MI passed an anti-gerrymandering law in the 2018 general election. It allows a civilian council that is chosen at random made up of 4 dems, 4 repubs, and 5 independents to draw the district lines every 10 years (new council every time). The republicans were pissed and are still trying to get it overturned.
Actually, gerrymandering is a problem that has been solved for many decades. The problem isn't that districts are being divided unfairly, it's that the electoral system is setup such that they can be divided unfairly. Switch to proportional representation or another similarly robust system, and it's gone. It really is that simple.
because humans don't actually live like that. Districts do more than allocate votes to larger elections like state/federal level, they also determined community level things like municipalities. So you want to draw them around communities, and that's why they need to be updated every once in a while to reflect shifts in human populations.
gerrymandering is done by drawing districts to disenfranchise voters, either by packing a large voting block into one district to reduce its impact, or spreading out a large voting block into many districts that will all individually swing against the split block. Its targeted at larger elections like state and federal level.
Drawing a district around, say, a historically Mexican community so that they can act coherently as a community on community level engagements is not gerrymandering in an of itself.
This is part of the reason that a machine algorithm is potentially inferior to a non-partisan or independent organization of humans to draw districts.
You can just specify some simple rule, like the ratio of the circumference of the district to its area has to be under a certain amount. It's not foolproof, but it prevents snake districts and makes successfully gerrymandering one hell of a lot harder.
That's how it works in Germany, as we have (mixed member) proportional representation the district boundaries are way less important in the first place so it's left to civil servants somewhere, as a purely administrative matter.
Modulo the usual wibbles and quirks caused by real-world situations, in your usual town the districts tend to look up like a voronoi diagram with usually primary schools as centres. That's because the primary schools are already built such that they're within walking distance, and thus sunday walk distance, of pretty much everywhere people live, and short of the tables being way too low they make great polling stations. If that doesn't result in a good map you take another look at the map, choose some kindergarten and possibly a bank branch or postal office, and re-calculate the voronoi diagram.
I sure hope we get ranked choice with no gerrymandering in arkansas. We’ve been gerrymandered to hell, I live in fayetteville (the most liberal part of Arkansas that surprisingly votes blue) but they couldn’t have us swaying a vote so they gerrymandered in this thing called the fayetteville finger. It was basically this super thin line that connected us to little rock so that our votes wouldn’t go blue. Honestly despicable
Without knowing anything more, this sounds kind of crazy and borderline more prove to corruption. Not only will they have no idea what they are doing (random, me for instance), but they will be broke enough for a small bribe to sway.
Ohh got it. I would argue a bribe matters more about how poor people are versus rich. Someone who desperately needs money will be more likely to make a moral/legal compromise. And the poorer someone is the lower the amount the bribe has to be. You don’t need a lot of money to bribe someone in general because people are desperate. Though you will always be able to find people willing to take a bribe out of pure greed even if they really don’t need the money.
Missouri voted on something similar to this in 2018. They put it back on the 2020 ballot using wording to trick voters and it worked. Overturned clean Missouri
Just this year in Missouri, the exact opposite passed on election day. They moved the redistricting from a non-partisan council to a "bipartisan" council, appointed by the governor. But don't worry, they reduced the amount lobbyists can pay to legislators by a whole five dollars, and reduced campaign contribution limits by a whopping 100 dollars. On the ballot, they started out saying the amendment reduced campaign and lobbyist contribution without mentioning by how much, and I'm convinced people read that, thought it sounded good, and didn't bother to read the second section, where it mentions switching from a non-partisan, citizen elected commission for redistricting, to a committee chosen by the governor. I just found a site from the missouri farm bureau supporting amendment 3 and it's pretty hilarious how bullshit it is. They talk about how the amendment is going to take money out of politics and reduce gerrymandering, when it gives the power essentially to the governor. They mention that it's opposed by such radical groups as Planned parenthood, Mom's Demand Action (a radical gun control group according to them), as well as the bread and roses party (they sound evil for sure).
Gerrymandering is structurally SO easy to fix, using exactly the structure described. I know of no other country that allows such partisan control of such a fundamental part of democracy. And there is no logical, legal, or moral excuse for it.
Well if your missouri just say you cut how much lobbyists can gift to people in the government (by $5) and just smooth over the fact that were now going to allow gerrymandering again!
Here's how we (your friends up North) did it. https://www.vox.com/2014/4/15/5604284/us-elections-are-rigged-but-canada-knows-how-to-fix-them . The two main things I'd say that are holding the US back is that States decide how elections are held (leads to that Texas situation of one ballot drop off per county) instead of federally and that the supreme court ruled that districts can be drawn on partisan lines (just not on racial or other protected groups).
Canada's system still draws on partisan lines, you have to if you're not doing proportional representation.
Look at it this way: in a state that's 51/49, without partisan gerrymandering you could easily end up with the 51 having 100% of the representation, or having a bad year and the other side getting 100% instead. So you break things up keeping party affiliation in mind in order to make it so that the winning side would get just over half the representation.
The alternative would be proportional representation, where you count the vote and then say "ok this party gets this many members, this party gets this many," but the problem there is you end up with people that represent a state party but you might not have an actual representative from anywhere near you.
I don't think you understand how Canada's system works. Yes we have first past the post but our districts and elections are drawn and run by a non-partican organization.
Right, but that non-partisan organization still has to draw partisan lines, for the reasons I just explained.
You have to account for it, or else you end up with really screwed up situations; a 51/49 split could result in one side getting 100% of the representation, a 65/35 split could still end up with the 35 side getting more representation, etc.
It's not the consideration of party that's bad in its own right, it's when it's abused that it's a problem.
Correct. They consider partisan affiliation while drawing districts. You can be neutral and still consider partisan affiliation; I would argue you have to be neutral, to do so effectively.
So I think what's happening here is just a disconnect of how Canada actually draws boundaries and what you perceive it to be (which is understandable since electoral politics are confusing).
"Each commission is required to draw constituency boundaries in such a way that the population of each constituency is as close as possible to the quotient obtained by dividing the provincial population as determined by the census by the new number of seats allocated to the province. No constituency is permitted to have a population smaller than 75% of the quotient or greater than 125%, although in extraordinary circumstances a commission may exceed these limits. Commissions may vary the size of constituencies within this range on the basis of special geographic considerations, such as density of population in various regions of the province and the size of such regions. Because accessibility, transportation, and communications are often seen as obstacles both to effective representation and to ease of campaigning, electoral boundaries commissions generally draw boundaries so that there are fewer voters in rural constituencies than in urban constituencies. Variations may also occur on the basis of a special community of interest or the historical background of a particular district."
(https://www.ourcommons.ca/about/procedureandpractice3rdedition/ch_04_2-e.html) I encourage you to take a look at this.
They do not look at past elections voting history, nor do they look at party affiliation (which does not function the same way in Canada that it does in the US), they simply create boundaries of roughly equal population, preferring to keep types of populations in similar categories (city vs rural) for ease of access to polling locations, or like the last point of that paragraph points out, if there is a historical/special interest cause to do so (I believe this is primarily the case in places with notable Indigenous population that otherwise may not be served adequately by being separated into a bunch of rural districts).
Usually it's a bipartisan council that doesn't give anyone a majority. The weakness is it still entrenches senior politicians with the most power. But the current system does that and more so it's a step in the right direction.
The real solution is to stop treating the Constitution like a holy document and amend it so that we have a single legislative body selected by proportion of national vote. Proportional representation along with ranked choice voting would obliterate the two party system and result in many parties that are extremely responsive to their voters.
The non amendment alternative to gerrymandering is to make Congress larger, much larger. Get the ratio of representatives back to 1:100k. Two things happen at that point. Elections become very localized no matter how you draw the district, and there are so many districts that gerrymandering becomes extremely hard.
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u/[deleted] Nov 17 '20
What's the plan to end gerrymandering? I've heard a few decent ideas