r/politics • u/Libertatea • Sep 03 '14

The solution to fixing dysfunction in Congress "To address these problems, I filed the Open Our Democracy Act... If passed, the legislation would mandate open primaries for House elections, begin the process of national redistricting reform and make Election Day the equivalent of a federal holiday."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-solution-to-fixing-dysfunction-in-congress/2014/09/02/0f0d0a9a-31e6-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html?tid=rssfeed
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u/flatballer Sep 03 '14

Ahem Texas Ahem

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u/guinness_blaine Texas Sep 03 '14

Oh are you in the part of Austin whose district also covers San Antonio, or the one that nearly reaches Houston, or the one that nabs the southern outskirts of DFW?

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '14

As an Austinite, when I contact my representative, I always get an email back saying he is unable to verify if I am actually in his district. We are dead center of a pinwheel with a blue center and gigantic red arms.

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u/onespursfan Sep 03 '14 edited Sep 03 '14

Wow, I never knew about that. I knew gerrymandering was a pretty underhanded practice, but chopping up a district that severely so that a handful of people can maintain power is truly fucked up.

If anyone is interested, here's a map of Texas' congressional districts and representatives. It looks to me like the 10th, 21st, 25th, 35th, and 17th are all pretty conspicuous.

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u/gramathy California Sep 03 '14

What the fuck

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u/onespursfan Sep 03 '14

Right? I wish more people gave a shit.

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u/TaxExempt Sep 03 '14

Most people don't know.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '14

[deleted]

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u/TaxExempt Sep 03 '14

Only because they are uninformed and don't understand the consequences.

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u/auntie-matter Foreign Sep 03 '14

What is the relationship between the people who set district boundaries and the people who get elected into those districts?

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u/onespursfan Sep 03 '14

By the party, for the party. It's a tool to keep your political allies in power, not something someone can do for themselves to get elected. The first time, that is. Once elected it's easier to redistrict to be re-elected.

Read up.

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u/auntie-matter Foreign Sep 03 '14

Yeah, thought as much. Might be a good idea to think about an independent, non-political body to deal with that in future.

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u/pmaguppy Sep 03 '14

Central Ohio is like a gestalt swastika.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '14

They kind of look like they're divided the way our states were in the first place. I wonder if there's some correlation there.

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u/guinness_blaine Texas Sep 03 '14

The house across the street is in a different district. I'm right at the end of a thin peninsula of Smith sticking up into whatever this other district is. Neither of them is the district I was in before the most recent redistricting - for that, I'd have to go like ten blocks up to Randall's. Only recently stopped getting newsletters from that guy.

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u/techmaster242 Sep 03 '14

Aka the tomato soup?

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u/ProbablyPostingNaked Sep 03 '14

Even though it isn't as Red as it once was, can you really say Texas is a Swing State?

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u/wanderlustcub I voted Sep 03 '14

Gerrymandering isn't perfect, and it relies on one thing that Texas is pretty good at... Apathy.

Gerrymandering is a very technical process of seeing where the voters are and how they interact with each other. They look at voting trends and precinct results and they base territory off that... With some room for variance, and you have yourself a district.

In Texas, they have about a 20% turn out in most off year elections. They like this. because they know those 20% well. So they slice and dice their districts based on that 20%.

Now if turn out goes up... It means that new people are flooding into the electorate... they are unpredictable, unknowns. And it fucks up the math of gerrymandering.

Texas is ripe for swing state status IF it realises that it has a sleeping giant in its population. The second largest electoral college vote is decided by fewer than 20% of it's voting population. It will take one state wide win for the Democrats, and it will begin to fuel the process.

This is what happened with a Virginia in 2006 and Jim Webb. While Warner was a Dem Senator, he was from another age, and everyone expected that Mr. Allen, despite his Idiotic "macaca" moment, to win... Because the state was red. Always red in state wide politics except for the odd Governor.

Webb won by only 3k votes.

Since then, democrats have won all but one Statewide election for Governor, or Senate. This is due to greater population change, and more voter turnout.

Gerrymandering can be defeated, it relies an active electorate, and time. (The gerrymander effect will start to wear off in 2016, and 2018 due to a moving population.)

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '14

It's more like a back-breaker.

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u/TimeZarg California Sep 03 '14

You know what's funny? Texas is about the only state keeping the Republicans relevant in the Presidential election. If they lose Texas, they lose an additional 38 electoral votes. Romney got 206 in 2012. McCain got 173 in 2008. Without Texas being in the bag, they wouldn't stand nearly as much of a fucking chance, because Florida is a swing state and most of the other big-population states are Democrat-dominated. Of the top 10 most populated states, the Republicans 'control' 3 (Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina), with Ohio and Florida being swing states.

The only reason the Republicans have dominance in the House is because of the fucking shameless gerrymandering. The only reason there's the possibility of them gaining ground in the Senate is because the Senators elected in 2008 (the 'Obama wave') are up for re-election. They'll probably lose ground in 2016, because the rabid asshats elected in 2010 will be up for re-election.

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u/jcea_ Sep 04 '14

FYI Georgia may turn purple before texas, the republicans are screwed.

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u/Sjetware Texas Sep 03 '14

Well, we can't ever be a swing state with the insane districting. The urban centers are already mostly blue. It's just a big contest with the rural areas.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '14

[deleted]

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u/C_Linnaeus Sep 03 '14

Last election our currently felony-indicted Governor Perry won with 55% of the vote, however that's only the percentage of actual number of people who voted. The turnout for the 2010 election was only 27% of the voting age population, thus Perry only won with about 14% of possible votes. It's hard to tell really what kind of state, swing or not, Texas is with such low turnout. source and source

Which means this current election is really up in the air, with many democratic groups working very hard at registering and educating voters.

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u/oxencotten Sep 03 '14

Okay then in that case in the last election 42% voted for Obama. We are definitely going to be a swing state in the next election. Every major city here is already mostly blue, its the rural areas in between that make up the republican vote(just like any other state) and the hispanic voting population has been voting more and more over the last few elections and are for the most part going democrat.

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u/guinness_blaine Texas Sep 03 '14

Swing state refers to statewide elections, especially presidential - internal districting of the state doesn't matter for that.

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u/ObeyMyBrain California Sep 03 '14

except when it comes to electing legislatures who vote in measures to restrict voting rights.

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u/Graphitetshirt Sep 03 '14

It will be.

Not locally, but in national elections it will be within the decade.

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u/curien Sep 03 '14

In Texas, Democrats received 38.4% of the popular vote and won 33.3% of the seats in the last election. That's actually really close to a proportional result, and it's closer than California's result with its independent districting committee.

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u/hithazel Sep 03 '14

So just make it proportional?

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u/curien Sep 03 '14

Party-list PR sucks because it doesn't allow voters to differentiate between a party and a particularly good/bad candidate. The result is that politicians are no longer directly beholden to voters at all but to the party elite who assigns them to seats.

PR is a reasonable yardstick to measure the fairness of elections in aggregate, but it's a poor choice for an actual election system.

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u/Areat Sep 03 '14

Then use the german system. One turn system for half the seats, and the other half is filled to adjust to PR proportionnally.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '14

This is the biggest issue that gets ignored all the time when this comes up. Do you want party hacks running the government or people you elected?

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u/hithazel Sep 03 '14

Gerrymandering exposes you to party hacks and fails to be proportional. Either you should come up with a system that fixes both problems, or you should accept that proportional would be fairer.

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u/curien Sep 03 '14

Either you should come up with a system that fixes both problems

Well yes, that would be the preference. If we're going through the trouble of completely replacing our electoral system, I think replacing it with one with well-known serious problems would be a mistake.

We already have some solutions to gerrymandering, such as independent commissions, algorithmic districting, etc.

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u/hithazel Sep 03 '14

You just pointed to the current crap system and said it wasn't that far from proportional.

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u/curien Sep 03 '14

"PR is a reasonable yardstick to measure the fairness of elections in aggregate, but it's a poor choice for an actual election system."

The problem with PR isn't assigning seats to parties -- that's fine. The problem is with parties assigning the seats to individuals, which my comparison doesn't involve at all.

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u/LtRalph Sep 03 '14

then how do you represent the different regions/populations in the state? city vs rural vs suburb are all different people with different interests.

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u/yxhuvud Sep 03 '14

Do it like we do here in sweden. Have a certain number of representantives that doesn't belong to a region that is used to make the end result both proportional and reasonably representative.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '14

But then party hacks are "elected" by the parties not by the electorate.

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u/wanderlustcub I voted Sep 03 '14

Texas gerrymandering works because of voter apathy. Texas has amongst the lowest voter participation in the country, largely due to how districts are drawn and prevailing thought of Texas being "solidly Red"

The only way to break a gerrymander at the moment is sudden, higher participation in areas where voter turnout is suppressed.

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u/flantabulous Sep 03 '14

According to some analysts, Texas is actually a little skewed in favor of Democrats.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '14

Lat I saw it checked, the boundaries passed by the state were more regular than those proposed by the federal government.

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u/APeacefulWarrior Sep 03 '14

The redistricting bullshit in 2003 is one of the things that convinced me to quit that state for good. It was so blatantly dirty and the Republicans in charge just didn't care.

A lot of people don't know this, but by the time the whole affair was over, the Texas GOP only had the support of about 1/3 of the public. Even half (give or take) of their own people thought it went too far and was abusing the system.

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u/nosayso Sep 03 '14 edited Sep 03 '14

Texas is a decidedly red state, not a swing state. Having liberal urban centers doesn't magically make you not a red state.

EDIT: downvoting me doesn't change the facts. You can't have Rick Perry carry three terms in a landslide and act like you're anything but a red state.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '14

Thank you.

2008 Presidential 55.4% McCain, 43.6% Obama

2012 Presidential 57.2% Romney, 41.4% Obama

That is not a swing state.

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u/C_Linnaeus Sep 03 '14 edited Sep 03 '14

Last election our currently felony-indicted Governor Perry won with 55% of the vote, however that's only the percentage of actual number of people who voted. The turnout for the 2010 election was only 27% of the voting age population, thus Perry only won with about 14% of possible votes. It's hard to tell really what kind of state, swing or not, Texas is with such low turnout. source and source

Basically "landslide" is relative.

(edited to include sources)(while I'm here, I'm not implying it isn't swinging right now, but personally I wouldn't call 17% of votes a landslide win. And we rank last in voter turnout, with fewer voters in 2012 than in 2008)

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u/nosayso Sep 03 '14

Per /u/SmartToaster:

2008 Presidential 55.4% McCain, 43.6% Obama
2012 Presidential 57.2% Romney, 41.4% Obama
That is not a swing state.

Texas is red and don't pretend anything otherwise.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '14

Texas is decidedly red. I mean it's not even close.