Their crocodile tears have been delicious.
Totally on board with outlawing this shit entirely, by the way, but also totally over getting punched in the groin by the people who go low.
It’s also a great way of pressuring Republican politicians into actually banning it.
“You don’t like us playing by the rules you wanted? Help us change the rules then!”
They’ll only accept losing the power to gerrymander if it hurts Democrats more than Republicans.
The funny part is where you think Republicans would abide by their own ban, if not outright reverse it, the second they have a chance to reverse power.
that’s an easy solve though…
it’s pretty easy to put a number to how gerrymandered a region is: ungerrymandered means that if you were to look at all the votes in the state without districts that’s your ideal ratio… if you then add districts and that ratio is different, it’s perhaps gerrymandered
so if the goal is to stop gerrymandering, you get a bunch of states to sign some interstate compact that measures gerrymandering across the country and says any state that’s part of the compact will (perhaps in the next election, perhaps based on projections for the current voting maps based on prior voting behaviour) gerrymander to an equal or greater degree to offset or punish gerrymandering overall… ie you can gerrymander your state but at best it’ll mean nothing when it comes to the ratio of votes
We’ll have to do it more. There’s a reason they could only gerrymander 5 more seats into a state the size of Texas, and that’s because Texas was and is already gerrymandered to shit.
They still don’t want a ban because even after a few high profile Democrat gerrymanders, Republicans still benefit more.
Virginia has had a bipartisan districting commission intended to discourage gerrymandering since 2020. Unfortunately, it’s designed terribly and just passes districting powers to the state Supreme Court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_in_Virginia
The US just needs to have PR and stop doing this flawed fptp stuff
Exactly that, I have stopped a while ago, I’ll joke with some of the naive ones say I can upset them with one sentence but, tell I mean in jest but I can act just like them, they ask what and I say one simple phrase that works every time loL “all Republicans must die” Then I say I don’t want to be serious about it so…
You know how MAGA has been full of shit every step of the way, trolling the libs with ragebait? Yeah, let’s do that to them all the way to 2028.
Exactly only Snowflake’s in this country is the GOP group of pedophiles
Democrats tried to ban gerrymandering for the last decade. Republicans have ALWAYS voted against it.
They know they lose when they don’t cheat and they are upset Democrats are not playing nice anymore.
also they cant gerrymander too hard, or they affect thier states republican strongholds. thats why they add in VOTER Suppression to top it off.
We got a saying where I’m from. “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
If only someone would make a law that prevents this. Surely conservatives would never oppose a law like that?
It gets tiring, pretending they care about hypocrisy. They truly don’t.
I honestly think they revel in it. They love the fact that they can force rules to apply to you and then feel powerful when they break them when it suits their goals.
Exactly that. It’s a power play. They do not experience shame.
They’re toddlers
They really are
Toddlers don’t rape kids
like lil’ maple maga Pierre Pollievre up here
keeps whining about liberals causing high prices and reduced affordability of everything. then literally just yesterday every single conservative voted against a food pricing transparency act. then continues whining about hidden taxes on groceries
my guy… you just voted against price transparency. shut the fuck up.
There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on…shame on you.’ Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.
tennesee, the other Florida.
I like how apparently a partisan judge is trying to block this now.
Texas: Fuck voters, we’re doing it without them.
CA/VA: Let’s defer to the voters as we should. Ok, they voted for it.
Partisan Hack Judge: Wait, no, not like that.
They control all 3 branches of the federal government, so I warmly welcome them to pass a law or ruling that makes partisan gerrymandering illegal.
If fighting fire with fire is what’s needed to make them feel like it’s a problem, then so be it.
they cant, thats why they tried to pass the voter suppression bill, Save act.
The fact that their evil dickhead grifters are doing overtime to cry and blame the Dems for not taking the gerrymandering laying down is awesome. We’re only here because of Trump demanding Texas gerrymander for five seats. You cocksuckers don’t get to punch someone in the face then complain when they fight back. I fucking hate right-wingers with all of my being. Horrible traitorous human beings.
Turns out it’s actually much easier to gerrymander when you already have a 15+ point majority statewide
Hardly call it gerrymandering with voting spread like that.
Ok. First. Awesome! More. More. More of this. Democrats actually doing something. I’m happy.
Now, second, once you do something like this you have to be ready to fight HARDER now. My pessimism and time spent watching the Democratic party gives me an awful taste in my mouth.
If any, if fucking any Democrat tries to do the “what we need is to not allow blue states or red states to do this. We need reasonable democratic districts” they should be immediately be removed from the party. They are either delusional or just a Republican fascist. The Republicans aren’t suddenly going to “be reasonable”. Shut the fuck up and get out of politics.
is there any actual benefit to having it subdivided at all in the first place? it just seems like another thing to fight over and undermine the value of particular voters.
Theoretically you get hyperspecific representatives. Maybe a district in the west would want to vote differently than a district in the east. Theoretically your vote is still just as valuable and you’re voting with your geographic peers.
In reality it just gets optimized for party votes and you end up with this
I’m in Texas. The far end of my district is over 400 miles away… And my district isn’t even the worst example.
The sort of idea of it is/was to give farmers and people living in rural i.e. less population dense areas a “fair” amount of voting power compared to cities. The idea does make sense to some extent, as city dwellers often make up a majority of the population, and are unlikely to have the farmers best interests in mind, which could be problematic for everyone. But this already shaky line of reasoning has been abused pretty much since its inception by the party in power to swing the vote in their favor by redrawing lines
Because it makes sense to have local districts represented in the state legislature?
Other than being able to use it to cheat in other to hold on to power?
I was thinking about this the other day and if you’re gonna gerrymander a state, having a state-wide vote about it first makes it a bit more fair.
This response is fifteen years late - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP
It bugs me that there is such a simple solution: just count total votes
This is for members of Congress. Simply counting total votes would mean 100% of the delegation to the house are from whatever party gets 50%+1 votes.
Yes, the majority of votes would elect the district’s chosen candidate. That’s correct.
All congressional districts already work like that. Gerrymandering is the practice of re-drawing distirct borders within an area so that your team has more districts with your voters as the majority.
You’re confusing the districts with Presidential election results.
In the presidential election the district lines actually don’t matter in terms of the outcome. They are just usually reported on election night as “by district”. This is likely what you are confusing or misremembering.
But, the state itself is based on a popular vote for the presidential election that determines who wins ALL of the states “electoral college votes”. Yes, stupidly confusing i know.
Meaning after counting all the votes in the entire state the winner is declared based on popular vote and ALL the “electoral votes” of those states will go to that winner.
Now, this is true for all BUT two states. Main and Nebraska are the exception. Their electoral votes are not “winner take all” for the popular vote. So, if it was one of those states what you are thinking would be correct actually. They split their electoral votes of the state based on the districts.
What is being discussed about districts in the OPs image is the redrawing of district maps. Each district elects a single representative in The House of Representatives. This is won by popular vote within each district and each district is independently represented. The votes from one district have nothing to do with the votes from another in this case.
This has always been a means of drawing the lines such that more of a certain party is likely to get more representatives. But, historically, this has primarily been aggressively done in red states. Especially in the south in order to reduce black voter and minority voter representation. Usually by attempting to draw a single district with as many black and minority voters as possible so they only get one representative.
Hope that clears up the confusion. You’re being downvoted but I think you’re just confused in a very purposely confusing electoral system.
The whole point though is that everybody is supposed to get equal representation.
So, when this latest round of gerrymandering kicked off it was stated this was a contest the Democrats would ultimately lose because they control fewer US States.
In the last few days there’s been some triumphalism as two? or three? Democrat run States have redistricted. But based on the assumption that Republican States do the same, this isn’t actually good news.
Am I out of the loop on some developments here?
Are Democratic run States finding it easier to redistrict than Republican run? Or is there some tangible reason theres an air of triumphalism?
Or are people not appreciating the wider arms-race-like contest and focusing too much on small wins out of context?
With the exception of Texas and Florida, all the other Republican controlled states have a lower population. Theoretically, if all 50 states gerrymandered for their majority the Democrats win.
There is also the fact that republican states weren’t really not gerrymandered to start with.
Good point. The gerrymandering has been exploited more by the Republicans, so they have less to gain from further redistricting.
So each State can send as many reps to the House as they want?
I’m not sure how a larger population in a State translates into more Federal House seats for that State.
I assumed the whole number of seats allocated to each State in the House was set. But i’ve never really had reason to question that assumption.
The total seats / number of districts is capped
and set for each state. It should be uncapped but that is besides the point. The redistricting / gerymandering makes use of packing (putting as many X voting areas into a single district to give them less voting power by basically wasting their vote since their candidate wouldve won that distric anyways) and cracking (splitting X voting areas up into multiple districts which will be majority Y voting).
This means that with even numbers of X and Y voting people, they can be partitioned so that 9/10 districts for example are 55-45 for Y, and the remaining X voting people can be packed into the last district. The end result is Y winning 90% of the districts with only 50% of the overall support.
The number of reps is not set, but it is capped. The numbers are evaluated every ten years via the census survey.
Every ten years they adjust the number of house reps per state based on the state census survey.
Personally I’m taking it one day at a time and celebrating the wins where they come.
Thats fair
If every state went full Gerrymander, Republicans have more trifectas by number of states, but Democrats gain more based on population and house seats.
Can’t even say that since the last 30 special elections show that the independents are **done ** with the pedo GOP & they are a much larger cohort than either the GOP or Democrats.
This is the reason why Florida won’t actually be redistricted.
Whats a trifecta? Is it House, Senate, Governorship?
So, the Republicans control more, due to winning more State Senates and Governorships but there are more, in raw number of reps, Democrats elected to the State Houses?
not quite. they’re saying Republicans would control more state Congresses and governorships, but Democrats would get more federal congressional seats.
but if Republicans control more states, they’d also control more federal Senate seats
whoopsie doodle
Get the fire hose, let’s paint the rest of the country blue too!
As long as we also get rid of conservative aspect of the Democrat party and make it one for the workers instead of big money interest, sure.
Conservatism is a curse
