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
Most sane countries leave electoral boundaries to an independent commission
This is kinda if topic, but why does the US have term limits for the presidency, but not all the other major positions?
It was added for the president with Roosevelt. Likely because the president has much more power than a single congressman.
Oh I knew it happened then, but I don’t really follow the reasoning.
I am glad it affects Trump, but I think Obama might still be president of he was ever elected (he may never have run as the world would have been very different anyways)
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.
Fun fact: the bones of any president would be a better leader than our current president.
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
- 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
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?
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.
So what, one representative for all those people?
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Here in Brazil, one person means one vote, no districting, no gerrymandering, none of this things, one vote for the president is one vote, one vote for your state senator is one vote, one vote for your deputy is one vote for them and their party (in this part it’s weird, but makes sense that the politician also represents their party, but creates effects like “party gerrymandering”).
Bolsonaro went into house arrest yesterday, so this could mean something.
I am also from Brazil and that’s why I was a bit perplexed. To me, simply counting votes directly instead of counting districts makes more sense.
Bolsonaro went into house arrest yesterday, so this could mean something.
He was also elected President, so that can mean something too.
Majority of people didn’t want him and don’t want him again, like with Trump, but only one of them got reelected.
Well, each vote is counted. Gerrymandering affects (federal level in the US) only the House of Representatives, and districts are drawn (ideally) proportional to population. How those lines are drawn are not and cannot be objective; Gerrymandering is when that subjectivity allows for bias.
The objection is that lines are not legitimate. Lines and districts do not represent voters, they represent politicians and that is not democratic.
Districts by their very nature represent voters.
I feel like you are misunderstanding representative government. There is value in districts, provided they are drawn apolitically. Without it, people living in sparsely populated areas would effectively have their unique needs unmet.
I am not saying the system is without critique. There is loads wrong with it as is, as the gerrymandering problem illustrates. But while one person / one vote would be ideal for an office like president (and it should be changed so this is the case), it would have other issues if it were used for all offices.
Without it, people living in sparsely populated areas would effectively have their unique needs unmet.
Why? That’s why you have different tiers of government. Parliament shouldn’t have to worry about the state of the water in a particular municipality, that’s a local government issue. Similarly, the state sets the budget for healthcare, but the regions allocate those resources based on the needs of the municipalities.
Districts by their very nature represent voters.
I feel like you are misunderstanding representative government. There is value in districts, provided they are drawn apolitically. Without it, people living in sparsely populated areas would effectively have their unique needs unmet.
It’s really important to understand why this is not the case. Districted voting essentially introduces first-past-the-post voting at more levels. Each level of FPTP creates a larger disparity between what voters want and who gets elected. This is in part due to gerrmandering, but that’s not a required thing.
Every time you decide a district election through FPTP, you essentially create a rounding error, a disparity between the election results and what voters actually voted for. This FPTP system then reinforces the two-party system that the US and UK have a very hard time escaping. And as you may be able to guess, having a mere two major parties to choose from is fucking terrible for getting niche voters represented. It’s why the US and UK see comparatively little regional focus and increased disillusionment with national politics in these areas.
Abolishing districts actually helps local representation(!). Because under proportional representation, if someone campaigns on serving the needs of a small group of voters, said group can vote for them and they will be elected. It lets anyone basically define their own “district” of voters, without political manipulation. If they fail to attract a sizeable enough share of votes, then this electoral niche is simply too small to be represented at the national level, and this group should perhaps petition local government instead.
We see this effect quite clearly in countries like the Netherlands, where there are quite a few national parties to choose from, and several focus on a specific group of voters (eg the BBB which focuses on farmers, or the FNP which focuses on people living in the region of Friesland.
I don’t see why FPTP voting are inherent to voting districts. I would agree FPTP voting is problematic, but don’t necessarily agree abolishing districts would be the way to solve it.
I’ll admit to being largely uneducated on political theory, but nothing you said has convinced me districted voting is inherently bad.
FPTP isn’t strictly necessary for districts, but it’s the most common. One way or another, you need some way to determine which candidate will ultimately represent a district. Unless you’re in a 2-party system, it’s very likely that this candidate will only represent a minority of voters in a district. Even with RCV you might get a “least disliked” candidate, but that’s still not a candidate that has majority support.
Perhaps to make it easier to understand: there is zero guarantee that all voters in a specific district have the same voting preference. And those without a plurality opinion are likely to end up marginalised under a districting system. If another group in your district is slightly larger, you end up without representation. Without districting, these voters can band together and choose their preferred candidate, without being constrained by arbitrary district lines.
Perhaps a concrete example will help. Take a random western country with a small minority. This minority doesn’t tend to aggregate in specific districts as much, they’re usually very well spread out over the country (let’s say there’s 2% nationwide, but at most 10% in any given district). Under a districting system, they’re likely to fail getting even a single representative, as they’re a minority in every single district. But under proportional representation, they could get a representative as collectively the minority is large enough to warrant representation with at least 2% of seats.
There’s also systems like the Danish, which iirc tries to figure out how many districts should be appointed to which party by dividing up the national vote (though I’m not very well acquainted with it). But even such a system will then be forced to assign a district representative to a district where the candidate does not enjoy majority support.
And that’s the issue with districting. It’s not possible to have a system that guarantees the national election results match the national voter preference, and that guarantees that district election results match the district voter preference.
FPTP needs voting districts for legislative bodies, and FPTP are the easiest implementation of voting districts.
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.
In my opinion there shouldn’t be districts at all. Too much potential for fuckery.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Non-surprisingly it exists in some form in anglo countries.
UK and CanadaIn 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?
This is just from what I looked up (from 4 years ago):
With both parties getting 38% to Tories get 12 more seats than Labour.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=Y&CON=38&LAB=38&LIB=12&Reform=2&Green=3&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=23.6&SCOTLAB=19.2&SCOTLIB=6&SCOTReform=0.3&SCOTGreen=1.5&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=47.5&display=AllChanged®orseat=(none)&boundary=2019baseSeen other comments they can also mess with other factors, avg inhabitants, etc…
Anyway, really not familiar with this but at first glance you at least have that system and you all can decide if 12 seats is a problem to you or not. Not my problem
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.
Cracking and packing
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.
It’s almost like the idea that representation based on land instead of based on people is flawed to begin with.
Not sure what you mean, get rid of districts? If you break up the population into groups then you get a geographic area.
y u no direct democracy?
Yes. Representation should be proportional. In other systems of democracy, you vote a party and if that party wins 25% of the vote, then they win 25% of the representatives. Gerrymandering works because it’s based on land being more important to representation than people.
I think you could move somewhat towards having both. Let them gerrymander as much as they want, but at the end you also appoint additional districtless seats nominated by the winners, proportional to the number of votes they won by.
We were never going to do representation by population. We barely got the southern colonies to agree to apportionment with land. (This was the 3/5ths compromise.)
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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.
Your vote for president or prime minister
The whole reason a prime minister is different from a president is that they’re not elected by direct votes. They’re the leader of the party with the most representatives (more or less).
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.
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.
When the Senate’s full of cucks, they let you do it
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
Instant recall would be huge in the US. People here have extremely short memories.
flooding the news, firehood falsehood. you have the MSM thanks for that, to distract people, complements from RU.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
That’s what happens when a convicted felon and an unregistered sex offender is made President
It started waaay before Trump was even born.
Like, over 200 years ago.
