4 ms·
The best way to get rid of gerrymandering of congressional districts is to get rid of congressional districts.
by ende 10y ago
The best way to get rid of gerrymandering of congressional districts is to get rid of congressional districts.
- vanattab 10y agoWhat would you do instead? Have all house seats state wide elections?
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y agoProportional representation probably
- jandrese 10y agoThe downside of that is it makes all but one or two of the seats noncompetitive. The voters can't oust one politician specifically unless that politician is already on the party's shitlist and the voters manage to move the needle enough to make them lose a seat. Most of the candidates end up being completely safe.
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y agoPerhaps we could combine it with some sort of ranking primary.
- kalleboo 10y agoSome election systems let you rank candidates in addition to the party (e.g. Sweden lets you in a limited fashion)
- tomjen3 10y agoThat is a nice soundbite. Congressional districts exist for a good reason - how would you keep the benefit?
- scholia 10y agoYou could assign representatives to cover the area where they were most popular. In fact, given modern technology, you could easily draw the boundaries after the election. If you did, I bet they'd look a lot more "natural" than the results of current GOP gerrymandering.
- esturk 10y agoJust like congressional districts that cover the entire state (ie. WY, ND, SD, etc.), there's no reason that multiple representatives can't all represent the entire state. They can cover the entire state's interest through compromises as oppose to infighting for district vs. district within a state.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Congressional districts exist for a good reason The universal rule of single member districts is relatively recent, and it was a blunt (though effective) tool to deal with the threat of a form of super-gerrymandering by which states would assign some or all of their representatives to state-wide at-large seats so that the statewide majority would elect them, as a means of preventing the existence of majority-black districts in majority-rule states. Multimember districts with a proportional (even candidate-centered, like STV) electoral system rather than plurality or majority-runoff deals with both that problem and the problem with single-member FPTP districts.
- asdfologist 10y agoWhy not take a step further and get rid of states?
- dragonwriter 10y agoThat's actually a really good idea for the House.
- CalChris 10y agoAgreed since Wyoming already gets two Senators and a House member for their 584,153.
- koenigdavidmj 10y agoAmerican states are sovereign entities, not mere administrative districts that exist at the pleasure of the Feds.
- CalChris 10y agoThe sovereignty of states most definitely does not exist outside of the Constitution. For example, states can be split into two; Kentucky was originally part of the State of Virginia and became a separate state in 1792, the 15th. West Virginia was a part of Virginia, Maine was a part of Massachusetts, Vermont was a part of New York. This is covered in Article IV, Section 3, clause 1 of the Constitution which says: no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State... without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress. This too can be changed. States are mere administrative districts that exist at the pleasure of the Constitution. This state sovereignty under the Articles of Confederation was done away with by the Constitution.
- ende 10y agoNo they are not. The states share sovereignty through the Federal government. That's the very definition of Federalism. We are not a single Unitary state. The mere fact that any partition of union requires the approval of the legislatures of the involved states is demonstative of this.
- dragonwriter 10y agoWell, single member districts at least; 5-member districts with STV would kill any value in gerrymandering, achieve reasonably proportional representation, and retain (unlike party list systems) strict accountability of representatives to the general electorate.
- mtgx 10y agoOr you could enlarge them and guarantee 3-5 winners, where each party can have only a single winner. That makes it almost impossible for any party to monopolize the districts (which right now they are by definition, because they are winner-takes-all elections): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS62N5b5L7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS62N5b5L7Y
- ende 10y agoMulti-member districts would certainly be better than single member.
- stcredzero 10y agoDid you read the Efficiency Gap article? You may not have guessed because of the context of the article, but this metric isn't just geometric. It directly measures the efficiency of converting party constituent votes into seats. That's cutting the Gordian Knot! Want to measure Gerrymandering? Then directly measure what it's trying to achieve! https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work/How_the_Efficiency_Gap_Standard_Works.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work...
- spott 10y agoThe problem with the efficiency gap metric is that it incentivizes cooperation between the parties to generate "safe" districts. You can turn it into an optimization problem instead if you try to minimize the wasted votes for the entire state. This ensures that you don't get states with districts that all have huge -- but equal! -- efficiency gaps.
- stcredzero 10y agoSo instead of efficiency gap, measure inefficiency excess?
- ouid 10y agowhat's wrong with safe districts? I would like to have better representation and lower volatility.