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.
What are you saying, I don’t understand…?
Anyway, what does this have to do with Sydney Sweeney’s Nazi jeans, how are you not enraged by that?1?1!!!
You have to focus on the issues that matter, ok dummy?
/s/s/s
EDIT:
God fucking damnit, it happened again.
I made this comment as a joke, a day ago, and within 24hrs…
Republican representatives, offices directly under Trump, and of course Fox News…
Yep, they’re all leaning into this, fanning the flames of this particular, latest culture war talking point, as an obvious distraction / rage bait tactic, basically trolling people with twitter posts and throwing red meat out to their core via Jesse Waters on cable TV.
That’s just direct elections with extra steps.
No, because the lowest-level voter typically has less direct knowledge of higher level politician or policy than the guy who has to work with them.
You’re just saying the extra steps are justified, not that they don’t exist. Which is hogwash, of course. Indirect elections where the intermediate can choose the candidate regardless of people’s choice is just regulated election fraud.
What your describing is called a Republic. There are several benefits to such a model.
The most relevant was well summarized in MIB as “a person is smart, people are stupid”. A simple direct democracy is great until you are relying on an uninformed population to make a time-critical decision that requires expertise. If we instead elect people who are then expected to use tax dollars to consult experts, and then represent our interests by voting accordingly, we can theoretically avoid problems (such as the tragedy of the commons).
The downside happens when the representative takes advantage of the public’s ignorance, fosters it, and wields it for personal/oligarchic gain. Ideally the people are just smart enough to see that happening and vote them out before it becomes a systemic issue…
Or even better, the position of president or prime minister should have little power.
In theory the US Federal govt should be split into branches so that it has power, but the checks and balances between branches prevent any single branch from dominating. Which sucks when all 3 branches collude to hand all the power to the executive branch, which then wields the Federal govt to dominate the states.
For the record, a similar system where the states remain separate with a centralized governing body, but with less power than a Federalist one is called a Confederacy…so yeah, we tried that in the US once too. On the flip side, Switzerland’s Confederation seems to be working out pretty great for them.
When the Senate’s full of cucks, they let you do it
I mean, you could go the other way. Presidencies are bad on their face and the chief executive should be promoted from the party with a legislative majority (ie, Parliamentary system).
Then go after single representative districts and the obscenely high constituent to representative ratios.
Your vote for president or prime minister
The whole reason a prime minister is different from a president is that they’re not elected by direct votes. They’re the leader of the party with the most representatives (more or less).
That is the Westminster system. It’s fine in that the head of the executive only has power so long as they have the confidence of the elected members. If the elected members lose confidence then the government falls. The government is the house, so your vote does directly influence the government on either the government or opposition side. Don’t get too jealous of the American system - it’s a bloody mess in its own right.
Some of these are absolutely insane
🎵how insane can you go?🎶
While I do agree, the difficulty is plausible deniability. If you want people with something in common to have a voice, perhaps a suburban ring around an urban core is a fair choice that looks like one of these.
I’m sure it’s not, but that could happen and whatever rule should allow that possibility. This is why it’s not easy to set a clear rule or a clear determination. Now it’s case by case and up to the judicial branch.
Perhaps setting a speed limit would go a long way - you can only redistrict on certain large changes such as the census every ten years and it can’t go into effect without judicial review, without all the appeals being exhausted. In this case Texas doesnt seem to have a legitimate reason to redistrict, and was it Georgia last year trying to argue that they had to use the new map for an election despite it being likely illegal
We need more 1 and 3, and less 2 4 5.
If the enemy has nukes, don’t unilaterally disarm. Same here.
What the fuck does this even mean
It means if democrats don’t gerrymander more, the house permanently in favor of republicans. Wont matter if you win like 60%, you still get a minority if seats.
Idk why people are downvoting, but I guess liberals love “playing by the rules”. Lol “when they go low, you go high” is why traitors have control of the country right now. But anyways, libs being libs 🤷♂️
Good example of why the US is so gerrymandered. People aren’t against gerrymandering, just against the other side doing it
As an outsider that seems to be the gist of what’s going on in the US, no one’s really against the bad things (corruption, guns, intolerance, etc), they just want to win at it.
Biggest egos in the world!
People are downvoting because your solution to oppressing democracy is doubling down on it.
And your take is that “libs love playing by the rules” when someone says that this rule should be abolished? Lol
How do you even get in power to make gerrymandering illegal if this is what happens if you try “playing by the rules”.
This is a state legislature, but imagine, for the national legislature, if every republican state does gerrymandering to the maximum, while every democratic state draws fair borders, what do you think happens if the democrats win 55% of the popular vote nation wide? They will get less than 40% of the seats, just like with the Wisconsin’s state legislature. How the fuck do you abolish gerrymandering if you keep playing by these rules? Because you will never win a majority in government.
You have to use dirty tactics yourself, in order to even win enough seats to then pass the law that will outlaw gerrymandering.
Did you think nazis went away because we were nice to them? No, the allies shot and killed the nazis.
Yes. There should be no gerrymandering. However, you can’t have one party unilaterally disarm while the other one keeps doing it.
“But we are using gerrymandering for good, we will abolish it once we get power, honest!”
lol
Hmm? All of these look pretty fucked up to me
This one is better because turnout matters and gives representative elections.
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:
It’s almost like the idea that representation based on land instead of based on people is flawed to begin with.
We were never going to do representation by population. We barely got the southern colonies to agree to apportionment with land. (This was the 3/5ths compromise.)
Not sure what you mean, get rid of districts? If you break up the population into groups then you get a geographic area.
Yes. Representation should be proportional. In other systems of democracy, you vote a party and if that party wins 25% of the vote, then they win 25% of the representatives. Gerrymandering works because it’s based on land being more important to representation than people.
I think you could move somewhat towards having both. Let them gerrymander as much as they want, but at the end you also appoint additional districtless seats nominated by the winners, proportional to the number of votes they won by.
y u no direct democracy?
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.
Both sides have had opportunities to make it illegal and neither have done it. I wonder why.
Because if you have the power to make it illegal, by definition, the old system worked for you (you won), so why would you change it?
It’s cynical as all hell, but that’s how it works.
I mean yeah but it feels stupider to me. Like bumping your head on something repeatedly then seeing somebody else bump their head, laugh at them and then bump your own head again. Political slapstick.
Simply vote for the one who’s not supporting it the least to push them towards actually supporting it at all.
I will never understand how the highest number of votes isn’t winning. Bucha cheatin ass bitches
Well, it’s a complicated issue. Let’s assume there’s a state where all but an area of 10 blocks votes for candidate X. If that area happens to be split between several cities, the people living there are SOL as their vote is basically useless. Gerrymandering allows them to have a say in what goes on. But yes, as with everything, corruption ruins it.
Gerrymandering by definition implies malicious intent
Yep. I just didn’t wanna draw a distinction between gerrymandering and regular settings of electoral borders because that’s a mouthful.
What? Without districts and zones, people vote individually. Majority wins. Pretty basic. Keep everything else the same, voting zones, districts, whatever, where people go, but count it as a PERSON no part of a preconfigured cheated group.
Or just do mail in ballots with online tracking that it was received. Done. Majority wins. No electoral college or other bs.
With all the shady shit the US does that other countries don’t seems like majority in US was designed to fail against money.
This way it doesn’t matter that you live or moved to an opposing zone, you still vote and count towards your vote, not a small group.
The issue is less to do with votes inside a district, and more with the apportionment of the districts themselves.
For something like the presidential election a popular vote makes (more) sense.
Where gerrymandering comes in is regional representatives. I’m supposed to have a congressional representative who represents me and my neighbors.
‘Districting’ is the general practice of defining what constitutes a group of neighbors. When done properly you tend to get fairly compact districts that have people living in similar circumstances represented together. The people living near the lake get a representative, as do the people living in the city center, and the people living in the townhouses just at the edge of town do too. (A lot of rules around making sure that doesn’t get racist or awful, but that’s a different comment). ‘gerrymandering’ is the abuse of the districting process to benefit the politicians to the detriment of the voter. Cutting the districts in such a way that people who tend to vote the same way get spread around to either never or always get a majority share, depending on if you want them to win or not.The above poster is wrong, and gerrymandering never had a valid usage. If 10% of the population has a political belief but they’re spread out amongst different districts, then they’re supposed to lose, not have the system bend over backwards to give them a special group.
Districting has value though, since it’s the way the system is supposed to allow people from smaller areas to have their voices heard without being drowned out by bigger areas, but fairly, such that each representative represents roughly the same number of people.Other countries also do this type of districting, they just have other systems in place that keep it from being so flagrantly abused.
My mind was stuck on presidential and more nationwide elections, which popular vote makes sense. Local things should be more regional like you described. If you don’t live by the lake, you have pretty much zero say on what those that do live there say.
100% thought you had done that, and just wanted to ramble some clarification in case. :) it’s pretty easy to focus on the “big” elections, and how what makes them shitty is essentially the “small” elections working properly-ish.
Personally, I’ve always wondered about a system where people directly vote for the representative they want regardless of geography, and then that person represents their constituency.
Geography used to represent a much more significant part of a persons interests, since you likely worked reasonably near where you lived, shopped and everything else. That’s less true now.
It’s moot since we’re not changing the fundamentals of our system anytime soon, but it’s interesting to think about.
Then the people living in those 10 blocks have to live with whatever the rest voted for regardless of whether it works for them or not with no hope of things ever changing because they’re in the minority.
Yes, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Your regional representative is supposed to represent your region. If you’re the minority in the region then you don’t get to pick the representative.
We don’t have a proportional voting system. The system is not designed to ensure that elected party makeup matches voter preference distribution.
The minority voters in your scenario get their say in the Senate votes where everything is equal and the district is the entire state.In any case, the scenario you’re describing is more representative of the cracking type of gerrymandering that’s the problem. A collection of voters in a region being split amongst multiple districts to dilute their votes is what gerrymandering is.
Hmm, I think I might have completely fucked up my phrasing somewhere because you seem to be agreeing with me.
It appears you’re saying that in some circumstances it’s appropriate to layout voting districts based on the political affiliation of the people who would end up in the various districts, with the intent of ensuring some seats are won by a minority party that would otherwise not hold power.
I’m saying that districting should be based on shared interests, predominantly geographic in nature because that’s how our system is designed, but that it should definitely not factor in political affiliation.
This means that if a political group is spread out and in the minority, they will not be represented by someone sharing their party affiliation, and that’s as it should be in our system.
I see. Yeah, that’s definitely entirely on me. When I said they should be grouped by political affiliation, I did mean “shared interests” but somehow forgot people treat politics like football teams.
Well, in a perfect world, people wouldn’t vote specifically to hurt others.
No vote woule be useless because they would all count the same.
Sounds great in theory but that’s just another way of saying minorities don’t get a vote.
Integrity is most common in other countries, but not in the united states.
The more I hear about this Jerry Mander fella, the less I care for him.
Most sane countries leave electoral boundaries to an independent commission
Where do we draw the line?
I’ll caveat this by saying that I detest gerrymandering and think it’s one of the roots of the decline of the US political systems.
That being said, I’m going to answer a question you might not have even asked with a bunch of information that doesn’t answer things better than “it’s complicated.”
The easiest “fair” way to divide up districts is based on equal polygons (say squares that are XX miles/km on an edge, for simplicity’s sake). The issue is that this doesn’t take into account population gradients due to terrain and zoning, or cultural/ethnic clusters. So, on its face it looks reasonable but you’ll end up with districts that cover a city with 1 million people of diverse cultural makeup standing equal with a district of 1000 people that are culturally/ethnically homogenous. Not actually fair.
So, you can try to draw irregular shapes and the next “fair” way to try and do that is to equalize population. Now you quickly devolve into a ton of questions about HOW to draw the districts to be inclusive and representative of the people in the overall area you’re trying to subdivide.
Imagine a fictional city with a cultural cluster (Chinatown in many American cities for example), a river, a wealthy area, a low income area, and industrial/commercial areas with large land mass and low resident populations.
How do you fairly draw those lines? You don’t want to disenfranchise an ethnic minority by subdividing them into several districts, you might have wealthier living on the river, you might have residents with business oriented interests in the industrial areas AND low income… It quickly becomes a mess.
A “fair” districting can look gerrymandered if you’re trying to enfranchise separate voting blocs in proportion to their actual population.
The problem is that politicians play this song and dance where they claim they’re trying to be fair (until recently in Texas where GOP said the quiet part out loud and just said they want to redraw lines to get more seats) but in reality they are setting up districts that subdivide minority blocs into several districts that disenfranchise their voting interests.
It’s disgusting, it’s a clown show. But none of OPs photos are representative of what a good district looks like, because every location is different and there’s likely an incredibly small number of locations that would divide that cleanly, if any.
So, it’s complicated. Needs to be independently managed outside politics as best as possible and staffed by smart people and backed up by good data.
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.
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.
It was invented because FDR was so popular that without that rule, his bones would probably still be president to this day.
Ive never understood why someone who is popular can’t keep doing the job. I also don’t understand lifetime appointments like the supreme court without mandatory retirement ages or other mechanism to prevent mentally deficient people in the role
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)
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.
Not necessarily of two-party systems or FPTP, I think this is a property of single-member districts in general. If you have multi-member districts (say 4 or 5 representatives per district) this becomes much less effective. Statewide PR solves this by removing districts, which for most people isn’t ideal.
Yeah, just get the winner of a 2-party FPTP system to change the rules that got them elected and instead put in place a PPV system that will ensure they never again get a majority. ezpz
a PPV system that will ensure they never again get a majority.
Are you saying the two party system doesn’t represent the people?
No system completely represents the people, but sorting people into only A or B is worse than systems that allow more categories.
