Strike Down GOP Gerrymandering

Good points. While I am philosophically & practically opposed to gerrymandering, posts on this forum have expanded my understanding of some of the extremely complex issues wrapped up with any attempt to resolve or change it. I still support dumping gerrymandering, but I don't know exactly what we can use to replace it. But whatever it is, I want it to reflect the will of the voters living there to a higher degree of accuracy.

 

Originally districts were defined based preserving community interests, community interests being things such as transportation and economics and social aspects. Community interest is not easy to define in legal terms, but just about everyone knows the boundaries of their community and how districts should be setup.

For example, a farming community should not be combined with a heavily industrialized community. The two have different and non-overlapping economics, transportation and environmental concerns, and social structure.

Most people self segregate based on affluence, education, career field, single versus married with children, hobbies, etc. If the politicians were taken out of the process, and remove race and minority aspects, then in many cases local communities would come up with natural districts.

 

I think the gerrymandering question could be eliminated by eliminating districts altogether. People in a state could still vote based upon their particular interests. For example, a farmer in the northwest corner of the state and a farmer in the southeast corner of a state might both vote for the same pro-agriculture candidate. In a district system their votes might be outweighed by anti-farm interests.

Just a thought. There's nothing that says districts are required.

 

Total interests tend to be localized. The farmer in the NW corner and the farmer in the SE corner might both grow the same crop, but the one in the SE might be on the border with Mexico and have severe problems with illegals and drug smuggling, while the one in the NW might want the cheap illegal labor. Or the NW farmer is located next to the river that is the major source of water for the state, while the SE farmer is far downstream and the river has been sucked dry by the time it gets to him.

And accountability increases the smaller and more condensed a district. It makes a difference if your representative lives down the street from you versus living on the other side of the state (or in DC).

But the real problem is that so much power is concentrated in DC. If DC politicians had little control over people, then federal districting is a non issue. Districting and gerrymandering are issues only because people can get filthy rich through politics.

 

I've always like Hume's plan that he lays out in 'Idea of a perfect Commonwealth' (https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/oll-reader-70). It's a multi-tiered system in which the lowest level has only a thousand or so people, from which one will be chosen as a representative. This makes knowing your representative very easy. He'll see you at football games and around town.

I don't think it would work at the level of the general government (the numbers don't work), but at a state level it seems like it would work well to keep down corruption.

I would add to Hume's plan that no person may be chosen to be a representative more than once.

 

And you think the Democrats don't gerrymander in states that they control.

 

I don't think Frenchy is a citizen. Just someone filled with envy and jealousy for the States.

 

Are those options explained somewhere? I'm not sure what they mean.

Perhaps we could hold a one-time election where everyone votes for which nearby district they want to be in, draw lines based on that vote, and leave them that way until the end of time.

 

Let's not forget that the demarcation of voting districts have multiple usages. Not only for state- but national-voting. So, proportion of any given number of "districts" (with representation to either state or national legislatures) - to my mind - should be as equal as possible.

The geographical establishment of sub-state sectors should be a result of numbers of voters more or less the same number in each district. (Which could be made up by vote numbers of an agglomeration of "counties".)

Which means necessarily that when dividing the total state vote by numbers of voters, the cities will have preponderant weight. Some being alone an entire district.

It's a tricky question ...