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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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Gerrymandering should be a crime and conviction should mean removal from office and a life long ban on working in politics.
Now we just need a way to do that that isn't vigilante violence.
It is kind of frustrating how every system needs to resist people (usually conservatives) from acting in bad faith.
I have some ideas.
Oh. Nevermind...
Classic
Go on, do something then
[Spiderman meme]
VV is a last step, for when the system has evolved into an unmovable corner.
Like when you play tic tac toe and all moves are done, you have to just restart. Eventually, you have to do something different to get a different outcome. Unfortunately if you fuck up your memory (bad history and bad education), you're doomed to fail until you get it right or die.
So, yeah, we need to figure out the right way to do it. Until then and if they don't let us, flip the damn table.
How would you prove it? That's actually a question that needs an answer
I'm not sure. I said in another comment in here that maybe having the public vote on districts would make it harder to pull off. Like, if the entire state needs to look at the map and say "That looks fair", maybe it'll be hard to make those paint splatter ones.
Supposedly there was a bill a few years ago to ban it that narrowly failed.
At this point maybe the best bet would be for blue states to enter the gerrymandering arms race on a conditional basis; do it as blatantly as it's being done on the other side, with some explicit clause that it will end when fair representation is implemented nationwide.
I just read an article this morning (tried to find it to link here but couldn't) that was talking about how it will be more difficult for Dems to lean into this strategy because most of the blue states already have independent committees to draw districts (as they should.) It basically pointed to California as our sole bastion of hope for 2026 and noted that if a bunch of the states follow suit, the Republicans will have the edge. Continues to come down to the electoral college problem with small states getting disproportionate voices.
That assumes the democratic party wants gerrandering to end and they just won't collude with the Republicans to carve up the country and entrench the two party system.
Some states have anti-gerrimandering written into their constitutions, so that would not be easy.
In order to do that, we need a rigorous definition of gerrymandering that isn't just "I know it when I see it." Even if we try to adopt some sort of strict mathematical criteria and algorithm for redistricting (such as optimizing for "compactness" using a Voronoi algorithm), there would always still be some amount of arbitrary human input that could be gamed (such as the location of seeds, in this example). Even if we went so far as to make a rule that everything must be randomized (which would possibly be bad for things like continuity of representation, by the way), we could still end up with people trying to influence the outcome by re-rolling the dice until they got a result they liked.
It's a hard (in both the computational sense and political sense) problem to solve.
I wonder if "I know it when I see it" would be good enough if it had to pass a public vote. Do you think the regular people on the street would vote to support gerrymandering? Getting good voter turnout and education is its own set of problems, admittedly.
If their side gets more representation, then yes. Unfortunately people are too focused on the output and not the process.
I heard of a test that makes sense, minimally. If you reverse the vote of every single person, the opposite party should win. Apparently there are ways of organizing it where that isn't the case.
That only works if there are only two parties. I'd prefer a solution that works with electoral reform, not against it.
but since there are 2 parties it complies with your request of
To make aure I understand, you mean that if you reverse the vote of every district the state should see the opposite party winning?
Yes
~~Gerrymandering is a crime. We just don't consider what's going on to be legally gerrymandering for some bullshit fuck ass reason. There's only been a few cases of gerrymandering being caught in a legal sense. It is largely ignored.~~
edit: a bit wrong here but whaddya know it's because our laws are not transparent
This issue is actually pretty weird. Racial gerrymandering is a violation of the voting rights act, hence illegal. Partisan gerrymandering is completely legal.
In practice this seems to mean that it is harder to gerrymander in states where racial voting patterns align with party, e.g. whites vote Republican, blacks vote Democrat. In states where party lines do not predominantly fall on racial lines, you can hack up the districts to favor your party as much as you like.
wow, i did not know that. thank you for elaborating. i looked into it further and found SCOTUS asshole Roberts: "The Constitution supplies no objective measure for assessing whether a districting map treats a political party fairly.” lol cool, cool...
He's being quiet about the part where the founders failed to predict an institutionalized two-party system.
Many of the founding fathers were against political parties altogether and absolutely anticipated a two party equilibrium.
https://www.usconstitution.net/founding-fathers-warnings/
So much of their arguments rely on that; "clearly the Constitution says nothing explicitly on this issue (or alternatively, the constitution wasn't microscopically specific this was a case it had in mind so, really, who are we to allow it to apply to this scenario?); as an originalist, I just presume that there was no intent rather than assuming anyone in the project of writing a founding document has any interest in it working fairly or well."
Florida has racial Gerrymandering. they just don't recognize race. problem averted.
If our laws were transparent how would anyone read them