A quick reminder that gerrymandering, the unethical process where politicians choose their voters (instead of the other way around), is not legal in any other western democracy. It's runaway corruption, shouldn't exist, and needs to be publishable by jail time...
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Get rid of districts and fill Congress through proportional representation. That solves so many problems.
But it creates others. In the US we vote for people, in proportional representing, you vote for parties.
You can argue that's better, but it's very different from what we have now.
It is different, and I would indeed argue it's better. And let's face it, you are mostly voting for parties anyway. How many independents are there really?
But if you want to have district representatives, you could do a hybrid system where half the seats are assigned by district, and the other half are assigned from a national list to fill out the proportionality.
Republicans would be getting most of their seats from districts, Greens and Libertarians would get them entirely from the national list, but at least they'd get representation.
We should make it proportionate to economic output. Not number of people. Seems like the capitalist way.
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Just enough farmer jokels in there to neutralize democratic city dwellers.
I will never understand how this obvious manipulation has been legal for decades.
We've lived in a fascist country for a long time.
Money. Every American politician is corrupt as fuck.
The pretense is gone now though, which is fascinating. And scary.
It’s literally just partisan warfare with legal exploitation, and voter bases apparently think it’s justified. I mean, what are they gonna do, side with the other party over it?
when lawmakers break the law and nobody enforces the law, it stops being the law.
Laws still apply, just not to the people in power.
They always forget that the laws they pass to punish their enemies or enrich themselves goes both ways.
If they start acting like the law is anything they can get away with without going to jail, then the same can apply to the rest of us.
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This repub regime is really showing us how much our system of government depends on having good-faith actors in (elected) positions of power. There truly are not sufficient checks in place to protect against one election's worth of bad actors.
Kind of amazing that this all worked for about 250 years, and heartbreaking that it could crumble in the next 2.5.
For about 200 years, a candidates morality was an important factor, now we apparently don't care, especially the MAGAs.
worked for about 250 years for a select group of people only
didn't work for the native americans, slaves, poor people, etcetera
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Question, does that make it overall blue or red for everyone else? I imagine Austin has more people than that rural area but idk
It’s only a small portion of Austin. If you take a sliver of a city where 20k people live and add it to a large rural district with 30k people across thousands of square miles you then spread the population of the dense city across the rural districts without overwhelming the ratio.
Utterly ridiculous stuff, how can the US call itself a democracy.
This is nothing new or unique. As much as it sucks when it’s blatantly obvious like this, there isn’t a true and objective way to draw perfect districts. If you cut the state into perfect squares then you group completely unrelated communities on either side of a large river that have nothing in common and one overwhelms the other. Sometimes one niche population is one county over from another one that’s twice the size. A lot of times a certain state does have a serious political bias. Independent districting committees with members from both sides still come up with wildly gerrymandered maps. A lot of times they aim for “highly competitive” elections where both sides have a real chance at winning any given election, but if the state is genuinely deep blue or red, that’s gerrymandered as well even if it “feels” democratic. 538 had an awesome map where you could visualize unfair advantages for each, highly competitive districts, compact districts (no absurd shapes like this one) and compact but follows existing county lines, but when ABC bought them they gutted everything good about 538 and just used the name for their existing garbage election reporting hoping to lure in a few more viewers so it’s now wiped off the face of the internet.
Australia has a rule that redistribution must bring the ratio of seats closer to the total ratio of votes when modelled on the previous election.
It's a strong objective way to prevent the worst abuses of subjective redistribution.
There are also equal(ish) population rules but I think the US probably has that too?
Ranked choice
Popular vote
All this goes away.
I think using a method of proportional representation is the most effective defence against gerrymandering. You cannot have unrepresentative elections when the system has representation built into it.
However, that would be difficult to do in the US from what I understand. There would need to be several changes to the law to give it a fighting chance.
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These assholes are going to make violent revolution inevitable. Why they think they will survive that revolution is a mystery.
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The worst part is that democrats will fight back by gerrymandering harder, and it just won't be as effective because gerrymandering always benefits the person behind. If democrats had an ounce of intelligence, they would be fighting for standard algorithms to manage redistricting. If it was federal law to minimize district perimeters, this whole nonsense would end.
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