The more I hear about this Jerry Mander fella, the less I care for him.
YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States
Submitted 8 months ago by Davriellelouna@lemmy.world to youshouldknow@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f90c201d-b8ca-40c4-a45c-1b052f69d1c0.png
Comments
Agent641@lemmy.world 8 months ago
smeenz@lemmy.nz 8 months ago
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”
Drbreen@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Fuck you Gerry, fuck you and your fucking madering
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What if everybody just votes thier opinion on a set of issues. The cadadites have to declare thier opinion on the same set. When the voting is done, the percentages are calculated for all the issues. Then a computer program picks a list of cadidates such the they together match the distribution of the voters.
iglou@programming.dev 8 months ago
Three problems:
- It makes voting more complex. Having citizens able to make their opinion heard is important, but it should be separate from voting, unless you want an even larger abstention.
- The matching problem doesn’t necessarily have a solution. As in, it might be (and is actually likely) impossible to have a set of representatives that matches the percentages of each opinion.
- Not all opinions can be expressed in a multiple choice question. Most topics are way too complex to be summarised in a few options. So, who picks the options?
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 8 months ago
1, it is actually less complex for the voter. Right now they don’t kniw much about who/what they are voting for because all the info they get is marketing. But a question about homelessness or crime they probably feel more confident in thier answer. Plus many people don’t vote because thier options are all liars. The reps in this case don’t have to be popular, so they don’t have to lie. 2 in very small states it might be tough, but an algorithm can find the closest match by simply trying all the combinations. For a computer that will be a very simple task. And it could even print them all out for anyone to validate. 3 this for sure is the hardest part. Probably some kind of public proposal and polling combo would be needed. Btw, at work we were told to use numbers instead of bullets because it makes referring to a point much easier.
GhostedIC@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Hmmm, interesting choice of colors, considering which famously colored party is currently in the news for aggressively gerrymandering…
ddplf@szmer.info 8 months ago
Which is it?
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 8 months ago
and the current party using the 4th one the most.
workerONE@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Why do votes need to be done by district? Just do it statewide
merc@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Because the concerns of farmers in California’s central valley are different from the people in Hollywood.
workerONE@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Right, but without districts you could have ranked choice of voting so the farmers in central California can vote for candidates that they want to represent them and all of their votes should be able to elect those candidates. Meanwhile, people who vote in other regions should have enough votes to elect candidates of their choosing.
wolfpack86@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
workerONE@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
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.
workerONE@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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?
datavoid@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Nice, repost of a classic repost from the reddit front page
Stupidmanager@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’d love to see what the vote would look like if we broke the gerrymandering systems today. Democrats are just now talking about doing their own fuckery to counter republicans, but what if we just “didnt” have them, which side wins?
RabbitBBQ@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Replace all politicans with AI first and then do everyone else
DemandtheOxfordComma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
As soon as we get a Democrat president let’s just get rid of it forever.
iceonfire1@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Unfortunately whichever party is in power is incentivized to be in favor of biasing the process toward themselves, both parties choose to keep gerrymandering even though it’s obviously voter suppression.
This is also why neither of them will support ranked choice/instant run-off voting.
AlecSadler@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
They’ve had plenty of opportunities and haven’t done it.
astutemural@midwest.social 8 months 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.
merc@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
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
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
Are you saying the two party systems doesn’t represent the people?
ytg@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
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.
dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
smh my head
yes.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 8 months ago
WE know. It’s the pithed Fox News and Joe Rogan fuckwit demographic that has no fucking clue.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
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 like to ignore it when it benefits their side.
misteloct@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
“How dare you punch me back? You’re choosing to be violent when it benefits your side!” -Bully who punched 1,000 times first
hddsx@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
This should be a minimum three member mixed district resulting in 3 blue, 2 red
cymbal_king@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This is a board game! There’s also a virtual version on Board Game Arena
ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I have this game and I love it, abstracts and lecturing people about obscure subjects are two of my favorite things
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 8 months 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.
Jarix@lemmy.world 8 months ago
How would you prove it? That’s actually a question that needs an answer
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 8 months 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.
grue@lemmy.world 8 months 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.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 8 months 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.
laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months 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.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months 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 8 months 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.
Yondoza@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Some states have anti-gerrimandering written into their constitutions, so that would not be easy.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months 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.
chosensilence@pawb.social 8 months 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.
Mac@mander.xyz 8 months ago
If our laws were transparent how would anyone read them
hypna@lemmy.world 8 months 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.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Now we just need a way to do that
I have some ideas.
that isn’t vigilante violence.
Oh. Nevermind…
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months 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.
Mac@mander.xyz 8 months ago
We need drastic change but not using the one proven method of bringing it!
Classic
callyral@pawb.social 8 months ago
why not count each person instead to avoid the issue entirely
merc@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
So what, one representative for all those people?
potatoguy@potato-guy.space 8 months ago
Here in Brazil, one person means one vote, no districting, no gerrymandering, none of this things, one vote for the president is one vote, one vote for your state senator is one vote, one vote for your deputy is one vote for them and their party (in this part it’s weird, but makes sense that the politician also represents their party, but creates effects like “party gerrymandering”).
Bolsonaro went into house arrest yesterday, so this could mean something.
callyral@pawb.social 8 months ago
I am also from Brazil and that’s why I was a bit perplexed. To me, simply counting votes directly instead of counting districts makes more sense.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
Bolsonaro went into house arrest yesterday, so this could mean something.
He was also elected President, so that can mean something too.
blitzen@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Well, each vote is counted. Gerrymandering affects (federal level in the US) only the House of Representatives, and districts are drawn (ideally) proportional to population. How those lines are drawn are not and cannot be objective; Gerrymandering is when that subjectivity allows for bias.
j4k3@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The objection is that lines are not legitimate. Lines and districts do not represent voters, they represent politicians and that is not democratic.
Sneptaur@pawb.social 8 months ago
Because then the rich wouldn’t be able to control everything
GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
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.
mr_account@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Obligatory mention of CGP Grey and his fantastic animal kingdom voting series: m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY
perviouslyiner@lemmy.world 7 months ago
And Alpha Phoenix demonstrating how to produce rigged boundaries that look natural and not suspicious:
sp6@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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 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 our 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.
Canconda@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
merc@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
“Explaintaion”
That’s a wild one.
Canconda@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
my thumbs flippped the t and the a… get a life.
TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
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.
Bonesince1997@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Cracking and packing
chunes@lemmy.world 8 months ago
In my opinion there shouldn’t be districts at all. Too much potential for fuckery.
qevlarr@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Proportional representation is the way. X% of the vote means X% of seats, no shenanigans
nemo@piefed.social 8 months 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 8 months 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 8 months 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 8 months 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?
bufalo1973@europe.pub 8 months ago
Proportional representatives. Of a party gets a 30%of the votes, it gets a 30%ish of the seats.
COASTER1921@lemmy.ml 8 months 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.
Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
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 sorry tells them to vote.