Democracy.
Friday 11th of November 2022
Democracy.
Social Media Says
We're the testing ground for how Republicans want this country to be. Thank fuck we reelected our Democrat governor because if we hadn't, we'd be Mega fucked. Even more than we already are.
Wait till you see Illinois.
And if I remember correctly, the Supreme Court let the Republicans get away with it in some fashion. Or at least refused to allow impartial redistricting.
What You Really Think
In our modern age of technology, it should be possible to create a mathematical algorithm for optimally fair and even distribution of districts. The formula could be made public and peer reviewed to make sure it's completely non-biased. That way computers can generate district maps without any interference from Democrats or Republicans Why don't we make that a Federal law?
Yup, and people are stupid enough to look at gerrymandered maps and go SEE, SEE, LOOK AT THE COLORS.
I came here to say WI has famously bad gerrymanders, and then I checked the Gerrymandering Project to refresh my memory and was actually shocked with what I found. So, the Congressional map in WI is horribly gerrymandered, getting an F grade for partisan fairness because of the robust advantage it provides to Republicans. But the Assembly and Senate maps, by contrast, actually get A grades for partisan fairness, likely because Evers (Democratic governor) has veto power, which can be overruled by a supermajority, over maps. Anyway, I havent thought about Wisconsin maps in a while, so if someone can shed some light around the edges of what is available ]here]() for me, I would be grateful, because while it absolutely *feels* like gerrymandering maybe it isnt? One additional thought to tack on: if there was an edge case that broke whatever methodology is used to simulate potential maps to judge fairness, partisan advantage, etc., it would probably be Wisconsin, given how horrible their maps have been in the past. Any somewhat fair map would look *great* compared to historical maps there.
Gerrymandering was made illegal in Florida too, but since the legislature is controlled by the republicans, the maps were still gerrymandered and are being disputed in the court system. But since we had an election coming up, we had to use a map, so were using the gerrymandered one for now ***nulb.
In Missouri we passed legislation to eliminate this garbage. The result was the Republican super majority putting this back on the ballot with language disguising it as lobby reform to undo the will of the people. The trick worked and we're back where we started. ]]().
This. It's the only way Republicans can hold onto power. &x200B; Gerrymandering and the electoral college is the reason this country is fucked.
In TN they gerrymandered the shit out of the black and brown areas of Nashville. District 5 used to encompass Nashville and the surrounding areas. Now they took East and Southeast Nashville area (higher populations of POC) and went 80 plus miles south into Maury county and surrounding areas which are almost exclusively rural white areas. They diluted the POC vote but removing it from Nashville and mixing with rural white areas. Heres a map showing before and after: I am originally from TN all my friends and family are still there, my mom showed me this gerrymandering. Its part of why for the first time in her entire life (shes a boomer) that she voted Democrat and all Democrat. I also used to be a staunch Republican, they dont realize how many people they are turning away from the GOP with their blatant racism and taking rights from women. Im grateful for them finally showing who they truly are, it woke me up to the point that I realized the propaganda theyve been shoving down my throat and I am now a tax the rich, down with the patriarchy, CRT in schools now, stop systemic racism, and healthcare for all progressive. I also was the good little conservative and had 4 babies (because you know that was my job as a person with a uterus!) and guess what? Im now raising those kids to be loud and proud progressives! So suck it Republicans!!! Screw you and your propaganda, I will NEVER vote red again!
Im from Michigan too and Im enjoying the new district lines. But why not just draw the lines along county lines? Am I missing something or am I just a dumb-dumb?
And to be clear about this, it isn't because they just Gerrymandered the opposite way. Michigan's map is likely the least gerrymandered map in the nation currently. All this time I spent thinking we were turning into a red state, it turns out people have just been pushing down the scale and cheating.
If you want to help get rid of gerrymandering, check out the ]Anti-Corruption Act]() being pushed at local/state/federal levels. A few highlights are ranked choice voting, end gerrymandering, open primaries, end lobbyist bundling, and immediately disclose political money online.
They did some gerrymandering in our district last year to make it more conservative and we have the closest race in the nation right now, Colorado 3rd district is wild currently.
We passed a law that made it on the ballot through a citizens initiative petition some years back in Musdouri that would eliminate ate partisan gerrymandering. The Republicans in the state legislature, who have a rock solid supermajority due to gerrymandering passed a law over-ruling the initiative. Then came the lawsuits and the citizens lost. It seems if you get the right judge you can gerrymandering yourselves into minority rule regardless of the people's wishes. Therefore, we're fucked. Pass a federal law banning partisan gerrymandering and I guarantee the partisan Supreme Court will strike it down as unconstitutional. It seems that even if the Constitution says nothing about it, our system assures that in spite of problems, doing the wrong thing is right in many cases.
I'm convinced that the only thing that will end gerrymandering is if Democrats decide to engage in the same tactics. The Republican party is an outrage machine looking for spilled milk to cry over, and they aren't going to join us in standing against gerrymandering unless they see Democrats doing it too.
As someone who lives in Ohio I really fucking hate how Michigan is doing so much better politically than us.
The minority party gotta get to power somehow. Gerrymandering (both parties get to do this ofc but republicans probably love it the most), voter suppression, supermajority, misinformation, propaganda, etc., etc. Works a treat! With the (former?) 50/50 split in the senate, the democrats still represented like 30-40m more ppl. Makes perfect sense.
Gerrymandering should be eliminated at a federal level. Another thing Dems could do if elections were fair.
Wait, the USA should have fair and competitive districts? Next I bet you will say politicians should put their differences aside and work in the best interest of the people.
I was about to comment and say the same thing. Gerrymandering. In the Midwest and South it's really bad. When election periods are coming up and they are redrawing the district lines. I've watched them, every time they are redrawing, get rejected by judges as gerrymandering up to 10 times, going over the span of weeks. It's this bad and this manipulative in order to try and manipulate numbers to make it look one way when a majority looks another. Republicans do this constantly as they argue climate change and many other things, they skew numbers and information in a way to make it look like something it's not and people who aren't bright enough, can't see past it unfortunately. Here's a vid on gerrymandering, hope it's informative for anyone that needs it. ]]().
As someone from Latam, when I watched a video about gerrymandering and what it was I was so impressed by how things like that exist. That's basically manipulation of population to arrange the votes and I can't comprehend how that hasn't been removed. I understand every state having a weight on the overall voting due to CA, NY, FL and TX having a large population but arranging the counties as you please is just outrageous.
Correct. A perfect representation of how you can manipulate districts to try and increase a state's republican support.
I hear you about gerrymandering but I cant tell what would make this map fairer. Yes, the districts have weird shapes, but its not always clear why, or even what might motivate weird shapes. Is there a River? A railroad track? A major road? If the notional goal is roughly equal population in each district, the shapes may be weird to accommodate a bunch of townhouses or apartments, etc. Not all lands areas in these maps is necessarily the same population density. Im definitely not saying gerrymandering isnt a problem. Im just saying that at least to me, its not always obvious why a district has the shape it does. Maybe someone should make a game, Gerrymandered or No? And just show the distinct shape.
Someone smarter than me should write an AI to create the districts in a way that gives the Republican party the biggest advantage and see how it compares to the current district maps.
That is only going to work, for so long. Eventually, it will collapse, they can't beat time and when it does finally fall away, they won't know how to become reasonable "conservatives" as they kind of were just around/before Nixon's time (He made the party shift HARD to the lunacy side of the fence.) Meaning, in another 20 years, it's going to be all blue, everywhere. Which just means people will need to be even engaged with politics to keep things from getting super fucked up.
Don't forget voting restrictions as well. If young, educated voters don't vote for them, simply make it illegal for those people to vote.
Wisconsin really tanked when walker came around. It was pre-trump but just as bad in terms of nutjobs believing absolute bullshit from walker while he simultaneously bled the state for his cronies. There were fanatical people everywhere who thought he was the second coming of Jesus. Wisconsin had always been a very neighborly state and after that it became extremely politically hostile. It was very sad to watch.
Wisconsin doesn't have state-wide referendums. edit: Correction, we do, but only the legislature can put them there, so kinda useless.
Both parties gerrymander. Historically, Dems use it to balance out districts, and Republicans use it to rig districts. This isn't an opinion - most court cases involving gerrymandering have been brought against the Republicans. Yes, Dems do it, too. But generally speaking, the Republicans use it to cheat. There used to be independent groups who did redistricting, and there still are in many Democratic states - i.e. Michigan - and when there are, results go mostly blue, although not always. But Republicans have the judicial system in states where Republicans do the redistricting, so they get to keep swinging the states to the right which allows them to keep redistricting, etc. Dems would have to displace the Republican legislature to fix the problem. And it's rigged to stop it. Plus, we can no longer expect the SCOTUS to help. Probably the only thing we can do to fix it would be to create a federal oversight redistricting process using completely independent committees for every state and district in the country, but I think it's obvious how unlikely that is, just from sheer complexity alone. Other than that, the voters have to turn blue. That's pretty much it.
That was SUPPOSED to be balanced by the number of seats in the House of Representatives. 2 Senators per state and then a number of representatives proportional to the population to make it "fair". But in BOTH cases, it's actually giving smaller states more power than larger ones. The failsafe is causing a bigger failure to occur. California gets 52 reps to divide among ~39M people. That's about 750,000 people per representative. Compare that to Wyoming, who has 1 rep for the whole state population of ~579k. This means that a person in Wyoming (the least populous state) has around 20% POWER in the house - which, again is supposed to favor LARGER populations. Then look at the senate. Each senator represents ~290k people in Wyoming and ~20M people in California. So the population of Wyoming has around 60x more power in the senate vs California. Combine that power imbalance with gerrymandering and you've got yourself a hell of a problem. It's unfortunately not a straight democracy, rather a Constitutional Republic. In some cases we directly elect our leaders but in others we "allow" people to do it for us (like with the electoral college for the president). It's all a big clusterfuck right now. There are lots of small ways we can start making things better (like getting rid of gerrymandering or increasing the max number of Reps in the House so that the power balance shifts back to population the way it was intended to be) but the GOP are going to fight it every step of the way. It's honestly really disheartening. I'm from Wisconsin and I'm really considering moving to MN because of all of this nonsense. Unfortunately, I think a lot of other people feel that way too and I'm afraid that lowering the population of people willing to fight for change will just make things worse. Which is maybe what the GOP wants. I really have no idea. I can't believe Ron Johnson got elected as a senator again and I can't believe how many reps we had go to GOP. It's just crazy. I live in Eau Claire and it's like my vote (and nearly everyone else in the city) was entirely silenced by gerrymandering for the house races. It's really disheartening.
No the 31 people are really happy because their vote means more than the blue. The whole point of this tweet is that blue got way more votes, but red won.
It seems to be the latter fairly clearly: "Dems won, but have fewer seats. That seems unfair", to paraphrase the tweet. Not really sure why almost the entire comment section seems to think this person is saying "why don't the Dems have *even fewer seats*", lmao.
It's the map that's throwing everyone off; the gerrymandering point can weirdly be made more effectively without showing the districts drawn. As a Wisconsinite, I can assure you there aren't a ton of people in the red. The point is simply that the GOP has a near supermajority while the democrats get over 50% of the vote.
And census-defined metro areas. Put suburbs together instead of lumping them with a bit of the city and a ton of the countryside.
social@worldnewsinpictures.com
It's most egregious in the west, where Eau Claire (a city of about 70k, that blue blip on the left side) is its own district while the rest of the county is split up to mitigate blue votes. They enclave all the voters in the same tiny blip districts.
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