One of the main complications in the US is the racial mix. Looking at party lines and geographic boundaries is an over simplification
Say 20% of the population is black, and the state has five reps. Two neighboring cities each have 30% black population, and enough population to have two of the five reps. The rest are dispersed in rural areas. Do you draw that each city gets one rep? Or do you draw such that a district has a majority of black residents, with funny boundaries to accommodate the geography?
The former means that you will more likely end up with a white representative for both cities and the voice of the black community are not heard in the legislative body. The latter means that you have now gerrymandered to ensure a group gets a voice they deserve.
This is the real pain in the ass about the whole thing. Some level of drawing stupid districts is needed to create good. Pure geographically created boundaries will only cause segregation if we want minority groups to have an equal voice in the legislature.
But, people in power tend to fuck everything up.
iglou@programming.dev 1 day ago
You can have a electoral division of your country without gerrymandering. Cf most european countries.
RunawayFixer@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 hours ago
Multi-representative per-voting district isn’t the same as proportional representation - you still get a percentage of votes that gets thrown out, normally smaller parties which can’t get enough votes in any one district to add up to a representative but if you added up their votes nationally it would be enough to have several representatives.
You still get things like parties getting 10% of the vote but only 5% of parliamentarians, whilst the big parties can get 50% of parliamentarians on about 40% of the vote.
In Proportional Representation there are no districts and the votes of the whole country are added up and then used to allocate parliamentarians, which minimizes the votes lost because they didn’t add up to a parliamentarian.
Multi-representative per-voting district is still better than First Past The Post (as a singled representative per district mathematically maximizes the number of votes thrown out), but it’s still designed to reduced the representation of smaller parties and boost that of larger ones.
As far as I know the only true Proportional Vote System in Europe is in the Netherlands, though Germany have a mixed system with a 5% threshold to get into the Bundestag.