- Redistricting should be done the same for every state.
- It should be done via a computer program that takes as input 2 data points: 1) population; 2) natural boundaries (city/county lines)
- The source code for this program must be public. I am quite certain there are people qualified on both sides of the aisle to ensure that there is no “cheating”
- Let the chips fall where they may… Some of each party will likely find they no longer live in the district they represent, but that is a small price to pay for a fair system
I realize that this will never happen because there will be complaints from both Ds and Rs; but it would end the whole ridiculous concept of gerrymandering
What bugs me is that the Dems are already unilaterally disarming themselves and are promising to merely make districts more “fair” , should they be able to be in a position to redraw maps in 2020 rather than play the same game as the Republicans.
There’s nothing like bringing knife to a nuclear war to show how you’re winning…
This is the same mistake Obama made when he refused to put the dagger through the GOPs heart when he had the opportunity early in his administration, and instead opted to keep the beast alive in hopes it would listen to reason.
like in Star Trek TOS when Lincoln ends up speared in the back by Colonel Green. Phuckers can’t be trusted.
“Repubicans…can’t…be…trusted…now…who knew…”
and then he drops dead.
Let’s hope Kennedy kills gerrymandering this summer.
They cheated so we cheat? Everybody cheats? Can’t trust anybody? Sounds like a wonderful plan to build one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. No, we should indeed seek a fair representational map, you may fool all of the people some of the time but you cannot fool all the people all the time, do it right and let democracy win. We already have a strong pull towards autocracy, no reason to add a shove.
A majority of the Republicans do not accept anything other than total surrender.
That always has to be a factor in devising strategy. At the moment, there really isn’t any point dealing with them other than the increasingly small minority that are still committed to democracy.
There’s every point in dealing with conservatives that have broken away from the Republican Party, whether on grounds of illiberalism or insufficient conservatism or both; they could be a crucial part of restoring real democracy in this country.
There is also every point in dealing with people that aren’t affiliated to either party. That’s where future change to redistricting has to be about constitutionally baking in non-partisan maps. Unfortunately even that is now coming under attack, as Arizona Republicans are putting the future of their state’s non-partisan districting commission on the November ballot with an initiative that would gut the commission.
You should probably move to the People’s Republic of China. They don’t have problems like this there.
What do the odds makers say on this, them with the tea leaves and sheep entrails?
RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA!
Meanwhile, Republican’ts have spent the last 16 months working to steal yet another election, as they’ve done since 2000, no Russians required…
Fight like hell.
You just described an algorithm for disproportionate Republican representation. The central problem that enables gerrymandering is that Democrats concentrate themselves in cities and Republicans spread themselves out across the country side. The only way to draw maps that fairly represent the statewide Congressional votes and the ratio of Republican to Democratic voters within a state is to draw districts that disregard natural boundaries and draw rural, urban and suburban voters into a single district.
So, “we had to destroy this democracy in order to save it?” Yeah, no.
At least Republicans are consistent.
Their solution for fair news – which sometimes was 48% conservative and 52% liberal on all channels – was to create a network that was biased 100% for conservatives, and then try to redefine the meaning of “fair”.
So to “balance” Maryland and Illinois, they gerrymander every district from sea to shining sea.
Freedom is now redefined as lack of choice.
War is peace / freedom is slavery / ignorance is strength
I picked the wrong decade to quit sniffing lox and bagels.
It’s not that simple. (By the way, city and county lines are political boundaries, not natural boundaries. They do delineate groups of people with a nominal common interest, and to the extent possible should be respected in the redistricting process.) There are many maps that respect existing political boundaries and achieve the desired balance – the existence of gerrymandering is an existence proof – modern gerrymandering involves (in part) sorting through those maps and finding the ones that achieve the partisan goal.
So what is needed is a compactness criterion – something like looking at the area/perimeter ratio and setting a limit on what degree of weirdness is acceptable. But this has to be balanced with the requirements of the Voting Rights Acts and the various court rulings about it.
Choices need to be made, and people need to be involved in making those choices. The question is, which people should be involved. History has taught us that the politicians are the wrong people to be involved.
Democracy in America is a complete illusion:
- The President was elected with fewer votes than the highest vote-getter.
- The Senate majority was elected with fewer votes than the Senate minority.
- The House Majority was elected with fewer votes than the House minority.
The Constitution was written to protect and preserve the power of wealthy white property owners, and it has been successfully doing that for more than 200 years.
What we need is a new Constitution with a new form of democratic government.
Have we not been having a similar fight with a group that still remains the same for our entirety as a nation. We compromised on slavery, and less then a 100 years later, we tear each other apart and lose a brilliant mind trying to solve it. Immediately after Jim Crow is instituted and we are back to systemic state sponsored disenfranchisement of people based on melanin. In the interim we go liberate Europe, build the world we recongnize now, then within 100 years we are losing another President and having the same fight trying to right the consistent wrong.
We negotiated in good faith, but all it gets us is a group that bullies and picks at the very essence of each person’s freedom, while projecting their insecurities and crimes against our constitution upon those they victimize. We compromise so far, we can’t even agree on where facts begin, so we divide ourselves geographically to escape insanity. Should we raise our kids where a school board wants to institute American Exceptionalism and Creationism, or where our wives and daughters aren’t afforded access to equal medical care.
We talk on their terms, always. We allow them to paint a very conservative media concerned with “fair and balanced” as left wing propaganda when it is them that sets the terms of the daily discourse. We hold 7 years of hearings on land sales, and presidential blow jobs, then give them two unfunded wars, a militarized police force, and millions of veterans without the proper funding to reintegrate them into society and treat them for the mental wounds of their service. Instead we hand them guns and say go police the street.
We allow my neighbor’s right to own and carry all his guns, and my request that maybe those guns not be carried onto my lawn, or into my libraries, or to my kid’s school as equal to me burning an American flag while I use its embers to roast a bald eagle which I will then feed the bird to the undocumented family I just picked up at the border, carrying drugs, and ISIS fighters.
We have allowed them to rig a national election twice now, to equate LGBTQ rights with beastiality, to make our policies with regards to Israel slanted towards maintaining control of key areas because of their belief in Judgment Day.
Anything sensible is anti-America, a conspiracy, elites, globalism, left-wing. And so we argue about what is a fact, and we tap dance and negotiate and hope we can win them over and remind ourselves we are one nation undivided. But you can’t be that. You can’t create a nation undivided on the back of genocide of the Native inhabitants, and then on the back of the unpaid labor of people sold like machinery, and decide our great nation will allow only the white men to make the decisions because we are all equal.
We capitulate even when we are unashamedly correct and just. This is not a group that cares about logic or reason. Call it grievance politics, identity politics, value voters. Does it matter why they are this way? Have they ever once exhibited any interest in changing? At what point do we and our ways of dealing with them become the problems? How many times does the hostage taker shoot the negotiator before we stop negotiating?
So you’re advocating that Democrats resort the kind of cheating that is the hallmark of Republican party politics.
Not only is that monumentally stupid, it’s arrogant and self-defeating.
We oppose gerrymandering as a party—we want fair and competitive congressional and state legislative districts so that “the will of the people” decides who serves, rather than having some computer algorithm make the decision and short-circuit our democracy.
You need to rethink your position.
Tit-for-tat is a bad political model for liberals and progressives.
Lord help us!
The Professional Whiner is posting the same trite and tired complaints.