680
Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College
(www.pewresearch.org)
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
680 points (98.6% liked)
politics
19148 readers
2766 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The issue with gerrymandering is that there is basically no way around it because all borders are arbitrary.
They could be less arbitrary and more mathematical. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mathematicians-who-want-to-save-democracy/
My understanding is that's just finding how "compact" a shape the districts are. There's still plenty of gerrymandering to be done in the positioning and the shapes themselves. Furthermore, why does that necessarily make the most sense?
Ie, splitting a city(with a rural area in a crescent shape around it) into two equal districts down the middle each with a sizable urban and rural population(say this gave 45% rural, 55% urban in each of these districts which is pretty reasonable), vs giving the city its own district and the rural area its own district. The first option may be more "compact" but in my opinion would lead to unfair under representation of the rural voters- same as if the demographics were swapped. Districts are supposed to "represent a community" not just be compact.
And urban/rural divide is just an easy example.
This is one of the reasons multi-member, proportional districts make sense. Unfortunately, I think that would take a constitutional amendment for the house of representatives.
~~Yeah I agree. The issue I have with that is just I don't think it would be very practical, especially for smaller states. The Kentucky legislature now only has 138 members, and as far as I know nobody knows any of them.~~
The main drawback of the scheme is that you're usually voting for a party rather than a person. So, not knowing who any of the people actually fits in pretty well into it.
Eh, if you had like a "top 3" system then you would be voting for a person. But I agree- voting solely being voting for a party is something I oppose(and why I prefer the US system to parliamentary systems)
Actually, seeing you're talking about the House elections, yeah I agree that would probably make sense, though it could over-double the size of the House. (And I don't know that I agree that's a good thing)
We've had GIS for decades. This is an easy algorithmic solve.
The simplest is the shortest-straight-line method. Draw district boundaries with the shortest straight line that divides the population appropriately.
Funnily enough, one of the biggest hurdles to algorithmic districting is the Voting Rights Act, which actually requires some level of gerrymandering to ensure representation of minorities. A algorithm may randomly split a community of color into 4 districts in violation of the VRA.
Heres my example from another comment: