YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to determine election outcomes by changing electoral maps. In most western countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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."
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.
I appreciate the response, reading my comment I hope it didn't come across as challenging you. Was just meaning to share that it is an important question that I hope someone figure out an answer for.
I think leveraging the relative ease we have with modern communication instead of renting on systems that don't account for the actual capability that there is no technical reason everyone in the world can't vote at the same time on issue if we really wanted to make it happen
The technology we currently have is able to do it, it would just be a matter of handling the traffic. (We penalty don't have enough hardware in place, but that's just a logistic other)
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.
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.
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...
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. The way you describe a republic would apply to countries like the UK or Sweden, which are constitutional monarchies, not republics.
Representative democracy is a better term for what you are talking about, where the population elects representatives who are able to advocate for them and take the time to become subject matter experts on running the country (idealy).
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.
Oof, that's a tough question to answer in here. There is no really good way to generalise who has what power, and there is probably many ways to split the powers in a meaningful way.
You can read the articles on both positions specifically for France, which I do think in this case is a great example, on wikipedia, although if you want a more precise and complete understanding you'd probably have to read the french article and translate it.
The main advantage of this system is that when the president doesn't have the majority to support him in the parliament, most of the executive power de facto shifts to the prime minister, who is usually nominated (by the president) in accordance with the parliament's majority coalition. When that's not done, the parliament can move to "censor" the government and force the president to nominate a new prime minister, who then nominates the rest of the government.
That system is a good way to make sure the president doesn't do whatever the fuck they want if the parliament disagrees.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Government" has two meanings here. The oppostion has an official role in "governance" which is why they have offices, sit in committees, have research budgets, vote etc. In a minority government situation The backbenchers have a great deal of control over the process. Opposition included. The "GOVernment" controls the process to great extent.
This isn't like the American system where the minority partner is relegated to the sides. The opposition play a very strong role in the parliamentary process. It doesn't map well onto American politics at all.
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).
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.
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.
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
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 🤷♂️
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.
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.
playing by the rules only makes sense when the other side does too… a level playing field is more important than some unspoken rules
yes, everyone agrees it should be impossible to gerrymander… but given that it’s not, for an election to be anywhere near “fair” (and to be clear it can’t when you’re gerrymandering) then both sides must do it otherwise it’s the most unfair thing possible
(disclaimer: aussie; this ain’t my country, and our electoral system doesn’t allow this.. but for absolute fucks sake yall your vote effects the entire world and we get no say at all, so all we can do is talk some sense into this UNIQUELY crazy bullshit)
We can still hope the playing field will tilt back to level. Four years from now there will be no evil orange overlord to pardon all his minions and groupies. They’ll have to face justice with no way to cheat it.
That hope is what keeps me going. If the Trump kids are fine profiting off their fathers position and to the detriment of the country, I hope to see the day where it all comes crashing down when they’re no longer above the law
We can still hope the playing field will tilt back to level.
they’ve been doing this for years… it ain’t gonna happen. it’s not a symptom of trump: texas used to be a muuuuch more purple state, but these days it’s only ever thought of as a republican stronghold not because of their vote, but because of gerrymandering… that’s how long it’s been going on. most people can’t even remember a time when it was any different
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
(fptp leads to extremism, ranked choice etc leads to moderation because people’s 2nd, 3rd, etc choice matters: you want to be likeable not just to your “base” but to everyone, because everyone’s vote has a chance of flowing through to you even if you’re not their first choice… if people hate you, you’re not going to get those preference votes when candidates get eliminated)
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.
For most of our history, Congress understood their highest priority was to pass a budget, and they did. Now that is no longer important.
yeah it’s pretty fucked… in australia, this is a sure way to trigger a dissolved parliament and an early election: there are only 3 things that can happen (and the government shutting down isn’t 1 of them)
the government resigns and the governor general (technically “the crowns representative in australia”, but in actuality they do very little unless there’s a crisis) appoints (probably) the leader of the opposition
of budget bills fail 3 times the government may request a double dissolution - early, full federal elections
the governor general unilaterally dismisses the PM, because if they government can’t even maintain supply then they don’t have the power to do anything at all (this has only ever happened once and was australia’s largest ever constitutional crisis, but i do like that it’s a valid fall-back)
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"?
yup, so it’s different with RCV and representative: in australia we have this, where we still have a mostly 2 party system that’s representative but we have RCV, so you can preference other parties first, and still have your vote eventually flow to the major party of your choice
in this case, perhaps enough votes are lost that they loose a seat (we’ve had at least 1 green rep in parliament for a few elections in a row)
also we track “primary vote” - the number of people who ranked you #1 - as an important election metric with real consequences… there are limits to private donations for elections, and a significant portion of funding for elections comes from the government itself. any party that gets over 4% of the primary vote is eligible to claim a proportional amount of financing for next election… so you can punish them in a way that really matters without actually putting anything real on the line
that’s different to proportional representation, because it’s a property of the system that there are many minor parties which inherently means parties have to make more deals
That sounds good in theory, but I've heard a lot of Australians complain about politics there. Maybe that's just because people complain about politics everywhere. But, it also seems like Australia has a lot of problems that aren't getting solved (like housing cost).
It definitely doesn't seem like a place that has things all figured out.
Switzerland is the only country where people seem pretty proud of their system. It has its issues, but that's mainly because they have some pretty awful voters and a direct democracy system that has caused some real headaches. For example, voters voted for some laws that were incompatible with the treaties the country had signed as part of the EU, and had they gone into effect it would have meant cancellation of their work with France on CERN, for example. I can't remember how that was eventually resolved, but it was a real mess.
I've heard a lot of Australians complain about politics there. Maybe that's just because people complain about politics everywhere.
i think this is true no matter what: nz and germany are both more proportional systems and similarly people dislike politics
it also seems like Australia has a lot of problems that aren't getting solved (like housing cost).
absolutely… some problems are incredibly tricky: getting people to vote against their interests (eg with housing, any effort to reduce house prices directly decreases the value of peoples assets - perhaps not investments, but their primary home even)
how to achieve some societal good things is really tricky in any democracy i think
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
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 for minor parties no matter the area you live)
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 guarantee a seat, and even with 6-7% they'd still have a good shot at getting one, 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 districts are 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.
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.
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 party tells them to vote.
This is a very cynical point of view that would make it even less possible for independants to be represented in the House, remove town halls from the system, and therefore make the entire system even less democratic and remove the entire point of a representative democracy.
Proportional voting would actually make smaller parties be able to have representatives, breaking up the 2 party system and promoting more diverse point of views. You can also have mixed systems, with locally elected reps for a part of the house, and the rest of the house being filled in a manner that the end result is proportional to the global voting share
Also it's possible to have a "national circle" which when votes allocate parliamentary representatives, is used for, after all regional representatives have be allocated, pick up all votes that didn't yielded any representatives in the regional circles and use them to allocate representatives nationally.
Smaller parties which are not regionally concentrated loose regional representation but they don't lose representation in overall as those votes end up electing national representatives, whilst very regional parties get regional representatives and the bigger national parties get mainly regional representative and maybe a handful of national ones.
I'm not saying getting rid of local representation is the solution, necessarily. In fact, I personally think the opposite is true and we need more local representation.
It's just with the current system, local representation is kind of useless and supports gerrymandering and corruption.
If I were in charge I would demand political parties to disperse completely and local representatives be the only people on the ballot to go ahead and make decisions for the people who voted for them. Vote for the person not the party.
The arguably huge downside of this, is that it cuts the direct line from you to a representative. That undermines democracy, because it undermines your capacity to be heard.
If the "direct line" is theoretical anyway it just doesn't matter anyway.
I don't have any citations sorry, but I did look into this about 15 years ago for reasons I no longer remember, and what I learned is that in most places with large overall populations that uses a system like this, and where leadership is not voted for independently of local representation, the representatives overwhelmingly vote along party leadership not on the community they represent.
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.
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.
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.
Not exactly, but similar. The dynamics of the haves and have-nots are different because of the sheer numbers. But we are at a point where if just a certain amount more of the wealth is shifted to the oligarchs, then the entire system will collapse.
I’ve already gotten a three day ban on Reddit for making certain statements, so I’ll just state my opinion that the only way to stop this is to mortify a few billionaires. But aside from that, the problem is apathy, complacency, and lack of unity. This is why they came up with all the petty divisive “issues” which are really not issues. This is why the Orange Feces-Man did that whole mask thing. Because if people were united and everyone felt they were on the same side, there would be rebellion - nay, revolution. It’s happened in the past many, many, many times around the world through history. But I don’t think they ever had the sheer magnitude of distractions that we have today. Bread and Circuses vs Streaming, social media, entertainment more than all the humans of the earth could collectively consume. THAT, the Romans did not have at their disposal to weaponize.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At least in the UK, Germany and France, certainly. Although, tbf, Americans are their own kind of unreasonable, fearful and violent. Western Europe is America-lite.
The US is failing more rapidly than other countries. But, it should be seen as an opportunity to look at your own country and think "ok, how would a morally bankrupt party exploit this thing that just used to be a tradition or a norm, and exploit it because there's no actual rule?"
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"
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
The last one might be the most fair, if it were based on criteria other than voting tendencies. Complex districts are meant to let different voices be heard, but what those voices are makes it challenging.
Let me make a hypothetical scenario. Consider a state where half the people are urban and half are rural, and has two representatives. Those groups has different priorities so districts drawn only for simple shapes means that someone’s voice is not being heard. It would be better to have one representative elected by urban voters and one by rural voters. Now picture those urban areas following a winding river because that follows historical settlement patterns. The most fair choice might be a complex shape following population density to result in one representative speaking for rural voters and one speaking for urban voters, but indistinguishable from gerrymandering.
Of course that same exact result might just be a proxy for political affiliation, which is unfair. This is why preventing gerrymandering is impossible: whether it’s good or bad depends on what you’re trying to do not how you do it
not in proportional representation... If half the people are rural and half are urban and vote for different people then 50% of the representatives represent each side, no matter how the land is divided.
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.
Texas Republicans are apparently going big with their brazen attempt to redraw the state’s congressional maps in the middle of the decade, outside of the normal redistricting process.
A draft map released Wednesday would add three new districts that would have voted for President Donald Trump in 2024. That would mean 79% of the state’s districts (30 out of 38) would have backed the president compared to his 56% share of the vote in the state.
It would also put two House Democrats who won Trump districts in significantly more danger in 2026.
The proposed map is intended to help the GOP hold on to the House — where they have a historically narrow majority and history suggests Democrats are very likely to pick up seats — in the midterm elections. The map could help Republicans flip five seats, significantly raising the bar for a Democratic takeover of the chamber.
All of which has set off a predictable round of whataboutism on the right. Yes, Texas Republicans are going for the bare knuckles on this one. But what about all those egregious Democratic gerrymanders? Both sides play this game, right?
Yes, both sides gerrymander. But that doesn’t mean they are equal-opportunity offenders.
** Republicans pretty clearly benefit more from gerrymandering, and there’s an increasingly strong case to be made that they go further in using the tools available to them. ** Gambits like what Texas is doing are rare, and it’s been Republicans who have led the charge.
But this is the subject of plenty of debate, and there’s a school of thought that gerrymandering has become effectively a wash.
Some analysts point to recent election results that show the percentage of House seats each side wins these days more or less matches their share of the nationwide popular vote for the House.
Republicans, for example, won about 51.3% of the two-party vote in 2024. And 51.3% of House districts is about 223 seats. They won 220 seats.
In fact, these numbers have tracked closely over the last four elections. While there was just a three-seat gap in 2024, it was only two seats in each of the previous three elections. Neither side is winning a significantly disproportionate number of seats.
But just because the seat totals so closely mirror the overall vote shares doesn’t necessarily mean gerrymandering didn’t have an impact – or that one side or the other didn’t go to more extremes to try and secure the seats they won.
The ways in which populations are distributed matters greatly, for instance – particularly if one side’s voters are a lot more concentrated. Just because a state is competitive doesn’t mean that a “fair” map would be a 50-50 one. Generally speaking, “fair” districts are thought to group people with similar interests or backgrounds, and respect existing geographic boundaries. Sometimes in order to get that 50-50 split or even a narrow advantage for your side, you have to get pretty creative.
In addition, gerrymandering can be a risky game. A really extreme gerrymander could backfire if your effort to create as many favorable districts as possible spreads your voters too thin and you wind up losing seats. (Some have wagered this could happen to Republicans in Texas, particularly if the GOP can’t replicate Trump’s big 2024 gains with Hispanic voters.)
If the results of that gerrymander weren’t as lopsided as envisioned, does it really mean it wasn’t an extreme gerrymander?
This reinforces why you can’t just look at seat totals and vote shares. You really need to look at individual maps and how aggressively they’re drawn. This is, of course, a somewhat subjective exercise that depends on what factors you look at. But some experts have attempted to do that.
The Gerrymandering Project at Princeton University, which evaluates the maps holistically, gives a “D” or an “F” rating to slight majorities of maps drawn by Republicans and those drawn by Democrats.
PlanScore, spearheaded by well-known academics, finds that more maps have a bias toward Republicans than Democrats across a number of metrics.
These PlanScore numbers, too, come with caveats.
One is that, in about half of states, the map-drawing process wasn’t fully controlled by one party or another – either because the state has split legislative control, or because courts or redistricting commissions do it. So even if more maps favor Republicans, it’s not just because they drew them that way.
The second is that a big reason more maps appear to have a GOP bias is that Republicans simply get more opportunities to gerrymander. They have full control of more states because they hold the “trifecta” of the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the state legislature. In the most recent round of post-Census redistricting, Republicans controlled the drawing of 177 districts (estimates on this vary slightly), compared to just 49 for Democrats, according to a 2022 report from the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.
(Part of the reason Republicans have more control is their superior standing in state governments and the fact that blue states have been more likely to outsource this process to redistricting commissions.)
The Brennan Center has also noted that Republicans appear to benefit from state courts having a more laissez-faire approach to partisan gerrymandering.
All told, the center found 11 Republican-drawn maps that had extreme partisan bias, compared to four drawn by Democrats, ahead of the 2024 elections.
Which brings us to the latest developments. They certainly reinforce the idea that Republicans are more ruthless about using this power.
The reason Texas is so controversial isn’t just that Republicans are drawing such a slanted map; it’s mostly when they have chosen to do it – in the middle of the decade, outside the normal post-Census redistricting process.
Maps are sometimes redrawn after that post-Census period, but usually it’s because courts force states to do so. When state legislatures have done this of their own volition, it’s been Republicans in charge.
Depending on how you slice it, we’ve seen three or four modern attempts like this at mid-decade redistricting.
The GOP did this in Texas and Colorado in 2003 (though the Colorado map was struck down) and in Georgia in 2005. They also redrew the maps in North Carolina in 2023 after a newly conservative-leaning state Supreme Court reversed an earlier decision and opened the door to partisan gerrymandering.
State legislative expert Tim Storey told the Washington Post back in 2003 that the strategy appeared unprecedented at the time.
And while Democrats are talking about a tit-for-tat in which they would do the same thing in states like California and New York, that would be a response to the GOP’s own gambit. Not to mention, Democrats would also face major legal and political hurdles in these states to make that a reality.
Indeed, Republicans seem to be leaning in on a mid-decade redistricting arms race, knowing they have superior capabilities and can take things further — just like they have before. _
The 2011 Canadian federal election voter suppression scandal (also known as the Robocall scandal, Robogate, or RoboCon) is a political scandal stemming from events during the 2011 Canadian federal election.[1][2][3][4][5][6] It involved robocalls and real-person calls that originated in the Conservative Party of Canada's campaign office in Guelph, Ontario. The calls were designed to result in voter suppression. Elections Canada and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) conducted investigations into the claims that calls were made to dissuade voters from casting ballots by falsely telling them that the location of their polling stations had changed.[7] Further possible electoral law violations were alleged as the evidence unfolded. Under the Canada Elections Act, it is an offence to willfully prevent, or endeavour to prevent, an elector from voting in an election.[8][9]
Do you have more context for the gerrymandering attempt? I don't remember that one, and web search is terrible now so I can't find more about it either.
In Canada, independent commissions handle the process, which makes gerrymandering much more difficult to get away with. An article discussing it:
"Independent commissions now handle the redistricting in every Canadian province"
Eventually, in 1955, one province — Manitoba — decided to experiment, and handed over the redistricting process to an independent commission. Its members were the province’s chief justice, its chief electoral officer, and the University of Manitoba president. The new policy became popular, and within a decade, it was backed by both major national parties, and signed into law.
Independent commissions now handle the redistricting in every province. "Today, most Canadian ridings [districts] are simple and uncontroversial, chunky and geometric, and usually conform to the vague borders of some existing geographic / civic region knowable to the average citizen who lives there," writes JJ McCullough.
“Of the many matters Canadians have cause to grieve their government for, corrupt redistricting is not one of them.” Hoffman concurs, writing, “The commissions have been largely successful since their implementation.”
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 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.
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
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)
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.
Our nation will continue circling the toilet until gerrymandering is outlawed.
And with how many stupids there are here that are scared of change, even when presented with facts proving it's better for them, the odds of things getting better are pretty slim.
You're looking at this as a red vs. blue issue and identifying with blue when it's really a people in power vs. normal people issue. This is the california democratic party taking power away from the people and giving it to the ruling party. Sure you may like that ruling party now, but if a new party takes power or the current one does something horrible then you'll have less of an ability to remove them from power.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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 few authorized opinions?
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.
You are conflating complexity and difficulty. But I'll argue it's both more complex and more difficult. It's more complex because rather than choosing your candidate, you have to express your opinions. You have a bunch of choices to make instead of one. That's complexity. But it is also more difficult, because it requires you to have a grasp of all the issues that are brought up. Not everyone is able to give their opinion on how to best fight a job crisis, for instance. And picking what "feels" best makes the choice pointless and dangerous. It also doesn't prevent lies, marketing and false promises at all, as a candidate could still be lying about their intentions just to get more votes.
It is very hard to find the closest match. I tell you that as a software engineer. Because what rules do you use to determine the "closest"? Do you consider every opinion as important? Do you minimise the average distance? Do you minimise the amount of extreme differences? Do you prioritise some "more important" issues? Who even decides what is important? There are so many ways to bias and twist a system like this.
Then you're probably better off advocating for a direct democracy, which is another topic and can be done in a much easier way than trying to adapt a representative democracy for it!
I disagree that answering the questions have to be harder. They don't have to be so specific that they require a solid grasp. They should be more like do you agree with doing X. Not "choose the best way to solve the homeless crisis".
You're overthinking it. You take each question and determine what % of the population answered each way. Then you choose multiple cadadites such that together roughly the same % of the cadadites answered the same way as the people. So yes you should end up with representatives on opposite sides of the issue if people voted that way. The idea is that the representatives as a whole accurately represent the people. And like I said, in a small population state that may be a challenge. But there are ways to work around that.
I don't think a direct democracy is better. In a dd, money determines what gets voted on. And there are less things voted on in general, so money can sway the people a lot. When the number of questions is higher and all at once, money has a hard time focusing a message on them all. And even after that, the answering of the questions chooses a rep who is able to learn enough aboutvit to be less likely to be swayed by money. A large part of that is that they need no campaign, so they don't have to serve the money to get reelected.
I'm not saying it perfect, but the general idea is to get people who represent the opinions of the people, not popularity contest winners. And to reduce the money connection to poloticians votes. Also, you don't need a "party" at all.
I'm not overthinking it. Doing stuff like this is my job. I receive a problem, I ask the questions to get precise requirements. What I am telling you is that depending on who answers these questions, the outcome of the elections can be completely different. In a very oversimplificated way, it's a new, even sneakier way to gerrymander.
I'm a devops engineer. I personally haven't written code to do this, but it isn't something that hasn't been done before. Just take all possible combinations of candidates and use thier answers to compute the percentage that answered a given way for each question foreach combination. Do the same with the voting results. Then compare the % of the population to the % of each combination to get a set of differences for each combination. For small states you probably need to increase the number of seats to some minimum like 20 or more. For big states you will probably get a match with a tolerance of +/- 1%. For others you will have to iterate the tolerance up until you get a match.
If you want to get a better match, you could make the number of cadadites selected dynamic. And personally I support having a larger number as it reduces the power of anyone individual. Then the reps from the state can vote on any issue, and the states votes can be distributed to represnt the votes of the many representatives.
The idea is a group that actually represents the views of the people they represent istead of special interests.
For district seats, that is proportional representation. It doesnt say it is winner take all. When it says that blue or red wins, it is just saying that they won the majority, and have dominate power over whatever government body they represent.
I just took the graphic literally without trying to guess which body (presumably in the US) this might represent.
If I need more information to understand the implication of this graphic than it imparts on me, then it's not very informative.
At no point does it imply proportional representation or that blue has a majority in some form of parliament.
So if blue just "wins" then red isn't represented at all. And I'm pretty sure there are election systems like this, including the US presidential election, or am I mistaken there?
What do you think "districts" means? Each district gets represention for the whole body, whatever body that may be. If you need that explained to you, okay, but don't then lecture others on minutae of semantics when you arent familiar with what the word "district" entails.
And the U.S. President is not elected like this, no. There is no districting involved in US Presidential elections, at least not currently and not directly. It is far stupider than that, unfortunately. Each state has so many districts on the federal level based on population of the whole state (minimum 1), and each district gets a federal representative in the US House of Representatives wing of congress. Each state also gets 2 and only 2 Senate seats regardless of population in that wing of congress. The Presidency is actually determined by the votes of Electors in the Electoral College. Each state gets as many Electors as they have seats in both the Senate and House, and it has nothing to do with how the districts in that state are subdivided or what party their Representatives are from.
Now, each state gets to determine for itself how they run their elections, how they assign their Electors, and even whether their electors are required to vote the same way as their state, so things can be pretty complicated. In many states, it is winner take all for that state's Electors, with the winner being the one with the plurality of votes in a FPTP election, which is dumb as fuck. Some others assign their Electors proportionally. There is even a slowly growing coalition of states that, once they reach a plurality of Electors in the coalition, have agreed to no longer assign their Electors on a state by state basis, but on the national popular vote instead. Again, within each of these states, rules differ on the relative power of the Electors themselves to vote according to their own desires even if that goes against the state's popular vote. They could, also, if they wished, leave each House-tied Elector up to each individual district, or just decided the Electors without considering or even having a democratic vote at all, neither or which currently happens, though. It's a giant fucking mess, it leads many many people in hard red or blue states to just to just not bother as their vote will be overwhelmed anyway, which is why the Electoral College should just be eliminated and replaced with a national popular vote. But that is a whole other story.
Ok, so there is an election system like the one I criticized in the US, just not in every state.
Would you then say, that this is better than "winner takes all" and that "blue wins" is not perfect?
No.... because in the example, it was NOT winner take all. Blue won the majority of districts. Red won the other districts. Nobody took all. I feel like you are trying really hard to misunderstand a VERY simple hypothetical example. Yes, winner take all states for electors is bullshit, but that is NOT what is happening in the example, for the love of god!
When there is one seat, two parties, and you're using First Past the Post voting (which is a terrible voting system that inevitably causes the two party divide), yes. They perfect out come is majority win. When distributing multiple district seats, proportional representation is the perfect outcome, which that also acheives.
When there is one seat, two parties, and you’re using First Past the Post voting (which is a terrible voting system that inevitably causes the two party divide), yes
So we can agree the system is inherently bad at representation?
Sounds more like that outcome is the "least bad" rather than "perfect".
First Past the Post is objectively a problem in general. However, if there are only two candidates, and thus only possible outcomes, with one possible seat, all forms of voting will be functionally identical to FPTP in result. So in this given example, "least bad" and "perfect" are synonymous.
Now if there was a third+ party or more candidates from the two parties, and alternative forms of voting, then things do get more complicated. But the point of the example is to show, in simplist terms, how districting works in an ideal world, and how Gerrymandering can warp the end results to give either the advantage.
Except that the lack of a third candidate is partially because of the FPTP system. It's a waste of time, money and energy to try to compete with the Dems and the Reps. In a ranked voting system, or even a two-round system like we have in France, I guarantee you you'd see more candidates, because people then wouldn't just "vote useful".
Except that the lack of a third candidate is partially because of the FPTP system.
Right, that's what I said in my previous comment. Ranked Choice is an improvement, yes. Though, I think it still is too easy to push the winning vote to the more polar candidates. If the centrist doesn't rile up passionate supporters (because what centrist does), they are more likely to be dropped in the first round even though they were ranked 1 or 2 for nearly everyone. I prefer Approval voting as my ideal alternative. It does tend to push more toward center, but if the idea is true democratic representation, then that would be the natural result, right? But anything is better than FPTP.
As I said elsewhere, if there is only two parties/candidates running for each of these seats and the districts are divided this way then there is no functional difference between Ranked Choice, Approval, Proportional, or First Past The Post. The results would be 100% identical in any of those systems. In this specific situation, the result is "perfect", as it says. Under different circumstances, it would be less than perfect, but that is not how hypothetical work, my guy.
I don't understand it well, but I like your 2 round system.
What are some typical flaws with it that might not be obvious?
I'm also curious what is the best thing about it, in your opinion
It is better than FPTP, but not a great system either. The flaws are similar to FPTP: The final winner may not be the candidate that would be most approved by the pooulation.
The main arvantage of it is that you can go wilder during the first turn, and pick a small party that you truly support, in hope it passes to the second turn. That happens often enough. And if it doesn't, then you vote for the least bad candidate in the second turn/the closest candidate to what you want.
That happens often enough. And if it doesn't, then you vote for the least bad candidate in the second turn/the closest candidate to what you want.
That's what I like about it that I thought it would solve for me. I don't think the person I've voted for, in any election I've ever voted for, has won my riding (Canada)
I often have to choose between who I want to represent me, and voting for the strategic choice so that the leader of the country isn't the worst choice
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.
I have some ideas.
Oh. Nevermind...
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.
potluck? tailgate and a stern personal talking to from somethousand or more ppl?
The stick can always wait in the corner. Many hands make light work.
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.
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.
Some states have anti-gerrimandering written into their constitutions, so that would not be easy.
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.
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
That only works if there are only two parties. I'd prefer a solution that works with electoral reform, not against it.
but since there are 2 parties it complies with your request of
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.
If their side gets more representation, then yes. Unfortunately people are too focused on the output and not the process.
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.
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."
Many of the founding fathers were against political parties altogether and absolutely anticipated a two party equilibrium.
https://www.usconstitution.net/founding-fathers-warnings/
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.
I appreciate the response, reading my comment I hope it didn't come across as challenging you. Was just meaning to share that it is an important question that I hope someone figure out an answer for.
I think leveraging the relative ease we have with modern communication instead of renting on systems that don't account for the actual capability that there is no technical reason everyone in the world can't vote at the same time on issue if we really wanted to make it happen
The technology we currently have is able to do it, it would just be a matter of handling the traffic. (We penalty don't have enough hardware in place, but that's just a logistic other)
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.
flooding the news, firehood falsehood. you have the MSM thanks for that, to distract people, complements from RU.
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...
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. The way you describe a republic would apply to countries like the UK or Sweden, which are constitutional monarchies, not republics.
Representative democracy is a better term for what you are talking about, where the population elects representatives who are able to advocate for them and take the time to become subject matter experts on running the country (idealy).
Or even better, the position of president or prime minister should have little power.
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.
When having these roles be distinct, aren't the only pieces intrinsic to the head of state merely ceremonial?
No! France has a head of state (the president) and a head of government (prime minister).
They are both powerful, none of these role is performative.
But where are the divisions and do other instances of government with separation of these roles divide the power in the same places?
Which powers have to go to the head of state for it to really be considered the head of state in more than just name?
Oof, that's a tough question to answer in here. There is no really good way to generalise who has what power, and there is probably many ways to split the powers in a meaningful way.
You can read the articles on both positions specifically for France, which I do think in this case is a great example, on wikipedia, although if you want a more precise and complete understanding you'd probably have to read the french article and translate it.
The main advantage of this system is that when the president doesn't have the majority to support him in the parliament, most of the executive power de facto shifts to the prime minister, who is usually nominated (by the president) in accordance with the parliament's majority coalition. When that's not done, the parliament can move to "censor" the government and force the president to nominate a new prime minister, who then nominates the rest of the government.
That system is a good way to make sure the president doesn't do whatever the fuck they want if the parliament disagrees.
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.
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.
And the UK, as the parliament is made up of local representatives. They should be two different people.
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.
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.
"Government" has two meanings here. The oppostion has an official role in "governance" which is why they have offices, sit in committees, have research budgets, vote etc. In a minority government situation The backbenchers have a great deal of control over the process. Opposition included. The "GOVernment" controls the process to great extent.
This isn't like the American system where the minority partner is relegated to the sides. The opposition play a very strong role in the parliamentary process. It doesn't map well onto American politics at all.
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).
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.
Some of these are absolutely insane
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.
🎵how insane can you go?🎶
I request all districts are now Penrose tiled using the Einstein hat!
They are so insane they inspired art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU8H-Ts_rfA
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
playing by the rules only makes sense when the other side does too… a level playing field is more important than some unspoken rules
yes, everyone agrees it should be impossible to gerrymander… but given that it’s not, for an election to be anywhere near “fair” (and to be clear it can’t when you’re gerrymandering) then both sides must do it otherwise it’s the most unfair thing possible
(disclaimer: aussie; this ain’t my country, and our electoral system doesn’t allow this.. but for absolute fucks sake yall your vote effects the entire world and we get no say at all, so all we can do is talk some sense into this UNIQUELY crazy bullshit)
We can still hope the playing field will tilt back to level. Four years from now there will be no evil orange overlord to pardon all his minions and groupies. They’ll have to face justice with no way to cheat it.
That hope is what keeps me going. If the Trump kids are fine profiting off their fathers position and to the detriment of the country, I hope to see the day where it all comes crashing down when they’re no longer above the law
they’ve been doing this for years… it ain’t gonna happen. it’s not a symptom of trump: texas used to be a muuuuch more purple state, but these days it’s only ever thought of as a republican stronghold not because of their vote, but because of gerrymandering… that’s how long it’s been going on. most people can’t even remember a time when it was any different
Hmm? All of these look pretty fucked up to me
This one is better because turnout matters and gives representative elections.
what?
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.
just one of the many reasons you see such consistent low turnouts in american elections
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mandelbrot has entered the chat
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
(fptp leads to extremism, ranked choice etc leads to moderation because people’s 2nd, 3rd, etc choice matters: you want to be likeable not just to your “base” but to everyone, because everyone’s vote has a chance of flowing through to you even if you’re not their first choice… if people hate you, you’re not going to get those preference votes when candidates get eliminated)
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.
yeah it’s pretty fucked… in australia, this is a sure way to trigger a dissolved parliament and an early election: there are only 3 things that can happen (and the government shutting down isn’t 1 of them)
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"?
yup, so it’s different with RCV and representative: in australia we have this, where we still have a mostly 2 party system that’s representative but we have RCV, so you can preference other parties first, and still have your vote eventually flow to the major party of your choice
in this case, perhaps enough votes are lost that they loose a seat (we’ve had at least 1 green rep in parliament for a few elections in a row)
also we track “primary vote” - the number of people who ranked you #1 - as an important election metric with real consequences… there are limits to private donations for elections, and a significant portion of funding for elections comes from the government itself. any party that gets over 4% of the primary vote is eligible to claim a proportional amount of financing for next election… so you can punish them in a way that really matters without actually putting anything real on the line
that’s different to proportional representation, because it’s a property of the system that there are many minor parties which inherently means parties have to make more deals
That sounds good in theory, but I've heard a lot of Australians complain about politics there. Maybe that's just because people complain about politics everywhere. But, it also seems like Australia has a lot of problems that aren't getting solved (like housing cost).
It definitely doesn't seem like a place that has things all figured out.
Switzerland is the only country where people seem pretty proud of their system. It has its issues, but that's mainly because they have some pretty awful voters and a direct democracy system that has caused some real headaches. For example, voters voted for some laws that were incompatible with the treaties the country had signed as part of the EU, and had they gone into effect it would have meant cancellation of their work with France on CERN, for example. I can't remember how that was eventually resolved, but it was a real mess.
i think this is true no matter what: nz and germany are both more proportional systems and similarly people dislike politics
absolutely… some problems are incredibly tricky: getting people to vote against their interests (eg with housing, any effort to reduce house prices directly decreases the value of peoples assets - perhaps not investments, but their primary home even)
how to achieve some societal good things is really tricky in any democracy i think
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
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 for minor parties no matter the area you live)
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:
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:
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 guarantee a seat, and even with 6-7% they'd still have a good shot at getting one, 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.
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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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
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.
You will have more parties. Internal party democracy is not that important then
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.
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?
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.
You can have an electoral division of your country without gerrymandering. Cf most european countries.
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.
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 districts are 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.
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.
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 party tells them to vote.
This is a very cynical point of view that would make it even less possible for independants to be represented in the House, remove town halls from the system, and therefore make the entire system even less democratic and remove the entire point of a representative democracy.
There is zero benefit to this.
Proportional voting would actually make smaller parties be able to have representatives, breaking up the 2 party system and promoting more diverse point of views. You can also have mixed systems, with locally elected reps for a part of the house, and the rest of the house being filled in a manner that the end result is proportional to the global voting share
Also it's possible to have a "national circle" which when votes allocate parliamentary representatives, is used for, after all regional representatives have be allocated, pick up all votes that didn't yielded any representatives in the regional circles and use them to allocate representatives nationally.
Smaller parties which are not regionally concentrated loose regional representation but they don't lose representation in overall as those votes end up electing national representatives, whilst very regional parties get regional representatives and the bigger national parties get mainly regional representative and maybe a handful of national ones.
I'm not saying getting rid of local representation is the solution, necessarily. In fact, I personally think the opposite is true and we need more local representation.
It's just with the current system, local representation is kind of useless and supports gerrymandering and corruption.
If I were in charge I would demand political parties to disperse completely and local representatives be the only people on the ballot to go ahead and make decisions for the people who voted for them. Vote for the person not the party.
Proportional representatives. Of a party gets a 30%of the votes, it gets a 30%ish of the seats.
The arguably huge downside of this, is that it cuts the direct line from you to a representative. That undermines democracy, because it undermines your capacity to be heard.
If the "direct line" is theoretical anyway it just doesn't matter anyway.
I don't have any citations sorry, but I did look into this about 15 years ago for reasons I no longer remember, and what I learned is that in most places with large overall populations that uses a system like this, and where leadership is not voted for independently of local representation, the representatives overwhelmingly vote along party leadership not on the community they represent.
Not sure I'm explaining it well sorry
Does your representative ever done something you asked for?
I'm not anerican so I'm unsure how pertinent my experience is.
But yes, my representatives often hold public neetings in which anyone is invited, although I don't go there myself.
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:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq-Y7crQo44
It's almost like the idea that representation based on land instead of based on people is flawed to begin with.
In the USA, politicians chose the voters!
I read this in a Russian accent.
Should probably read it in a Texan accent
Both sides have had opportunities to make it illegal and neither have done it. I wonder why.
Because you never were a democracy
I'm not USA or from USA.
lol idiot
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.
Yeah, a common pattern in pseudo democracies like Hungary...
Also Japan, India, Malaysia.
Even the UK has covert influence from politics on district drawing tho officially its “independent commission”.
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.
You guys are entering the late decadence phase as already experienced in the Roman Empire
Not exactly, but similar. The dynamics of the haves and have-nots are different because of the sheer numbers. But we are at a point where if just a certain amount more of the wealth is shifted to the oligarchs, then the entire system will collapse.
I’ve already gotten a three day ban on Reddit for making certain statements, so I’ll just state my opinion that the only way to stop this is to mortify a few billionaires. But aside from that, the problem is apathy, complacency, and lack of unity. This is why they came up with all the petty divisive “issues” which are really not issues. This is why the Orange Feces-Man did that whole mask thing. Because if people were united and everyone felt they were on the same side, there would be rebellion - nay, revolution. It’s happened in the past many, many, many times around the world through history. But I don’t think they ever had the sheer magnitude of distractions that we have today. Bread and Circuses vs Streaming, social media, entertainment more than all the humans of the earth could collectively consume. THAT, the Romans did not have at their disposal to weaponize.
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.
I will never understand how the highest number of votes isn't winning. Bucha cheatin ass bitches
why not count each person instead to avoid the issue entirely
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.
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.
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.
FPTP needs voting districts for legislative bodies, and FPTP are the easiest implementation of voting districts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So what, one representative for all those people?
Integrity is most common in other countries, but not in the united states.
Pay more attention to home friend, Europe is sliding into corruption hand in hand with us. But that would get in the way of nationalism wouldn't it?
Fragile Europeans: Americans are children who need a babysitter
Also fragile Europeans: a couple brown people arrive welp, back to the 1930s
At least in the UK, Germany and France, certainly. Although, tbf, Americans are their own kind of unreasonable, fearful and violent. Western Europe is America-lite.
Congrats, you have written the dumbest take I've read today
The US is failing more rapidly than other countries. But, it should be seen as an opportunity to look at your own country and think "ok, how would a morally bankrupt party exploit this thing that just used to be a tradition or a norm, and exploit it because there's no actual rule?"
We really aren't we just have a spotlight on us and third parties deliberately making it look bigger and worse
Good take!!
The more I hear about this Jerry Mander fella, the less I care for him.
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"
Fuck you Gerry, fuck you and your fucking madering
Where do we draw the line?
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.
yes.
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
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.
Most sane countries leave electoral boundaries to an independent commission
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.
Why do votes need to be done by district? Just do it statewide
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
Anything to undermine democracy
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
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.
https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/
The figures only make sense in “first past the post” (or “winner takes it all”) systems.
The last one would be unfair in most systems using districts.
The last one might be the most fair, if it were based on criteria other than voting tendencies. Complex districts are meant to let different voices be heard, but what those voices are makes it challenging.
Let me make a hypothetical scenario. Consider a state where half the people are urban and half are rural, and has two representatives. Those groups has different priorities so districts drawn only for simple shapes means that someone’s voice is not being heard. It would be better to have one representative elected by urban voters and one by rural voters. Now picture those urban areas following a winding river because that follows historical settlement patterns. The most fair choice might be a complex shape following population density to result in one representative speaking for rural voters and one speaking for urban voters, but indistinguishable from gerrymandering.
Of course that same exact result might just be a proxy for political affiliation, which is unfair. This is why preventing gerrymandering is impossible: whether it’s good or bad depends on what you’re trying to do not how you do it
not in proportional representation... If half the people are rural and half are urban and vote for different people then 50% of the representatives represent each side, no matter how the land is divided.
From my understanding "winner takes it all" is on state level, so the winner gets all the votes people. I only know this from the US.
"First past the post" is when there is one elected person per district and they need a relative majority which is also true in the UK.
In other countries like France, you have more than one round or need an absolute majority. Still gerrymanderable but not "first past the post".
This is what the US has, for the most part. It makes it extremely difficult for ranked choice or similar to gain a foothold.
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.
Hmmm, interesting choice of colors, considering which famously colored party is currently in the news for aggressively gerrymandering...
and the current party using the 4th one the most.
Which is it?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/31/politics/gerrymandering-texas-republicans-analysis
Texas Republicans are apparently going big with their brazen attempt to redraw the state’s congressional maps in the middle of the decade, outside of the normal redistricting process.
A draft map released Wednesday would add three new districts that would have voted for President Donald Trump in 2024. That would mean 79% of the state’s districts (30 out of 38) would have backed the president compared to his 56% share of the vote in the state.
It would also put two House Democrats who won Trump districts in significantly more danger in 2026.
The proposed map is intended to help the GOP hold on to the House — where they have a historically narrow majority and history suggests Democrats are very likely to pick up seats — in the midterm elections. The map could help Republicans flip five seats, significantly raising the bar for a Democratic takeover of the chamber.
All of which has set off a predictable round of whataboutism on the right. Yes, Texas Republicans are going for the bare knuckles on this one. But what about all those egregious Democratic gerrymanders? Both sides play this game, right?
Yes, both sides gerrymander. But that doesn’t mean they are equal-opportunity offenders.
** Republicans pretty clearly benefit more from gerrymandering, and there’s an increasingly strong case to be made that they go further in using the tools available to them. ** Gambits like what Texas is doing are rare, and it’s been Republicans who have led the charge.
But this is the subject of plenty of debate, and there’s a school of thought that gerrymandering has become effectively a wash.
Some analysts point to recent election results that show the percentage of House seats each side wins these days more or less matches their share of the nationwide popular vote for the House.
Republicans, for example, won about 51.3% of the two-party vote in 2024. And 51.3% of House districts is about 223 seats. They won 220 seats.
In fact, these numbers have tracked closely over the last four elections. While there was just a three-seat gap in 2024, it was only two seats in each of the previous three elections. Neither side is winning a significantly disproportionate number of seats.
But just because the seat totals so closely mirror the overall vote shares doesn’t necessarily mean gerrymandering didn’t have an impact – or that one side or the other didn’t go to more extremes to try and secure the seats they won.
The ways in which populations are distributed matters greatly, for instance – particularly if one side’s voters are a lot more concentrated. Just because a state is competitive doesn’t mean that a “fair” map would be a 50-50 one. Generally speaking, “fair” districts are thought to group people with similar interests or backgrounds, and respect existing geographic boundaries. Sometimes in order to get that 50-50 split or even a narrow advantage for your side, you have to get pretty creative.
In addition, gerrymandering can be a risky game. A really extreme gerrymander could backfire if your effort to create as many favorable districts as possible spreads your voters too thin and you wind up losing seats. (Some have wagered this could happen to Republicans in Texas, particularly if the GOP can’t replicate Trump’s big 2024 gains with Hispanic voters.)
If the results of that gerrymander weren’t as lopsided as envisioned, does it really mean it wasn’t an extreme gerrymander?
This reinforces why you can’t just look at seat totals and vote shares. You really need to look at individual maps and how aggressively they’re drawn. This is, of course, a somewhat subjective exercise that depends on what factors you look at. But some experts have attempted to do that.
The Gerrymandering Project at Princeton University, which evaluates the maps holistically, gives a “D” or an “F” rating to slight majorities of maps drawn by Republicans and those drawn by Democrats.
PlanScore, spearheaded by well-known academics, finds that more maps have a bias toward Republicans than Democrats across a number of metrics.
These PlanScore numbers, too, come with caveats.
One is that, in about half of states, the map-drawing process wasn’t fully controlled by one party or another – either because the state has split legislative control, or because courts or redistricting commissions do it. So even if more maps favor Republicans, it’s not just because they drew them that way.
The second is that a big reason more maps appear to have a GOP bias is that Republicans simply get more opportunities to gerrymander. They have full control of more states because they hold the “trifecta” of the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the state legislature. In the most recent round of post-Census redistricting, Republicans controlled the drawing of 177 districts (estimates on this vary slightly), compared to just 49 for Democrats, according to a 2022 report from the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.
(Part of the reason Republicans have more control is their superior standing in state governments and the fact that blue states have been more likely to outsource this process to redistricting commissions.)
The Brennan Center has also noted that Republicans appear to benefit from state courts having a more laissez-faire approach to partisan gerrymandering.
All told, the center found 11 Republican-drawn maps that had extreme partisan bias, compared to four drawn by Democrats, ahead of the 2024 elections.
Which brings us to the latest developments. They certainly reinforce the idea that Republicans are more ruthless about using this power.
The reason Texas is so controversial isn’t just that Republicans are drawing such a slanted map; it’s mostly when they have chosen to do it – in the middle of the decade, outside the normal post-Census redistricting process.
Maps are sometimes redrawn after that post-Census period, but usually it’s because courts force states to do so. When state legislatures have done this of their own volition, it’s been Republicans in charge.
Depending on how you slice it, we’ve seen three or four modern attempts like this at mid-decade redistricting.
The GOP did this in Texas and Colorado in 2003 (though the Colorado map was struck down) and in Georgia in 2005. They also redrew the maps in North Carolina in 2023 after a newly conservative-leaning state Supreme Court reversed an earlier decision and opened the door to partisan gerrymandering.
State legislative expert Tim Storey told the Washington Post back in 2003 that the strategy appeared unprecedented at the time.
And while Democrats are talking about a tit-for-tat in which they would do the same thing in states like California and New York, that would be a response to the GOP’s own gambit. Not to mention, Democrats would also face major legal and political hurdles in these states to make that a reality.
Indeed, Republicans seem to be leaning in on a mid-decade redistricting arms race, knowing they have superior capabilities and can take things further — just like they have before. _
Cracking and packing
Stephen Harper, Pierre Poilievre and the CPC began the process of gerrymandering Canada to match GOP attempts in the states.
As example: in Vancouver you have a riding that is two physically distinct pieces of land that you have to travel through two other ridings to get to.
Even worse, google "Pierre Poutine".
Links to get people started on the 2011 one
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_federal_election_voter_suppression_scandal
Do you have more context for the gerrymandering attempt? I don't remember that one, and web search is terrible now so I can't find more about it either.
In Canada, independent commissions handle the process, which makes gerrymandering much more difficult to get away with. An article discussing it:
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/15/5604284/us-elections-are-rigged-but-canada-knows-how-to-fix-them
Is there even a way to mathematically divide up land area into completely fair districts? I heard somewhere that it wasn't possible.
https://bdistricting.com/
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
Illegality is slowly being erased in america
Full Explaintaion
"Explaintaion"
That's a wild one.
my thumbs flipped the t and the a.
Get a life.
Ah, so you meant "Full Expltination"?
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
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
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
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.
Where text lists blue-then-red?
In the image attached to the post.
Our nation will continue circling the toilet until gerrymandering is outlawed.
And with how many stupids there are here that are scared of change, even when presented with facts proving it's better for them, the odds of things getting better are pretty slim.
WE know. It’s the pithed Fox News and Joe Rogan fuckwit demographic that has no fucking clue.
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 choose to ignore it when it benefits their side.
You're looking at this as a red vs. blue issue and identifying with blue when it's really a people in power vs. normal people issue. This is the california democratic party taking power away from the people and giving it to the ruling party. Sure you may like that ruling party now, but if a new party takes power or the current one does something horrible then you'll have less of an ability to remove them from power.
It's also illegal in the united states.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
In the UK we have the electoral boundary commission specifically to avoid this sort of thing. Do you have an example of it being a problem in the UK?
yeah no, jerry foreman explained better
”Perfect representation” only works if everyone votes. Blue can win with 3 votes against 20 votes.
Lol Voting is irrelevant Prepare for the country to be Texafornicated
Replace all politicans with AI first and then do everyone else. How difficult can it be to create an Agent that lies and steals from everyone?
As soon as we get a Democrat president let's just get rid of it forever.
They've had plenty of opportunities and haven't done it.
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.
A democrat like... Obama?
No no, it's Russia you see.
Gerrymandering and throwing your opponents out the window are two different things, even if it leads to similar outcomes at first glance.
A Power Duopoly is better than a Power Monopoly, but not all that much better.
Think Cartel vs Monopoly.
LOL you've really got brainbugs. Munch munch munch
Nice, repost of a classic repost from the reddit front page
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
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.
Three problems:
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.
I disagree that answering the questions have to be harder. They don't have to be so specific that they require a solid grasp. They should be more like do you agree with doing X. Not "choose the best way to solve the homeless crisis".
You're overthinking it. You take each question and determine what % of the population answered each way. Then you choose multiple cadadites such that together roughly the same % of the cadadites answered the same way as the people. So yes you should end up with representatives on opposite sides of the issue if people voted that way. The idea is that the representatives as a whole accurately represent the people. And like I said, in a small population state that may be a challenge. But there are ways to work around that.
I don't think a direct democracy is better. In a dd, money determines what gets voted on. And there are less things voted on in general, so money can sway the people a lot. When the number of questions is higher and all at once, money has a hard time focusing a message on them all. And even after that, the answering of the questions chooses a rep who is able to learn enough aboutvit to be less likely to be swayed by money. A large part of that is that they need no campaign, so they don't have to serve the money to get reelected.
I'm not saying it perfect, but the general idea is to get people who represent the opinions of the people, not popularity contest winners. And to reduce the money connection to poloticians votes. Also, you don't need a "party" at all.
If you want to get a better match, you could make the number of cadadites selected dynamic. And personally I support having a larger number as it reduces the power of anyone individual. Then the reps from the state can vote on any issue, and the states votes can be distributed to represnt the votes of the many representatives.
The idea is a group that actually represents the views of the people they represent istead of special interests.
So, "perfect representation" is when one side wins that does not represent 40% of the votes?
When there's just two "teams", yeah. What's more fair than majority rule in that situation?
Maybe proportional representation instead of winner takes it all?
For district seats, that is proportional representation. It doesnt say it is winner take all. When it says that blue or red wins, it is just saying that they won the majority, and have dominate power over whatever government body they represent.
I just took the graphic literally without trying to guess which body (presumably in the US) this might represent.
If I need more information to understand the implication of this graphic than it imparts on me, then it's not very informative.
At no point does it imply proportional representation or that blue has a majority in some form of parliament.
So if blue just "wins" then red isn't represented at all. And I'm pretty sure there are election systems like this, including the US presidential election, or am I mistaken there?
What do you think "districts" means? Each district gets represention for the whole body, whatever body that may be. If you need that explained to you, okay, but don't then lecture others on minutae of semantics when you arent familiar with what the word "district" entails.
And the U.S. President is not elected like this, no. There is no districting involved in US Presidential elections, at least not currently and not directly. It is far stupider than that, unfortunately. Each state has so many districts on the federal level based on population of the whole state (minimum 1), and each district gets a federal representative in the US House of Representatives wing of congress. Each state also gets 2 and only 2 Senate seats regardless of population in that wing of congress. The Presidency is actually determined by the votes of Electors in the Electoral College. Each state gets as many Electors as they have seats in both the Senate and House, and it has nothing to do with how the districts in that state are subdivided or what party their Representatives are from.
Now, each state gets to determine for itself how they run their elections, how they assign their Electors, and even whether their electors are required to vote the same way as their state, so things can be pretty complicated. In many states, it is winner take all for that state's Electors, with the winner being the one with the plurality of votes in a FPTP election, which is dumb as fuck. Some others assign their Electors proportionally. There is even a slowly growing coalition of states that, once they reach a plurality of Electors in the coalition, have agreed to no longer assign their Electors on a state by state basis, but on the national popular vote instead. Again, within each of these states, rules differ on the relative power of the Electors themselves to vote according to their own desires even if that goes against the state's popular vote. They could, also, if they wished, leave each House-tied Elector up to each individual district, or just decided the Electors without considering or even having a democratic vote at all, neither or which currently happens, though. It's a giant fucking mess, it leads many many people in hard red or blue states to just to just not bother as their vote will be overwhelmed anyway, which is why the Electoral College should just be eliminated and replaced with a national popular vote. But that is a whole other story.
A subsection of a larger unit, here the subsections of a rectangle. What does that have to do with me not guessing what the rectangle represents?
Ok, so there is an election system like the one I criticized in the US, just not in every state.
Would you then say, that this is better than "winner takes all" and that "blue wins" is not perfect?
No.... because in the example, it was NOT winner take all. Blue won the majority of districts. Red won the other districts. Nobody took all. I feel like you are trying really hard to misunderstand a VERY simple hypothetical example. Yes, winner take all states for electors is bullshit, but that is NOT what is happening in the example, for the love of god!
When there is one seat, two parties, and you're using First Past the Post voting (which is a terrible voting system that inevitably causes the two party divide), yes. They perfect out come is majority win. When distributing multiple district seats, proportional representation is the perfect outcome, which that also acheives.
So we can agree the system is inherently bad at representation?
Sounds more like that outcome is the "least bad" rather than "perfect".
First Past the Post is objectively a problem in general. However, if there are only two candidates, and thus only possible outcomes, with one possible seat, all forms of voting will be functionally identical to FPTP in result. So in this given example, "least bad" and "perfect" are synonymous.
Now if there was a third+ party or more candidates from the two parties, and alternative forms of voting, then things do get more complicated. But the point of the example is to show, in simplist terms, how districting works in an ideal world, and how Gerrymandering can warp the end results to give either the advantage.
Except that the lack of a third candidate is partially because of the FPTP system. It's a waste of time, money and energy to try to compete with the Dems and the Reps. In a ranked voting system, or even a two-round system like we have in France, I guarantee you you'd see more candidates, because people then wouldn't just "vote useful".
Right, that's what I said in my previous comment. Ranked Choice is an improvement, yes. Though, I think it still is too easy to push the winning vote to the more polar candidates. If the centrist doesn't rile up passionate supporters (because what centrist does), they are more likely to be dropped in the first round even though they were ranked 1 or 2 for nearly everyone. I prefer Approval voting as my ideal alternative. It does tend to push more toward center, but if the idea is true democratic representation, then that would be the natural result, right? But anything is better than FPTP.
So if improvements are possible then the current situation can by definition not be perfect, right?
As I said elsewhere, if there is only two parties/candidates running for each of these seats and the districts are divided this way then there is no functional difference between Ranked Choice, Approval, Proportional, or First Past The Post. The results would be 100% identical in any of those systems. In this specific situation, the result is "perfect", as it says. Under different circumstances, it would be less than perfect, but that is not how hypothetical work, my guy.
I don't understand it well, but I like your 2 round system. What are some typical flaws with it that might not be obvious? I'm also curious what is the best thing about it, in your opinion
It is better than FPTP, but not a great system either. The flaws are similar to FPTP: The final winner may not be the candidate that would be most approved by the pooulation.
The main arvantage of it is that you can go wilder during the first turn, and pick a small party that you truly support, in hope it passes to the second turn. That happens often enough. And if it doesn't, then you vote for the least bad candidate in the second turn/the closest candidate to what you want.
That's what I like about it that I thought it would solve for me. I don't think the person I've voted for, in any election I've ever voted for, has won my riding (Canada)
I often have to choose between who I want to represent me, and voting for the strategic choice so that the leader of the country isn't the worst choice