Unfortunately, excess incumbency is NOT JUST a voter problem. It is caused by LOCAL redistricting that strongly favors incumbency, and rewards longevity with increasingly friendly wards and precincts.
The only cure for that is to outlaw “Gerrymandering” - the creation of highly distorted, meandering districts that accumulate tiny pockets of support within a sea of opposition. The only mechanism I thought of would be to set a legal maximum ratio of district boundary to district area. Mathematically, the minimum would be 2xPi - about 6.284 - for an almost perfectly circular district. I don’t know what the maximum should be, but my own district is probably in triple digits.
MainFrame65 wrote:
Unfortunately, excess incumbency is NOT JUST a voter problem. It is caused by LOCAL redistricting that strongly favors incumbency, and rewards longevity with increasingly friendly wards and precincts.
I agree with you that gerrymandering is a problem. But I don’t buy that this isn’t just another problem the voters need to fix. Voters can fix that too.
Who draws the gerrymandered districts? And how do they get the authority to do that? Are they perhaps elected?
| From the desk of cc2k: |