Nameless Voice on 27/6/2021 at 18:51
One thing that would hugely improve the fairness and reduce the impact of gerrymandering would be to merge many of the electoral districts, changing them from single-seaters to larger districts which elect multiple seats.
That would require repealing (
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c) the law which mandates all constituencies are single-seaters (which, according to Wikipedia, was hilariously implemented under the justification that it would protect the voting rights of African Americans. That... didn't go well.)
Cipheron on 1/7/2021 at 18:28
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
One thing that would hugely improve the fairness and reduce the impact of gerrymandering would be to merge many of the electoral districts, changing them from single-seaters to larger districts which elect multiple seats.
That would require repealing (
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c) the law which mandates all constituencies are single-seaters (which, according to Wikipedia, was hilariously implemented under the justification that it would protect the voting rights of African Americans. That... didn't go well.)
Actually, you wouldn't have to repeal that law at all. You can work around how that's worded.
The law only says that states must create a number of districts equal to their congressional quota, and that only one person can be elected per district, and must be from the district.
This doesn't exclude the concept of overlapping districts, because nowhere does it actually stipulate that districts MUST be non-overlapping and one person can't be a resident of multiple districts. Nor does it specify what the process of election is, so you can narrowly-define that as just being the person selected as the representative of the district.
So a state could just pass a law that all their districts are the same size as the state, so that all state residents are eligible to run in any seat, then the rest of the process is basically up to the state law about how they want to decide.
Starker on 2/7/2021 at 04:53
Bill Cosby apparently got his conviction overturned by the state supreme court:
Cipheron on 2/7/2021 at 05:20
Quote Posted by Starker
Bill Cosby apparently got his conviction overturned by the state supreme court:
BTW I need to point out that while this is a TRUE story, that's actually a news parody site.
The joke is of course that the lawyers are apparently scared of being drugged and raped by Cosby.
EDIT: in other real news that I found out from the same parody site, the much-loved Donald Rumsfeld has passed into the great beyond.
Tributes are flowing in from worldwide, and Elton John is dusting off Candle in the Wind for the tribute show /s.
Nicker on 2/7/2021 at 21:19
Or simply have a National Election for President. Every vote in the whole country counts and the Feds run the process.
demagogue on 2/7/2021 at 23:17
Not a bad idea itself, but the core of the problem is more about state officials & representatives; gerrymandering biases towards the GOP, and if there's enough bias so they get a lot more power than the actual public support would warrant, then they'll push changes way out of sync with the public from the bottom up, including high level things like nutcase Supreme Ct. justices. So that solution doesn't get at that deeper problem.
The other fundamental issue is that you'd have to change the constitution, and that's also a process run through the gerrymandered state-level system. So there's a chicken-egg problem there too.
Nicker on 3/7/2021 at 03:38
If it wasn't for those those meddling details my plan would have worked.
Cipheron on 3/7/2021 at 18:44
Quote Posted by Nicker
Or simply have a National Election for President. Every vote in the whole country counts and the Feds run the process.
Sorry but that fixes a different problem.
State-level gerrymandering doesn't really affect the presidential election: the EC votes are just allocated at the end based on whichever candidate got the most votes in the entire state. So where the districts are actually drawn doesn't affect that.
Gerrymandering is about how they rig the Congress and state legislatures. I'd argue that this is a deeper problem than worrying about the EC issue with presidential elections.
Dia on 9/7/2021 at 13:17
That gave me a migraine, Nicker.
