Posted on 09/27/2017 1:35:23 PM PDT by fwdude
My high school biology teacher, Dudley Davis, used to like to remind us all that "figures can't lie, but liars can figure." How right he was, especially when politics is somehow involved in the equation, as it is every time districts lines are redrawn for seats in Congress and state legislatures.
The Democrats have suddenly decided this is a problem – and have come up will all kinds of mathematical analyses and formulas to back their assertion up.
(Excerpt) Read more at usnews.com ...
The map of my congressional district is fairly simple:
The entire state of Montana.
The intent of Gerrymandering is not just to concentrate preferred groups in one district, but also to dilute other less preferred areas of conservative bent.
“Gerrymandering” is what the side you are opposed to does :-)
We really need districts designed by algorithm, required to be as compact as possible regardless of who it hurt or helps.
We need a lot more Representatives ... 435 people representing almost 325M is ridiculous. 4350 would be a far better number. Good luck to the uniparty stranglehold if they’d choose to buy that many seats :-).
Of course, should the House grow, the exotic salaries and pensions Representatives get wouldn’t be part of the equation anymore. I’d be nice and grandfather in existing members ... they’d more than likely leave when they see their power diluted by 1000.
Moreover, you’d have to have convictions to work in a madhouse like that (and it was designed to be that way) for any appreciable period of time.
Do that and the whole Dem/Repub paradigm falls apart. That would make the Senate easier to fix.
Like AZ. We have a committee of 5. 2 ‘R’s”, 2 ‘D’s’ and a supposed Independent. The ‘I’ on the committee turned out to be a Dem, who met with the other two Dems in secret, drew up a map and voted on it (all illegal activity ). This is the map we are stuck with until 2020. Jan Brewer appointed the ‘Independent’ and after the gerrymandered map came out, tried to sue to stop it. You guessed it, a Leftist judge implemented it anyway. The first year after the new map came out, we had 5’D’s’ in Congress and 4 ‘R’s’.......in a state with two (ostensibly) Republican Senators, a Republican Governor, AG, Sec of State, etc. I sure hope that the redistricting in 2020 is a lot fairer!
This is the way it works: Democrats win, Democrats get to draw the districts. Republicans win, Democrats get to draw the districts.
Due to the Voting Rights Act, and some mixed Supreme Court decisions, it will be very hard to get rid of special minority districts. Also the idea that there is a perfect mathematical approach to creating districts is fantasy, it can and will always be biased.
Both sides love to gerrymander, and love to complain about the other side doing it, hoping nobody will pay attention to what they’re doing. It’s part of why the system is irretrievably broken and cannot be fixed as long as parties exist. Parties will always be loyal to themselves first.
The only real way to do it would be to codify all the significant demographic data into random variables in the data being fed into the program so nobody working the program (and therefore the program itself) has no idea if X123 is Democrats or Norwegians. Then it clusters the variables together into districts as well as possible, and nobody is allowed to reverse the data. And nobody will allow that, because both sides have a vested interest in things being crooked, fair is bad for both of them.
The difference being, when Democrats in power do it, Republicans try to win elections the best they can by persuasion and meaningful debate with an eye to redraw these according to their interests. When Republicans in power do it, Democrats find a sympathetic, unelected judge to invalidate what the voters indirectly mandated.
It’s part of why the system is irretrievably broken and cannot be fixed as long as parties exist. Parties will always be loyal to themselves first.
The only thing that is "broken" is the part about judges usurping power unconstitutionally.
Both sides are very good at finding sympathetic judges. What’s broken is that we let the parties divide the country however they see fit. Even fair judges can’t make any headway on it because both sides WANT gerrymandering, they want incumbents protected, they want the 95% return rate we have, and they hate actually contested elections.
Yeah, the quest to de-politicize the shape of districts politicized the judiciary. I remember respecting the judicial branch when I was a kid.
Gerrymandering happens in many states..CT-1 (Hartford area) is shaped like a backwards C. CT-2 is eastern CT (if Middletown - home of Leftleyan University - was in CT-1, CT-2 would be R), CT-3 is New Illegal Haven..CT-4 is the Gold coast area and if CT-5 could take some of CT-1 towns it might go R, too. In the 90s CT had 3 RS and 3 D’s, now 5 D’s.
Thanks fwdude.
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