastic animal kingdom voting series: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY
I love that video. One awesome solution he brings up is letting math draw the district lines, specifically the shortest-split line method. There’s also an updated version of the method called Impartial Automatic Redistricting, that uses an approach similar to SSLM, but will only make cuts along the boundaries of census blocks (the smallest geographic unit used by the Census Bureau) to avoid cutting towns/neighborhoods in half, although it can create some odd results sometimes.
However, I think both of these would currently be illegal in the US under the Voting Rights Act for not taking minority representation into account. That is one downside to these methods, even though they’re probably still an upgrade compared to the heavily-gerrymandered system in the US. So in the US’s current system, the algorithms would have to be updated to somehow take that into account.
There are also a few other neat district drawing rules on Wikipedia that he didn’t cover which are worth a read.
And Alpha Phoenix demonstrating how to produce rigged boundaries that look natural and not suspicious:
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.
Fun fact, the term for running a nation like a corporation is fascism.
Well it’s already been this way for like 20 years almost. It’s been forming for many decades, but it’s a done deal.
I will never understand how the highest number of votes isn’t winning. Bucha cheatin ass bitches
Most sane countries leave electoral boundaries to an independent commission
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.
The more I hear about this Jerry Mander fella, the less I care for him.
This is kinda if topic, but why does the US have term limits for the presidency, but not all the other major positions?
In the original Constitution, there are no limits for any of them. George Washington made it a tradition not to seek a third term, but it wasn’t actually enshrined into law until ~150 years later.
They focussed more on term length
- House: two years for frequent turnover, voice of the people
- Senate: 6 years for stability, maturity
- judges: lifetime, for independence from who appointed them and from politics of the day
While these don’t seem to be working right, anyone proposing changes needs to understand what they were trying to do and not make it worse trying to fix another aspect
It was added for the president with Roosevelt. Likely because the president has much more power than a single congressman.
Oh I knew it happened then, but I don’t really follow the reasoning.
I am glad it affects Trump, but I think Obama might still be president of he was ever elected (he may never have run as the world would have been very different anyways)
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.
From reading the comments of others I’ll say it seems like I’m pretty uninformed about how the actual process works. But what i meant was that if there are 6 electoral votes and each candidate wins 50% if the votes in the state then they both get 3 electrical votes. If there are 8 electoral votes and someone wins 27% if the vote they get 2 votes, not all or nothing
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.
the fascists aren’t attempting 3, they’ve already been doing it for decades. now they just want to do even more, because it’s open fascism season so why be coy about it.
Everyone’s been doing either one or three for decades, the fascists are just more effective at it. What’s changed is that they’re doing it in a non-census year with the explicit goal of changing the outcome of the 2026 midterms. The only states with have unbiased districts are the places where people have passed ballot measures against partisan districting, but Democrats have been just as happy as Republicans to pull this shit.
2 and 31 and 2 are indistinguishable if you don’t take political alignment into account. What counts as a line or a column in real life? You need to group/sort people by something in order to draw any of those lines.Edit: somehow I missed the actual numbers in the image and counted them starting from the sample, so when I said 2 and 3 I was thinking of 1 and 2.
Do you mean one and two? Two and three are clearly different, as three has no pattern other than disenfranchisement.I agree that one and two are both valid ways to divide the squares visually, but the text is stating that one is, “perfect,” and two is, “compact but unfair,” implying that the goal should be getting each political group some representation. That is still allowing politicians to pick their constituents, and even if it’s more fair than three, it still built to serve the candidates, not the voters. Compact (i.e. a system that divides districts entirely by geography and population, without consideration towards demographics or political alignment) should be the actual desired outcome.
Anything to undermine democracy
Illegality is slowly being erased in america
Our nation will continue circling the toilet until gerrymandering is outlawed.
And with how many stupids there are here that are scared of change, even when presented with facts proving it’s better for them, the odds of things getting better are pretty slim.
WE know. It’s the pithed Fox News and Joe Rogan fuckwit demographic that has no fucking clue.
Eh, the democrats seem to be getting back on board with it too now. Most Americans at least have a vague concept of gerrymandering. They just choose to ignore it when it benefits their side.
“How dare you punch me back? You’re choosing to be violent when it benefits your side!” -Bully who punched 1,000 times first
Pretty sure it’s a last resort and reaction. Democrats tried going high and it didn’t work.
You’re looking at this as a red vs. blue issue and identifying with blue when it’s really a people in power vs. normal people issue. This is the california democratic party taking power away from the people and giving it to the ruling party. Sure you may like that ruling party now, but if a new party takes power or the current one does something horrible then you’ll have less of an ability to remove them from power.
Cracking and packing
