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It’s almost like the idea that representation based on land instead of based on people is flawed to begin with.
Not sure what you mean, get rid of districts? If you break up the population into groups then you get a geographic area.
y u no direct democracy?
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.
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.)
Is there even a way to mathematically divide up land area into completely fair districts? I heard somewhere that it wasn’t possible.
there are generally a couple (probably more but modern democracies afaik have settled on 2) ways of dividing up government: representative (you as a person living in an area elect someone to represent you) and proportional (you as a citizen of the country elect a party to represent your preferences)
rather than dividing land area (representative aka districts) to elect individuals, there are voting systems that take proportionality into account… parties put forward candidates based on their proportional vote (ie the party leader would get in first, and then they have a list of candidates who get chosen based on their % of the vote)… they don’t represent a district/area, but the party… so the idea is that if a minority party gets 10% of the vote, they should have 10% of the representation - districts be damned… philosophy is more important than land… this leads to a whole lot of minor parties having to form a coalition government
i live in australia, and we don’t have proportional representation (we have a party… kind… called the coalition but that’s… different… it’s complex… ignore it… afaik germany and nz have proportional representation: they’re probably the best places i know of to look for these systems: parliaments composed of many minor parties)… we do have ranked choice voting, so we’re kind of a middle ground: ranked choice without proportional representation still leads to a 2 party system, but imo theres debatable up sides and down sides from representative to proportional (proportional systems can lead to a lot of nothing - small parties that are technically the majority but can’t agree on anything and not able to get anything done)
i thiiiink i’ve heard that there are systems that combine proportional and representative (actually, i think our australian senate is proportional and our house of representatives is representative - our HOR is pretty 2 party and our senate has a about 5-6 minor parties) but this is where my knowledge gets fuzzy
first past the post is the root of all evil: there are no up sides, there are only down sides… it causes politics to be horrible (ranked choice you have to worry about not just winning outright but also being likeable - you have to make everyone like you, because you want them to put you 2nd, 3rd, etc because 2nd preference might make you win!), it causes extremism, hate, forced 2 party (in the worst possible way: extremist 2 party), and absolutely no opportunity for change
It’s also illegal in the united states.
This I didn’t know, wtf. So this whole bullshit has literally been illegal to begin with???
It was, though a few years ago SCOTUS decided it’s OK as long as you aren’t doing it because you are racist.
And if you are doing it because you’re racist that’s OK, just don’t be too obvious about it.
It isn’t actually, not in all cases. There is nothing in the constitution preventing it and the Supreme Court and state courts have said that there is no mechanism in place to either identify it objectively, nor to remedy it if found, with a few exceptions. The biggest exceptions are where it violates the Voting Rights Act or otherwise demonstrably discriminates on the basis of racial demographics (a constitutionally protected class), in which case it can be kicked back to the legislature with the directive to do it again but try to be less racist this time.
Don’t forget that if you say it’s because the minority group votes against you then it’s officially political and not racist. Thanks SCOTUS.
Illegality is slowly being erased in america
I’ve said it many times, the US is a model example of what not to do in so so many different ways.
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Why do votes need to be done by district? Just do it statewide
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
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.
Because the concerns of farmers in California’s central valley are different from the people in Hollywood.
Right, but without districts you could have ranked choice 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.
The candidates might all focus on the big population centers, and the central California voters might have to choose between LA candidate A, LA Candidate B and SF Candidate C.
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
Where text lists blue-then-red?
In the image attached to the post.
this assumes a left to right interpretation which is not universal, the graphic in a sense is not absolutely red then blue
the text could be positioned left and right like the graphic does, but I found it natural to list the larger number first and the smaller second - so not everyone feels the same as you about the graphic being confusing
this assumes a left to right interpretation which is not universal
While this is true, the graphic is in English using the Latin script. The Latin script is, as you might know, a left to right script which triggers a left to right interpretation of the whole thing.
Honestly, it didn’t trigger me at all but it would be more logical to also put the bigger color first (read: on the left)
Yeah, it’s written in English, which is read left to right.
Thanks fot adding context to my comment
💀💀💀
agreed, I think the reasoning makes sense given that context 😄
Thanks, I like being right on the internet
ha, relatable
I do have to think about these assumptions in web design, e.g. using block start or end padding styles instead of padding left or right, so that the page will render correctly if loaded in a different cultural context / language. Euro-centrism is strong, but English isn’t the only language, and Western culture isn’t the only culture.
They listed the majority first. That’s all they did here.
gerrymandering goes both ways: it can make a majority a total victory, and a minority also a victory… i think building up is a good way of displaying that: you can go from a representative minority to a total win, and a representative minority to a minority win depending on how you draw the lines
the point being to show that gerrymandering is more influential than the vote, regardless of which “side” you’re on… it’s bad for everyone
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.
“Explaintaion”
That’s a wild one.
my thumbs flipped the t and the a.
Get a life.
Ah, so you meant “Full Expltination”?
why not count each person instead to avoid the issue entirely
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.
The objection is that lines are not legitimate. Lines and districts do not represent voters, they represent politicians and that is not democratic.
Districts by their very nature represent voters.
I feel like you are misunderstanding representative government. There is value in districts, provided they are drawn apolitically. Without it, people living in sparsely populated areas would effectively have their unique needs unmet.
I am not saying the system is without critique. There is loads wrong with it as is, as the gerrymandering problem illustrates. But while one person / one vote would be ideal for an office like president (and it should be changed so this is the case), it would have other issues if it were used for all offices.
Without it, people living in sparsely populated areas would effectively have their unique needs unmet.
Why? That’s why you have different tiers of government. Parliament shouldn’t have to worry about the state of the water in a particular municipality, that’s a local government issue. Similarly, the state sets the budget for healthcare, but the regions allocate those resources based on the needs of the municipalities.
Districts by their very nature represent voters.
I feel like you are misunderstanding representative government. There is value in districts, provided they are drawn apolitically. Without it, people living in sparsely populated areas would effectively have their unique needs unmet.
It’s really important to understand why this is not the case. Districted voting essentially introduces first-past-the-post voting at more levels. Each level of FPTP creates a larger disparity between what voters want and who gets elected. This is in part due to gerrmandering, but that’s not a required thing.
Every time you decide a district election through FPTP, you essentially create a rounding error, a disparity between the election results and what voters actually voted for. This FPTP system then reinforces the two-party system that the US and UK have a very hard time escaping. And as you may be able to guess, having a mere two major parties to choose from is fucking terrible for getting niche voters represented. It’s why the US and UK see comparatively little regional focus and increased disillusionment with national politics in these areas.
Abolishing districts actually helps local representation(!). Because under proportional representation, if someone campaigns on serving the needs of a small group of voters, said group can vote for them and they will be elected. It lets anyone basically define their own “district” of voters, without political manipulation. If they fail to attract a sizeable enough share of votes, then this electoral niche is simply too small to be represented at the national level, and this group should perhaps petition local government instead.
We see this effect quite clearly in countries like the Netherlands, where there are quite a few national parties to choose from, and several focus on a specific group of voters (eg the BBB which focuses on farmers, or the FNP which focuses on people living in the region of Friesland.
I don’t see why FPTP voting are inherent to voting districts. I would agree FPTP voting is problematic, but don’t necessarily agree abolishing districts would be the way to solve it.
I’ll admit to being largely uneducated on political theory, but nothing you said has convinced me districted voting is inherently bad.
FPTP isn’t strictly necessary for districts, but it’s the most common. One way or another, you need some way to determine which candidate will ultimately represent a district. Unless you’re in a 2-party system, it’s very likely that this candidate will only represent a minority of voters in a district. Even with RCV you might get a “least disliked” candidate, but that’s still not a candidate that has majority support.
Perhaps to make it easier to understand: there is zero guarantee that all voters in a specific district have the same voting preference. And those without a plurality opinion are likely to end up marginalised under a districting system. If another group in your district is slightly larger, you end up without representation. Without districting, these voters can band together and choose their preferred candidate, without being constrained by arbitrary district lines.
Perhaps a concrete example will help. Take a random western country with a small minority. This minority doesn’t tend to aggregate in specific districts as much, they’re usually very well spread out over the country (let’s say there’s 2% nationwide, but at most 10% in any given district). Under a districting system, they’re likely to fail getting even a single representative, as they’re a minority in every single district. But under proportional representation, they could get a representative as collectively the minority is large enough to warrant representation with at least 2% of seats.
There’s also systems like the Danish, which iirc tries to figure out how many districts should be appointed to which party by dividing up the national vote (though I’m not very well acquainted with it). But even such a system will then be forced to assign a district representative to a district where the candidate does not enjoy majority support.
And that’s the issue with districting. It’s not possible to have a system that guarantees the national election results match the national voter preference, and that guarantees that district election results match the district voter preference.
Yeah it’s not that districted voting requires FPTP, but I think the point was that it has an effect that’s similar.
Even if you had RCV in each district so that the elected candidate was generally more preferred by the people in that district, you could still end up with an aggregated outcome where no members from a given party win any districts, yet still had some small portion of voters in each district. In that way the unlucky party gets no representation despite having a non-zero voter base.
So while I wouldn’t use the phrase “inherently bad” to describe district elections, I think the arguments in favor of districtless, proportional voting are stronger.
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.
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.
Bolsonaro went into house arrest yesterday, so this could mean something.
He was also elected President, so that can mean something too.
Majority of people didn’t want him and don’t want him again, like with Trump, but only one of them got reelected.
Because then the rich wouldn’t be able to control everything
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.
So what, one representative for all those people?
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.
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.
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.
That only works if there are only two parties. I’d prefer a solution that works with electoral reform, not against it.
To make aure I understand, you mean that if you reverse the vote of every district the state should see the opposite party winning?
Yes
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.
Do you think the regular people on the street would vote to support gerrymandering?
If their side gets more representation, then yes. Unfortunately people are too focused on the output and not the process.
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.
Some states have anti-gerrimandering written into their constitutions, so that would not be easy.
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.
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.
Now we just need a way to do that
I have some ideas.
that isn’t vigilante violence.
Oh. Nevermind…
We need drastic change but not using the one proven method of bringing it!
Classic
Go on, do something then
[Spiderman meme]
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.
So, yeah, we need to figure out the right way to do it. Until then and if they don’t let us, flip the damn table.
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.edit: a bit wrong here but whaddya know it’s because our laws are not transparent
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.
wow, i did not know that. thank you for elaborating. i looked into it further and found SCOTUS asshole Roberts: "The Constitution supplies no objective measure for assessing whether a districting map treats a political party fairly.” lol cool, cool…
He’s being quiet about the part where the founders failed to predict an institutionalized two-party system.
Many of the founding fathers were against political parties altogether and absolutely anticipated a two party equilibrium.
So much of their arguments rely on that; “clearly the Constitution says nothing explicitly on this issue (or alternatively, the constitution wasn’t microscopically specific this was a case it had in mind so, really, who are we to allow it to apply to this scenario?); as an originalist, I just presume that there was no intent rather than assuming anyone in the project of writing a founding document has any interest in it working fairly or well.”
Florida has racial Gerrymandering. they just don’t recognize race. problem averted.
If our laws were transparent how would anyone read them
How would you prove it? That’s actually a question that needs an answer
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.
The limit (with infinite districts made of infinite people) is theoretically 1/4 support, in a 2 party system, with a choice made from separately decided districts. If you add another level of districts, it could be 1/8, another would be 1/16, and so on.
In practice you can’t make a district with actually 100% support of the opposing party, and you need to leave a little room for error in the districts you plan to win. Also there aren’t an infinite number of districts lol
”Perfect representation” only works if everyone votes. Blue can win with 3 votes against 20 votes.
This should be a minimum three member mixed proportional district resulting in 2 blue, 1 red
Edit: I can’t add to three. Fixed numbers
There is a board game! There’s also a virtual version of Mapmaker on Board Game Arena
It is quite fun despite the depressing context.
I have this game and I love it, abstracts and lecturing people about obscure subjects are two of my favorite things
