Posted on 12/06/2016 2:20:24 AM PST by SMGFan
The U.S. Supreme Court returns Monday to the issue of race in politics when it hears claims that North Carolina and Virginia packed African-Americans into a small number of voting districts to limit their statewide electoral power. Both cases present challenges to new maps drawn after the 2010 census. In North Carolina the issue is the boundaries for its congressional districts, while in Virginia state legislative districts are contested.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Split decision.
On the other hand libtards have driven the judicary to legislate minority-majority districts, WTH do they want?
If the court declares it racist...what will happen to all the districts that were gerrymandered to guarantee a black representative?
It’s another judicial over-reach into States rights. The Feds need to be brought to heel.
In the past, concentrating black votes so as to ensure that there would be black elected representatives, was DEMANDED by the “Civil Rights” crowd.
I long for a day when the Federal courts are not interfering with my state government.
My vote in Virginia’s 4th district is now worthless for my congressional choice. Goodbye Mr. Forbes. I have been disenfranchised.
I hate gerrymandering. Divide the state evenly with a grid superimposed by computer to create equal size geographical districts and let the numbers fall where they may.
Let's use people of Irish descent for the sake of this discussion. And let's say we're dealing with a state that has ten Congressional districts. If you have a state where this group represents 30% of the population and you're trying to gerrymander the Congressional districts in such a way that they are "fairly represented" in Congress, you could approach it from two extreme positions:
1. Pack them all into three districts so they will control three of the ten districts.
2. Draw the districts so they are spread them evenly, ensuring that they are 30% of the voters in all ten districts.
If you want to guarantee Irish representation, you do #1. If you want to guarantee a voice of the voters across the state that is proportional to their population, you do #2.
Obviously, gerrymandering will almost always end up with something in between #1 and #2. But it's important to understand this because it goes right to the heart of racial and ethnic politics in Congress. Does it do black people, for example, any good to have a bunch of permanent "black districts" that have become completely detached from the national political discussion?
It has to be done by numbers because of the equal representation thingy and the reason the census is taken in the first place. As long as they are not drawn like Corrine Brown’s original district snaking all over the place from Jacksonville to Orlando at some places only as wide as a street, I’m OK with it. The demographics will change.
The dems did just this in Florida awhile back so as to insure a black would get a house seat.
Guess you can judge shop for any reason and find some worthless liberal bought judge.
I’d like to see the states divided into Congressional districts using some sort of algorithm that would delineate districts having equal populations, but in such a way as to minimize the total length of district boundaries. Then redraw the boundaries as soon as possible after each census.
This should be required by the individual states, not by the Federal government, so it will never happen.
Oh please. I’m south of Cleveland, west of the Cuyahoga River. A few of these small towns were sacrificed to a district that connected Cleveland’s black neighborhoods with Akron’s black neighborhoods. It does look like a deal to assure a black HOR representative with insane district lines that put everyday gerrymandering to shame.
I have long been an advo ate of districts determined by mathematical clusters. However, the discussion over the electoral college has caused me to rethink this. I don’t want to be part of a nation ruled by Califoria and NY. That was a major part of the logic of the electoral college. Find a way to balance a presidential election so all states have an important say.
I imagine I would have trouble always being a minority voice within a CD for the same reason. Always shut out from access. We need some similar model to insure representation within CDs. I don’t lile long, meandering CDs designed to give minorities a clear chance to win a CD. I would not object, though, to precincts within CDs sending electors to a CD convention to select a CD candidate for their party. Nor would I object to minority precincts being given 2 electors instead of one.
Congressional districts are based on areas of equal population, not equal geographic area.
However, I agree with you in concept. I think starting with a grid divided in to equal geographic area, then shifting the horizontal and vertical lines as needed to equalize the population among the “quadrilaterals” would be a good way to approach it.
Longest dimension of the district cannot be greater than five times the shortest dimension, for instance? (or some reasonable number that would prevent snake-shaped districts)
That would go a long towards preventing gerrymandering.
I wonder if we could go a long way toward fixing this problem -- or at least diminishing it -- by simply amending the Constitution to allow for many more House districts. There's probably less of an incentive to gerrymander districts when you have 2,000 seats in a governing body compared to 435.
I know. I’ve lived in Virginia my entire life. Thirty years ago it was “racist” to have the states legislative districts divided so that blacks could not get elected. Now, it’s “racist” to cluster blacks together in majority black districts.
However, in Virginia at least, this is not about race at all. It is about the democrats trying to gain more seats in the General Assembly. Sufficient numbers of northern liberals have relocated to Virginia that a “regerrymandering” would result in the dems gaining a seat or two in the House of Delegates and at least one in the state senate.
It’s not about fairness, it’s about tilting the landscape in their favor.
I think the district shapes would tend toward equal dimensions in different directions, since a square has the shortest perimeter of any rectangle of equal area.
The districts wouldn’t be square, of course, or even rectangular. It shouldn’t be too hard to make polygons to satisfy the conditions, though.
The problem would be that state legislators would want to make all sorts of exceptions, for all sorts of self-serving reasons, and then you have gerrymandering still.
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