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.
YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States
Submitted 3 weeks ago by Davriellelouna@lemmy.world to youshouldknow@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f90c201d-b8ca-40c4-a45c-1b052f69d1c0.png
Comments
TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
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.
pennomi@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Instant recall would be huge in the US. People here have extremely short memories.
acockworkorange@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
That’s just direct elections with extra steps.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
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…
Womble@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
Just FYI, this use of republic is not recognised in political science and as far as I've seen is only used by americans justifying why their system is undemocratic. Republic just comes from "res Publica" (public affair) and means the head of state is not a monarch but a member of the public. There are very democratic republics like Finland and there are very undemocratic republics like the PRC
yucandu@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Or even better, the position of president or prime minister should have little power.
iglou@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
You don’t want that. France tried that, a couple of times, it didn’t work. Government ended up deadlocked and falling every 6 months. Our 5th republic granted more power to the presidency, and now it’s a little better.
What you do want, however, is the head of state and the head of government to be two distinct persons. Which is not the case in the USA.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
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.
Quadhammer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
When the Senate’s full of cucks, they let you do it
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
iglou@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Area based voting is a necessity for electing a local representative. But it shouldn’t apply for national elections, on that I agree. The US is the only country I know of that applies area based voting in national elections.
TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
And the UK, as the parliament is made up of local representatives. They should be two different people.
DrBob@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
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.
ohulancutash@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
The Government isn’t the house, it’s the around 140 ministers appointed by the PM, drawn from both houses, plus the whips. Opposite them is the opposition frontbench, which is the leader of the opposition and the shadow cabinet, and their whips. Everyone else in the Commons from those two parties are backbenchers.
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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).
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
the gop loves to use the 4th one, which always fucks up dem voters, and thats where you see voter turnout problems. plus they also suppress votes in the areas they control which has significant D voters too.
RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Some of these are absolutely insane
ToastedRavioli@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
Blackmist@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Ah, the minority locator.
That first one is no longer like that, but according to Wikipedia was done by the Democrats.
It’s a complex issue as well, because it’s not always done for nefarious reasons. If say 20% of a city is black, they might bundle them up so that they end up with one black guy and four white guys running the city, rather than the 5 white guys that would come from a “fairer” distribution.
But it’s all just window dressing on the fact that first past the post systems aren’t fit for purpose. If I vote for something, I want that counted at all levels up to the national level, not just thrown away because my particular group of streets doesn’t like it.
OldChicoAle@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
🎵how insane can you go?🎶
Carighan@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
I request all districts are now Penrose tiled using the Einstein hat!
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
We need more 1 and 3, and less 2 4 5.
If the enemy has nukes, don’t unilaterally disarm. Same here.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
What the fuck does this even mean
RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Hmm?
m0darn@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
bss03@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
They are so insane they inspired art: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU8H-Ts_rfA
AA5B@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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
Peereboominc@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Why even have the system with districts? Just calculate all the votes and see who wins?
If you live in a place where most people vote x, why even bother to vote y. Your vote will go straight in the bin.BussyGyatt@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
just one of the many reasons you see such consistent low turnouts in american elections
rymden_viking@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The idea was that you get direct representation - your representative should be focused on your issues and the issues plaguing people in your district. But it breaks down today because politicians in the US just vote with their party.
booly@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The American political system was designed for weak parties, and geographical representation above all, in a political climate where there were significant cultural differences between regions.
The last time we updated the core rules around districting (435 seats divided as closely to proportionally as possible among the states, with all states being guaranteed at least one seat, in single member districts) was in 1929, when we had a relatively weak federal government, very weak political parties, before the rise of broadcasting (much less national broadcasting, or national television, or cable TV networks, or universal phone service, or internet, or social media). We had 48 states. The population was about 120 million, and a substantial number of citizens didn’t actually speak English at home.
And so it was the vote for the person that was the norm. Plenty of people could and did “switch parties” to vote for the candidate they liked most. Parties couldn’t expel politicians they didn’t like, so most political issues weren’t actually staked out by party line.
But now, we have national parties where even local school governance issues look to the national parties for guidance. And now the parties are strong, where an elected representative is basically powerless to resist even their own party’s agenda. And a bunch of subjects that weren’t partisan have become partisan. All while affiliations with other categories have weakened: fewer ethnic or religious enclaves, less self identity with place of birth, more cultural homogenization between regions, etc.
So it makes sense to switch to a party-based system, with multi member districts and multiple parties. But that isn’t what we have now, and neither side wants to give up the resources and infrastructure they’ve set up to give themselves an advantage in the current system.
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Another thing was that in the past it wasn’t actually possible to properly coordinate parties. Communications technology just wasn’t there. I’m sure every congressman had a high-tech “telephone” in their house, but they weren’t always home, and there certainly weren’t answering machines.
More importantly, mass media wasn’t there either. People knew their reps from local town halls and canvassing. They weren’t bombarded with mass media featuring the president or the party leader. Sure, they’d show up in newspapers, but not audio/video. So, that meant that congressional reps had a lot more “fame” in their districts, and the leaders had a lot less. So, that gave the reps more independence.
Money also was less of a factor. It’s always been a problem with US democracy, but national parties didn’t have a stranglehold over their members because of money like they do today.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Mainly because these jerryrigged districts are counting on you not voting in order for them to work.
Ideally, your Reps are supposed to be local, so states are supposed to be divided up into relatively equal populations where the citizens have similar economic and social demographics so they get equitable representation of their local issues at a federal level.
Personally, I think we need a law where voting districts are limited by complexity. Create a law that establishes a maximum perimeter-to-area ratio for congressional districts, and also mandates that the most and least populous districts must be within 10% of eachother’s population.
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Mandelbrot has entered the chat
pupbiru@aussie.zone 2 weeks ago
i did a big ol post here about this
generally what you’re talking about is proportional representation… systems like this tend to lead to a government comprised of a lot of minor parties, which sounds great!
but it has its down sides (and i’m not saying 2 party is much better, but it’s useful to be aware of the situations it creates): when there are a lot of minor parties with no clear “above 50%” majority, they have to form a coalition government and that can be extremely fragile
you can’t hold parties to election promises, because you just don’t know what they’re going to have to give up to form a coalition, and even if they do end up forming a coalition you really don’t know how stable that coalition is going to be!
i guess in the US there’s gridlock anyway, so what the hell right? may as well at least have gridlock with parties blocking legislation based on things you believe in… buuuuuuut that’s probably a bad example: first past the post is far more to blame in that case than proportional vs representative democracy
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
you can’t hold parties to election promises
You can’t do that today either. In fact, it’s worse today. What are you going to do if your party doesn’t fulfill its electoral promises? Vote for the “bad party”?
AA5B@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
i guess in the US there’s gridlock anyway, so what the hell right?
Historically there were many compromises where representatives worked with the other party to find a solution they could all agree to. We like to think that’s how politics work.
However over the last few years it’s gotten much more divisive. Currently it seems like everything is a party line vote. It seems like one party especially elevated party loyalty above serving constituents, above doing the right thing. There is no more voice of the people, only the party and the evil orange overlord.
Filibusters have always been a thing, where you can hold the floor as long as you can talk about something, delaying everything. That was both a challenge for someone to do and had a huge impact when Congress had the motivation to do what they saw as right for their constituents. Now it’s automatic. You simply need to declare it. A majority vote is no longer enough for most choices because you always need the supermajority sufficient to overcome the filibuster, to “silence the representative “. Now you can’t get anything done.
For most of our history, Congress understood their highest priority was to pass a budget, and they did. Now that is no longer important. Brinksmanship means there is no longer a downside to hold the whole country hostage over whatever issue so they do. “Shutting down the government” by not passing a budget has become the new norm. Meaning we not only can’t get anything done but disrupt everything else.
AA5B@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You need districts because not every race is national. Sure it allocates electoral votes but also Congress-critters. When a state has multiple Representatives, who elects each?
Districts are good so that people with something in common are better represented. We do NOT want a “tyranny of the majority” where minorities have no voice.
Some amount of gerrymandering is good to create districts where people have something in common. But that’s the real problem: how to allow “good” complex shapes while prohibiting “bad” gerrymandering? How do you even define that?
Personally I thought there was some law connecting it to the census so that any changes are based on data, not political whims. However clearly not
pupbiru@aussie.zone 2 weeks ago
this is proportional vs representative democracy
it’s a choice between which you value more: your ideals (proportional - lots of minor parties get elected who better represent your morals and what you want accomplished) or someone to represent the area you live in (representative - inevitably leads to, actually, MINORITY rule because the majority across most districts votes for the party that they hate least - partly because first past the post, but also because in individual districts parties need to get above 50% to win, and that’s just a hard ask do matter the area you live)
NateNate60@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The idea is to have state-wide races where parties, not individuals, compete. Let’s take Washington State, as an example, because it has a nice and even 10 representatives. Instead of having district campaigns, you would have one big statewide election where each party puts up their best campaign, the people vote, and then the votes are counted on a statewide basis and tallied up. Let’s say the results are in and are as follows:
- Democratic Party: 40%
- Republican Party: 28%
- Libertarian Party: 11%
- Green Party: 8%
- Working Families Party: 6%
- Constitution Party: 4%
- Independents: 3%
For each 10% of the vote, that party gets allocated one seat. So Democrats get 4, Republicans get 2, and Libertarians get 1. The remaining 3 seats are doled out to whichever party has the largest remainder. So the Republicans and Greens with 8% get one more each, and the Working Families Party with 6% gets one. The Constitution Party and the independents will go home with zero seats.
The final distribution:
- Democrats: 4
- Republicans: 3
- Libertarians: 1
- Greens: 1
- Working Families: 1
There are two ways of determining which exact people get to actually go and sit in Congress: open list or closed list. A closed list system means that the party publishes a list of candidates prior to the election, and the top N people on that list are elected, where N is the number of seats won by the party. A simple open list system would be that everyone on that party’s list has their name actually appear on the ballot and a vote for them also counts as a vote for their party, then the top N people of that party with the most votes are elected, where N is the number of seats won by a party. In a closed list system, the party determines the order before the election (they can hold a primary). In an open list system, the voters determine the order on election day.
The main drawback of this system is that with a closed list system, the voters can’t really “vote out” an unpopular politician who has the backing of their party since that party will always put them at the top of the list, and open list systems tend to have extremely long ballot papers (if each party here stood the minimum of 10 candidates and 10 independents also stood, that would be 70 candidates on the ballot). It also forces the election to be statewide which means smaller parties can’t gain regional footholds by concentrating all their efforts on a small number of constituencies. Small parties in the US don’t tend to do this anyway, but it is a fairly successful strategy in other countries, like the Bloc Québécois in Canada or the Scottish National Party in the UK. That being said, a proportional system would still increase the chance that smaller parties have of obtaining representation. Small parties in the US have almost invisible campaigns but if they took it seriously, they’d only need to get 10% of the vote to win a seat, which on some years they almost do anyway even without a campaign.
The other drawback is that it eliminates the concept of a “local” representative (oddly-shaped and extremely large constituencies notwithstanding), so if a representative votes for a policy that is extremely unpopular in their constituency, it is less effective to “punish” them for it within that constituency as long as the candidate or their party is still popular statewide.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
I’ve said it many times, the US is a model example of what not to do in so so many different ways.
chunes@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
In my opinion there shouldn’t be districts at all. Too much potential for fuckery.
qevlarr@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Proportional representation is the way. X% of the vote means X% of seats, no shenanigans
nemo@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
No shenanigans except the party picks the rep instead of the voters. Maybe you have a party you trust to do that, but I don't.
marcos@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.)
Jumi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
It’s a bit simplified of course.
iglou@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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?
COASTER1921@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
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.
SuperCub@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
It’s almost like the idea that representation based on land instead of based on people is flawed to begin with.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.)
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Not sure what you mean, get rid of districts? If you break up the population into groups then you get a geographic area.
mr_account@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Obligatory mention of CGP Grey and his fantastic animal kingdom voting series: m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY
vga@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Both sides have had opportunities to make it illegal and neither have done it. I wonder why.
Geobloke@aussie.zone 2 weeks ago
In the USA, politicians chose the voters!
AndrewZabar@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
Yeah, a common pattern in pseudo democracies like Hungary…
melsaskca@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Integrity is most common in other countries, but not in the united states.
Dorkyd68@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I will never understand how the highest number of votes isn’t winning. Bucha cheatin ass bitches
callyral@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
why not count each person instead to avoid the issue entirely
Agent641@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The more I hear about this Jerry Mander fella, the less I care for him.
FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Where do we draw the line?
arc99@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Most sane countries leave electoral boundaries to an independent commission
astutemural@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
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.
kelpie_returns@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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 most 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 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.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
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.
pjwestin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Anything to undermine democracy
Jarix@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is kinda if topic, but why does the US have term limits for the presidency, but not all the other major positions?
workerONE@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Why do votes need to be done by district? Just do it statewide
GhostedIC@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Hmmm, interesting choice of colors, considering which famously colored party is currently in the news for aggressively gerrymandering…
Legisign@europe.pub 2 weeks ago
The figures only make sense in “first past the post” (or “winner takes it all”) systems.
kalistia@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Bonesince1997@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Cracking and packing
riquisimo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
It bothers me that the graphic lists red-then-blue but there text lists blue-then-red. It’s inconsistent to how we read the information and makes it confusing to process.
…like gerrymandering
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 3 weeks ago
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.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I have some ideas.
Oh. Nevermind…
Mac@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Classic
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
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.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Supposedly there was a bill a few years ago to ban it that narrowly failed.
At this point maybe the best bet would be for blue states to enter the gerrymandering arms race on a conditional basis; do it as blatantly as it’s being done on the other side, with some explicit clause that it will end when fair representation is implemented nationwide.
half_fiction@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I just read an article this morning (tried to find it to link here but couldn’t) that was talking about how it will be more difficult for Dems to lean into this strategy because most of the blue states already have independent committees to draw districts (as they should.) It basically pointed to California as our sole bastion of hope for 2026 and noted that if a bunch of the states follow suit, the Republicans will have the edge. Continues to come down to the electoral college problem with small states getting disproportionate voices.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
That assumes the democratic party wants gerrandering to end and they just won’t collude with the Republicans to carve up the country and entrench the two party system.
Yondoza@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Some states have anti-gerrimandering written into their constitutions, so that would not be easy.
grue@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
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.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 2 weeks ago
I wonder if “I know it when I see it” would be good enough if it had to pass a public vote. Do you think the regular people on the street would vote to support gerrymandering? Getting good voter turnout and education is its own set of problems, admittedly.
chosensilence@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
Gerrymandering is a crime. We just don’t consider what’s going on to be legally gerrymandering for some bullshit fuck ass reason. There’s only been a few cases of gerrymandering being caught in a legal sense. It is largely ignored.
hypna@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This issue is actually pretty weird. Racial gerrymandering is a violation of the voting rights act, hence illegal. Partisan gerrymandering is completely legal. In practice this seems to mean that it is harder to gerrymander in states where racial voting patterns align with party, e.g. whites vote Republican, blacks vote Democrat. In states where party lines do not predominantly fall on racial lines, you can hack up the districts to favor your party as much as you like.
Mac@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
If our laws were transparent how would anyone read them
Jarix@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How would you prove it? That’s actually a question that needs an answer
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 2 weeks ago
I’m not sure. I said in another comment in here that maybe having the public vote on districts would make it harder to pull off. Like, if the entire state needs to look at the map and say “That looks fair”, maybe it’ll be hard to make those paint splatter ones.