Dennis Kucinich Loses Primary

[Sea Skimmer]

Yeah, math would be good.

I'd settle for mandating that the borders be either straight or follow county lines (so you can chop a county into halves or thirds or whatever, but you can't make jigsaw puzzles), or that there is some maximum allowed ratio of border length to internal area to force the districts to be more or less round-ish.

The problem with that idea is you'd have lots and lots of places in which an urban center endlessly dominates everyone around it. People don't like that.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, math would be good.

I'd settle for mandating that the borders be either straight or follow county lines (so you can chop a county into halves or thirds or whatever, but you can't make jigsaw puzzles), or that there is some maximum allowed ratio of border length to internal area to force the districts to be more or less round-ish.

The problem with that idea is you'd have lots and lots of places in which an urban center endlessly dominates everyone around it. People don't like that.

Yeah, and I expect urban centers don't like it when someone draws a big loop around their city with enough rural and exurban voters to just barely outnumber them, and get their votes diluted into irrelevance by having that loop chopped up into pie slices. I'm not at all convinced that letting urban centers have a bit more of a voice in American politics would be a bad thing.

More seriously, there'd still be nothing stopping you from chopping a city in half and sticking half in each district under the rule I have in mind. It's just these bizarre tortured jigsaws that need to go, because they serve no practical purpose except to create custom-tailored districts for individual politicians, at the expense of any interest the current majority doesn't care about.

[Gandalf]

I'm not at all convinced that letting urban centers have a bit more of a voice in American politics would be a bad thing.

Since those urban centres would have more people in them, wouldn't not giving them more power contradict the idea of "government of/for/by the people"?

[Lonestar]

Since those urban centres would have more people in them, wouldn't not giving them more power contradict the idea of "government of/for/by the people"?

Ever hear of the phrase "Tyranny of the Majority"?


Incidentally, one thing Virginia has right is the constiutional stipulation that districts be "Compact and uniform". You can see what they look like here. Now compare them to, say, Maryland's districts.


So, it is possible to have districts that aren't gerrymandered to hell.

[Gandalf]

Since those urban centres would have more people in them, wouldn't not giving them more power contradict the idea of "government of/for/by the people"?

Ever hear of the phrase "Tyranny of the Majority"?

Yes I have.

Thanks for asking.

[weemadando]

Functional bicameral parliaments are a mystery to some.

[Simon_Jester]

Since those urban centres would have more people in them, wouldn't not giving them more power contradict the idea of "government of/for/by the people"?

Ever hear of the phrase "Tyranny of the Majority"?

The limits on tyranny of the majority come from constitutional rights, checks and balances, and the ability of the minority to delay actions in Congress. They do not come from deliberately jiggering the election districts so as to give the minority the same number of Congressmen that the majority gets, or from watering down the majority so half of them might as well not bother casting a vote for all the good it does them. Something like one third of Americans live in the cities, about one third in the suburbs, and about one third far enough from the cities to be rural...ish.

Any reasonable balance of power should require those three groups to forge alliances among themselves- having the support of the nation's chicken farmers should not count for more than having the support of its taxi drivers, or vice versa.

Incidentally, one thing Virginia has right is the constiutional stipulation that districts be "Compact and uniform". You can see what they look like here. Now compare them to, say, Maryland's districts.

So, it is possible to have districts that aren't gerrymandered to hell.

Yes. In this, Virginia is definitely doing better than Maryland. Or a lot of other states.

Although looking at it, it wouldn't take that much to straighten out Maryland's situation. The main problem is the way the 2nd, 3rd, and 7th districts are jigsaw-puzzled so as to catch different rings of the Baltimore suburbs.

Functional bicameral parliaments are a mystery to some.

You Australian guys cheated and cunningly waited to write your constitution after seeing what we'd done wrong... heh.

Of course, we have no excuse for managing to screw up things the British got right. If only it had been politically possible to make drawing congressional districts the responsibility of a federal agency, like the Census...