🎵how insane can you go?🎶

Ah, the minority locator.

That first one is no longer like that, but according to Wikipedia was done by the Democrats.

It’s a complex issue as well, because it’s not always done for nefarious reasons. If say 20% of a city is black, they might bundle them up so that they end up with one black guy and four white guys running the city, rather than the 5 white guys that would come from a “fairer” distribution.

But it’s all just window dressing on the fact that first past the post systems aren’t fit for purpose. If I vote for something, I want that counted at all levels up to the national level, not just thrown away because my particular group of streets doesn’t like it.

While I do agree, the difficulty is plausible deniability. If you want people with something in common to have a voice, perhaps a suburban ring around an urban core is a fair choice that looks like one of these.

I’m sure it’s not, but that could happen and whatever rule should allow that possibility. This is why it’s not easy to set a clear rule or a clear determination. Now it’s case by case and up to the judicial branch.

Perhaps setting a speed limit would go a long way - you can only redistrict on certain large changes such as the census every ten years and it can’t go into effect without judicial review, without all the appeals being exhausted. In this case Texas doesnt seem to have a legitimate reason to redistrict, and was it Georgia last year trying to argue that they had to use the new map for an election despite it being likely illegal

We need more 1 and 3, and less 2 4 5.

If the enemy has nukes, don’t unilaterally disarm. Same here.

Now we just need a way to do that

I have some ideas.

that isn’t vigilante violence.

Oh. Nevermind…

In order to do that, we need a rigorous definition of gerrymandering that isn’t just “I know it when I see it.” Even if we try to adopt some sort of strict mathematical criteria and algorithm for redistricting (such as optimizing for “compactness” using a Voronoi algorithm), there would always still be some amount of arbitrary human input that could be gamed (such as the location of seeds, in this example). Even if we went so far as to make a rule that everything must be randomized (which would possibly be bad for things like continuity of representation, by the way), we could still end up with people trying to influence the outcome by re-rolling the dice until they got a result they liked.

It’s a hard (in both the computational sense and political sense) problem to solve.

Supposedly there was a bill a few years ago to ban it that narrowly failed.

At this point maybe the best bet would be for blue states to enter the gerrymandering arms race on a conditional basis; do it as blatantly as it’s being done on the other side, with some explicit clause that it will end when fair representation is implemented nationwide.

Gerrymandering is a crime. We just don’t consider what’s going on to be legally gerrymandering for some bullshit fuck ass reason. There’s only been a few cases of gerrymandering being caught in a legal sense. It is largely ignored.

edit: a bit wrong here but whaddya know it’s because our laws are not transparent

just one of the many reasons you see such consistent low turnouts in american elections

The idea was that you get direct representation - your representative should be focused on your issues and the issues plaguing people in your district. But it breaks down today because politicians in the US just vote with their party.

i did a big ol post here about this

generally what you’re talking about is proportional representation… systems like this tend to lead to a government comprised of a lot of minor parties, which sounds great!

but it has its down sides (and i’m not saying 2 party is much better, but it’s useful to be aware of the situations it creates): when there are a lot of minor parties with no clear “above 50%” majority, they have to form a coalition government and that can be extremely fragile

you can’t hold parties to election promises, because you just don’t know what they’re going to have to give up to form a coalition, and even if they do end up forming a coalition you really don’t know how stable that coalition is going to be!

i guess in the US there’s gridlock anyway, so what the hell right? may as well at least have gridlock with parties blocking legislation based on things you believe in… buuuuuuut that’s probably a bad example: first past the post is far more to blame in that case than proportional vs representative democracy

(fptp leads to extremism, ranked choice etc leads to moderation because people’s 2nd, 3rd, etc choice matters: you want to be likeable not just to your “base” but to everyone, because everyone’s vote has a chance of flowing through to you even if you’re not their first choice… if people hate you, you’re not going to get those preference votes when candidates get eliminated)

Proportional representation is the way. X% of the vote means X% of seats, no shenanigans

The secret is that you need proportional elections within each district. What also implies that they should be bigger…

Or, in other words, just copy Switzerland and you’ll be fine.

(Personally, I’m divided. The largest scale your election is, the most voice you give to fringe distributed groups. I can’t decide if this is good or bad.)

The point of representatives is that they each represent a small portion of the population. If you remove districts, then who are house members representing?

Because you never were a democracy

I read this in a Russian accent.

What your describing is called a Republic. There are several benefits to such a model.

The most relevant was well summarized in MIB as “a person is smart, people are stupid”. A simple direct democracy is great until you are relying on an uninformed population to make a time-critical decision that requires expertise. If we instead elect people who are then expected to use tax dollars to consult experts, and then represent our interests by voting accordingly, we can theoretically avoid problems (such as the tragedy of the commons).

The downside happens when the representative takes advantage of the public’s ignorance, fosters it, and wields it for personal/oligarchic gain. Ideally the people are just smart enough to see that happening and vote them out before it becomes a systemic issue…

Area based voting is a necessity for electing a local representative. But it shouldn’t apply for national elections, on that I agree. The US is the only country I know of that applies area based voting in national elections.

I don’t think tiered representation is bad if 1: every person’s vote is equal regardless of zip code 2: you have instant recall and can just have a representative replaced if they vote against their constituency wishes.

I mean, you could go the other way. Presidencies are bad on their face and the chief executive should be promoted from the party with a legislative majority (ie, Parliamentary system).

Then go after single representative districts and the obscenely high constituent to representative ratios.

Your vote for president or prime minister

The whole reason a prime minister is different from a president is that they’re not elected by direct votes. They’re the leader of the party with the most representatives (more or less).

the gop loves to use the 4th one, which always fucks up dem voters, and thats where you see voter turnout problems. plus they also suppress votes in the areas they control which has significant D voters too.

That is the Westminster system. It’s fine in that the head of the executive only has power so long as they have the confidence of the elected members. If the elected members lose confidence then the government falls. The government is the house, so your vote does directly influence the government on either the government or opposition side. Don’t get too jealous of the American system - it’s a bloody mess in its own right.

Or even better, the position of president or prime minister should have little power.

Also Japan, India, Malaysia.

Even the UK has covert influence from politics on district drawing tho officially its “independent commission”.

You jest, but it was named after a person:

The term “gerrymander” originated in 1812 from the redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry. The newly shaped districts, particularly one in Essex County, were said to resemble a mythological salamander. Federalist party members, critical of the practice, coined the term “Gerry-mander” (later shortened to gerrymander) by combining Gerry’s name with “salamander”

The purpose is to have the people of smaller areas represented by an individualized Congress member. So the people in say the backwoods of California, aren’t being spoken for by all big city people from LA/San Fran etc. When something is going on in your district, you are supposed to have someone who is empathetic to your cause and familiar to it. Then they bring that to the house and make the argument for you.

Aka, when someone brings up a federal code change proposition that will bankrupt the main source of jobs in your town, your legislature is supposed to go to bat, not fall in line and let your town die. 200 jobs being lost doesn’t sound like much to a large city, but in a town of 2,000 people that’s game over

This will lead to the majority of the state getting full say and suppressing minority views. This can be political, racial, etc.

California has a large Republican population. If it goes state wide they get zero voice as the full state will go blue.

These days I’m kinda fine with that, but in principle this is wrong. The same suppression logic can be spread to ethnic groups, etc.

Because the concerns of farmers in California’s central valley are different from the people in Hollywood.

And Alpha Phoenix demonstrating how to produce rigged boundaries that look natural and not suspicious:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq-Y7crQo44

I love that video. One awesome solution he brings up is letting math draw the district lines, specifically the shortest-split line method. There’s also an updated version of the method called Impartial Automatic Redistricting, that uses an approach similar to SSLM, but will only make cuts along the boundaries of census blocks (the smallest geographic unit used by the Census Bureau) to avoid cutting towns/neighborhoods in half, although it can create some odd results sometimes.

However, I think both of these would currently be illegal in the US under the Voting Rights Act for not taking minority representation into account. That is one downside to these methods, even though they’re probably still an upgrade compared to the heavily-gerrymandered system in the US. So in the US’s current system, the algorithms would have to be updated to somehow take that into account.

There are also a few other neat district drawing rules on Wikipedia that he didn’t cover which are worth a read.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/31/politics/gerrymandering-texas-republicans-analysis

Texas Republicans are apparently going big with their brazen attempt to redraw the state’s congressional maps in the middle of the decade, outside of the normal redistricting process.

A draft map released Wednesday would add three new districts that would have voted for President Donald Trump in 2024. That would mean 79% of the state’s districts (30 out of 38) would have backed the president compared to his 56% share of the vote in the state.

It would also put two House Democrats who won Trump districts in significantly more danger in 2026.

The proposed map is intended to help the GOP hold on to the House — where they have a historically narrow majority and history suggests Democrats are very likely to pick up seats — in the midterm elections. The map could help Republicans flip five seats, significantly raising the bar for a Democratic takeover of the chamber.

All of which has set off a predictable round of whataboutism on the right. Yes, Texas Republicans are going for the bare knuckles on this one. But what about all those egregious Democratic gerrymanders? Both sides play this game, right?

Yes, both sides gerrymander. But that doesn’t mean they are equal-opportunity offenders.

** Republicans pretty clearly benefit more from gerrymandering, and there’s an increasingly strong case to be made that they go further in using the tools available to them. ** Gambits like what Texas is doing are rare, and it’s been Republicans who have led the charge.

But this is the subject of plenty of debate, and there’s a school of thought that gerrymandering has become effectively a wash.

Some analysts point to recent election results that show the percentage of House seats each side wins these days more or less matches their share of the nationwide popular vote for the House.

Republicans, for example, won about 51.3% of the two-party vote in 2024. And 51.3% of House districts is about 223 seats. They won 220 seats.

In fact, these numbers have tracked closely over the last four elections. While there was just a three-seat gap in 2024, it was only two seats in each of the previous three elections. Neither side is winning a significantly disproportionate number of seats.

But just because the seat totals so closely mirror the overall vote shares doesn’t necessarily mean gerrymandering didn’t have an impact – or that one side or the other didn’t go to more extremes to try and secure the seats they won.

The ways in which populations are distributed matters greatly, for instance – particularly if one side’s voters are a lot more concentrated. Just because a state is competitive doesn’t mean that a “fair” map would be a 50-50 one. Generally speaking, “fair” districts are thought to group people with similar interests or backgrounds, and respect existing geographic boundaries. Sometimes in order to get that 50-50 split or even a narrow advantage for your side, you have to get pretty creative.

In addition, gerrymandering can be a risky game. A really extreme gerrymander could backfire if your effort to create as many favorable districts as possible spreads your voters too thin and you wind up losing seats. (Some have wagered this could happen to Republicans in Texas, particularly if the GOP can’t replicate Trump’s big 2024 gains with Hispanic voters.)

If the results of that gerrymander weren’t as lopsided as envisioned, does it really mean it wasn’t an extreme gerrymander?

This reinforces why you can’t just look at seat totals and vote shares. You really need to look at individual maps and how aggressively they’re drawn. This is, of course, a somewhat subjective exercise that depends on what factors you look at. But some experts have attempted to do that.

The Gerrymandering Project at Princeton University, which evaluates the maps holistically, gives a “D” or an “F” rating to slight majorities of maps drawn by Republicans and those drawn by Democrats.

PlanScore, spearheaded by well-known academics, finds that more maps have a bias toward Republicans than Democrats across a number of metrics.

These PlanScore numbers, too, come with caveats.

One is that, in about half of states, the map-drawing process wasn’t fully controlled by one party or another – either because the state has split legislative control, or because courts or redistricting commissions do it. So even if more maps favor Republicans, it’s not just because they drew them that way.

The second is that a big reason more maps appear to have a GOP bias is that Republicans simply get more opportunities to gerrymander. They have full control of more states because they hold the “trifecta” of the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the state legislature. In the most recent round of post-Census redistricting, Republicans controlled the drawing of 177 districts (estimates on this vary slightly), compared to just 49 for Democrats, according to a 2022 report from the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.

(Part of the reason Republicans have more control is their superior standing in state governments and the fact that blue states have been more likely to outsource this process to redistricting commissions.)

The Brennan Center has also noted that Republicans appear to benefit from state courts having a more laissez-faire approach to partisan gerrymandering.

All told, the center found 11 Republican-drawn maps that had extreme partisan bias, compared to four drawn by Democrats, ahead of the 2024 elections.

Which brings us to the latest developments. They certainly reinforce the idea that Republicans are more ruthless about using this power.

The reason Texas is so controversial isn’t just that Republicans are drawing such a slanted map; it’s mostly when they have chosen to do it – in the middle of the decade, outside the normal post-Census redistricting process.

Maps are sometimes redrawn after that post-Census period, but usually it’s because courts force states to do so. When state legislatures have done this of their own volition, it’s been Republicans in charge.

Depending on how you slice it, we’ve seen three or four modern attempts like this at mid-decade redistricting.

The GOP did this in Texas and Colorado in 2003 (though the Colorado map was struck down) and in Georgia in 2005. They also redrew the maps in North Carolina in 2023 after a newly conservative-leaning state Supreme Court reversed an earlier decision and opened the door to partisan gerrymandering.

State legislative expert Tim Storey told the Washington Post back in 2003 that the strategy appeared unprecedented at the time.

And while Democrats are talking about a tit-for-tat in which they would do the same thing in states like California and New York, that would be a response to the GOP’s own gambit. Not to mention, Democrats would also face major legal and political hurdles in these states to make that a reality.

Indeed, Republicans seem to be leaning in on a mid-decade redistricting arms race, knowing they have superior capabilities and can take things further — just like they have before. _

and the current party using the 4th one the most.

Which is it?

smh my head

yes.

Not necessarily of two-party systems or FPTP, I think this is a property of single-member districts in general. If you have multi-member districts (say 4 or 5 representatives per district) this becomes much less effective. Statewide PR solves this by removing districts, which for most people isn’t ideal.

Well, it’s a complicated issue. Let’s assume there’s a state where all but an area of 10 blocks votes for candidate X. If that area happens to be split between several cities, the people living there are SOL as their vote is basically useless. Gerrymandering allows them to have a say in what goes on. But yes, as with everything, corruption ruins it.