Can someone please explain to me the logic behind allowing states to redistribute their districts every few years? The problem isn’t that the GOP redistricts in a way to oppress black voters or that the Dems redistrict to support them, it’s that we allow these shenanigans at all. Why are we allowed to have these battles in the first place? There has to be a better solution.
There is definitely a better way. With proportional representation, districts won’t matter. Get 10% of the votes, you get 10% of the seats. Added bonus would be that every opinion gets represented, and not just the two most common ones.
I mean, populations change. And the number of seats allocated to an area in a representative democracy needs to change with that.
Its just that every state should have a third party, non-partisan commission drawing those districts with ranked choice voting nationwide to actually better represent the will of the people vs letting legislators in their own state design and vote on their own constituents. We should be voting for them, not the other way around.
Context: US political polarization is too severe to be contained. It’s too severe for non-partisan organizations and institutions to truly exist. These aren’t political differences competing in the marketplace of ideas. It’s opposing cultures that are more invested in their side winning than in the system that keeps all of this mostly non-violent (democracy).
In this case: Populations shift, maps have to be periodically redrawn by people. Those people will wield political power whether they want to or not, so controlling who gets that power and what they do with it is a natural incentive.
Many countries do these maps in a mostly non-partisan way, but that is only possible when the majority of people believe the system of democracy to be more important than any one (potentially bad) outcome. That is simply not the case in the US. The power to redraw maps must exist and at the level of political polarization that exists in the US, that power will ultimately be corrupted for partisan ends.
They do it in a way where there are much smaller districts. Then the realities of slightly skewed districts offset on the balance… And you also have multiple parties.
The parties in the US draw them to pre-decide outcomes
Can someone please explain to me the logic behind allowing states to redistribute their districts every few years? The problem isn’t that the GOP redistricts in a way to oppress black voters or that the Dems redistrict to support them, it’s that we allow these shenanigans at all. Why are we allowed to have these battles in the first place? There has to be a better solution.
There is definitely a better way. With proportional representation, districts won’t matter. Get 10% of the votes, you get 10% of the seats. Added bonus would be that every opinion gets represented, and not just the two most common ones.
I mean, populations change. And the number of seats allocated to an area in a representative democracy needs to change with that.
Its just that every state should have a third party, non-partisan commission drawing those districts with ranked choice voting nationwide to actually better represent the will of the people vs letting legislators in their own state design and vote on their own constituents. We should be voting for them, not the other way around.
Who is we? Plenty of people support this.
Context: US political polarization is too severe to be contained. It’s too severe for non-partisan organizations and institutions to truly exist. These aren’t political differences competing in the marketplace of ideas. It’s opposing cultures that are more invested in their side winning than in the system that keeps all of this mostly non-violent (democracy).
In this case: Populations shift, maps have to be periodically redrawn by people. Those people will wield political power whether they want to or not, so controlling who gets that power and what they do with it is a natural incentive.
Many countries do these maps in a mostly non-partisan way, but that is only possible when the majority of people believe the system of democracy to be more important than any one (potentially bad) outcome. That is simply not the case in the US. The power to redraw maps must exist and at the level of political polarization that exists in the US, that power will ultimately be corrupted for partisan ends.
They do it in a way where there are much smaller districts. Then the realities of slightly skewed districts offset on the balance… And you also have multiple parties.
The parties in the US draw them to pre-decide outcomes