314
Court picks new Alabama congressional map that will likely flip one seat to Democrats
(www.politico.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
314 points (97.9% liked)
politics
19243 readers
3019 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Imagine if all the red states where the GQP electorally assaulted the voting districts (and it was almost all of them, thanks ALEC) had to go to the goddamned supreme court to get it resolved which the arrogant GQP then flat-out refused to do! JUST to eke out a sliver of balance back to these extremely unfair maps.
See more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2021/nov/12/gerrymander-redistricting-map-republicans-democrats-visual
Cheaters. Crooked as sweet fuck-all, no wonder they love that orange rapist shitbag.
I mean, this literally used to be part of the Voting Rights Act, that states with a history of racist gerrymandering would have to get federal clearance on things like their election maps.
That's what Shelby County v. Holder was about. Making it easier for states to engage in racist gerrymandering because the conservative justices like it.
They claimed the preclearance requirements were unconstitutional because they were based on old data (not a legitimate reason to find it unconstitutional) in spite of the fact that the VERY CASE THEY WERE RULING ON proved the exact relevant need for the law they were striking down.
I have always been partial to placing geometric measure restrictions on district mapping. Things like they "must contain no less than 90% of the proportion of the state population and the number of districts" and "the area between any 2 1 mile long edges of the district must be at least 4 Square miles" or "the borders of a district may contain no more than 6 corners, none of which may have angles greater than 100 degrees or less than 80 degrees."
Make the Republicans work for it, make it a trip back to math class which we all know they failed.
Geometric rules like that can still cause communities to be unreasonably divided. The decision to avoid "funny" shapes can itself be used as a methodology of cracking and packing. There's no rule that people spread out evenly and in sensible forms across a state, unfortunately. I remember a model from a textbook I read once where they just had the districts as even slices of a pie chart and showed that merely rotating the starting point could swing an election one way or another, given that communities are not homogeneous.
To put it another way, sometimes you NEED a funny-shaped district to AVOID disenfranchising a community because that community lives in a funny-shaped neighborhood.
The relevant video I always evangelize in the discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq-Y7crQo44
The belief that there is a "fair", nonpolitical, algorithmic, or similar objectively-correct method to district is a nice one, but it just can't be true. Redistricting is an inevitably political process. Any way you cut it, you are picking the voters and distorting the final results.
The best compromise I am aware of, in the US system, is to have a bipartisan or nonpartisan (is there really a difference in a 2-party system?) commission overseeing distracting in an open and transparent process. And even then, all we can do is our best. The hard work of governance. It is not a problem you "solve", it is one you have to wake up every day and commit to improve steadily.
I agree in principle with your assessment. I have a math degree and work with data and optimization, so I understand full well that ANY set of rules can be abused if you understand them well enough and know what "optimized" looks like for your ends. That said, there are definitely O() complexities to optimizing and abusing rule sets. And there is also usually some soft cap on exactly how effective an abuse can become within a rule set. I am not looking to "solve" the problem, but more of trying to lower the soft cap and raise that O from O(1) to at least O(n^2) for how complex it is to abuse the rules.
At the high level, no party should be easily able to say "I want this neighborhood full of rich white folks, but need to be sure not to included the apartment building full of poor black people that the neighborhood wraps around". Both are part of the same community, they shop at the same stores, drive on the same roads, their kids likely go to the same schools, and they should have representation that cares about the whole community. So I fail to see how your comment about "funny shaped neighborhoods" does anything but exemplify the mentality that causes the issue in the first place. I will watch that video tonight, perhaps it will enlighten me.
What the fuck is the GQP?
Grand Qanon Party - aka Trumplicans