3 ms·

The point of districting is to have the representation be more connected to a particular demographic than the whole state. I get what you're saying about geogr

The point of districting is to have the representation be more connected to a particular demographic than the whole state. I get what you're saying about geography. But the alternatives have a lot of pitfalls. An at-large candidate from Texas or California is not likely to be particularly close to any minority demographic that might desire a champion for their concerns. You end up with every candidate from Chicago, campaigning in Chicago and its collar counties, and no one ever visits or gets elected from Carbondale or Bloomington-Normal or the Illinois part of the Quad Cities. It might be appropriate to segment the population by profession, such as to have all the bus drivers, car drivers, train operators, and pilots in the state nominally represented by the same person, while all the farmers, loggers, and ranchers have their own person. That faces the same problems as geographical gerrymandering, and more. If you segmented the population alphabetically, the representative for surnames starting with the letters A through C does not have a particularly clear mandate. But at least it would likely be a fair distribution. I think the simplest segmentation would be between urban and rural. Line up voters by the population density of their census tract. Slice the population into a reasonable number of buckets, 2 or 3, and the voters in those buckets elect a number of at-large representatives. You probably end up with liberal representatives for every urban core, moderate representatives for every suburb and commuter artery, and conservative representatives for every hamlet and unincorporated township that can still see the stars at night.

michaelmrose 9y ago
If rural voters are a small minority of the populace why should their distinct regressive views have more than a mathmatically appropriate ammount of weight? When tyranny of the majority is most people agreeing people ought to have more rights than rural hicks think they ought to deserve I fail to see the problem. Democracy means representing the majority view tempered by personal judgement.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  But they are not a small minority. It just costs more in campaign funding to sway their votes. You would have to have a smaller event in every county seat to equal one big political rally in the metropolis. That's a lot of time and distance, and the payoff goes into the basement if other candidates are doing the same thing.
dragonwriter 9y ago
Or you could just make this simple and use STV or a similar preference-based, candidate-centered, proportional system, which effectively segments the electorate by candidate preferences expressed in the election, rather than prior to the election. This essentially minimizes distortions resulting from pre-vote segmentation.

michaelmrose 9y ago

If rural voters are a small minority of the populace why should their distinct regressive views have more than a mathmatically appropriate ammount of weight? When tyranny of the majority is most people agreeing people ought to have more rights than rural hicks think they ought to deserve I fail to see the problem. Democracy means representing the majority view tempered by personal judgement.

logfromblammo 9y ago
But they are not a small minority. It just costs more in campaign funding to sway their votes. You would have to have a smaller event in every county seat to equal one big political rally in the metropolis. That's a lot of time and distance, and the payoff goes into the basement if other candidates are doing the same thing.

dragonwriter 9y ago

Or you could just make this simple and use STV or a similar preference-based, candidate-centered, proportional system, which effectively segments the electorate by candidate preferences expressed in the election, rather than prior to the election. This essentially minimizes distortions resulting from pre-vote segmentation.