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[FearfulJesuit]

There is some talk of democrats doing mid decade redistricting to overturn some of the gerrymandering.  Cue Fox news calling it undemocratic...

And for the benefit of the rest of us, for the record it ain't. I think there was a Supreme Court decision a few decades ago where they decided that the state legislature can redistrict twice a week if it feels like it.

Now, what we need is a constitutional amendment that narrows redistricting so that it's fair. But since both parties benefit from it, and even if it did make its way through Congress it would have to be ratified by three quarters of the same state legislatures who caused the problem in the first place, it may never go through.

Mind you, they said that about half the other amendments, too...

Edit: Upon snooping around Wikipedia for unratified outstanding amendments, would anybody like to write an alternate history in which the modern Congress has over 5,000 members? It's even more gridlock-tastic! And it came just this close to being passed.

It also makes you wonder what intracongressional bickering would be like if the House were fifty times bigger than the Senate, instead of just over four times bigger.

[Aqizzar]

There is some talk of democrats doing mid decade redistricting to overturn some of the gerrymandering.  Cue Fox news calling it undemocratic...

And for the benefit of the rest of us, for the record it ain't. I think there was a Supreme Court decision a few decades ago where they decided that the state legislature can redistrict twice a week if it feels like it.

Now, what we need is a constitutional amendment that narrows redistricting so that it's fair. But since both parties benefit from it, and even if it did make its way through Congress it would have to be ratified by three quarters of the same state legislatures who caused the problem in the first place, it may never go through.

The 'how' part is the problem, because in the eyes of Congressional law, my example of a 2.3M to 2.1M vote creating a 9 to 4 representation of the minority party is essentially meaningless.  Parties are not a recognized function of the political system the way parliamentary democracies work - the state government apportions the districts, and whoever gets the most votes in that district wins.  I honestly don't have the first clue how to legally challenge a bogus districting map, and given the state of affairs I highly doubt there even is one, at least under federal law.  A good first step would be making such a thing.

The only way I could think to do it would be to empower the FEC to just not recognize a state's federal voting results as long as it doesn't produce proportions to within a one-seat margin of rounding.  And even I think that would be ludicrously infeasible.

The real thing to fear is that after the last election, all those Republican state governments clinging to a disproportionate amount of power in those states are saying they want to change how their Electoral College votes are distributed.  Currently every state is winner-take-all by popular vote, except for Maine and Kansas.  The way they work is, each presidential candidate gets one Electoral vote for every Congressional district they win, and the majority taker gets the extra two (reminder: every state has as many Electoral votes as Congressmen, so that's one for each district and two for the Senate).

Nobody ever pays much attention to this, because both Maine and Kansas only have like five votes each and they're so homogenous they almost never split anyway.  But imagine if say Pennsylvania, or Ohio, or Florida worked that way.  Or the example of Michigan up there.  Because Obama won the popular vote there 2.3M to 2.1M he won the state's 16 electoral votes.  under this proposed system, we can guess by the Representative results that a 2.3M Democrat to 2.1M Republican vote would have translated to Obama getting five Electoral votes to Romney's eleven.

That ought to put some starch in your shorts.  Of course, if that level of blatant vote stealing actually occurred at such a high-profile level, you can bet that there'd be some serious movement on it in about one election cycle.  Except if those Republican state governments get their way, that election would be 2016 and the beneficiary would be a Republican candidate, and you can basically bid farewell to ever having any other government for the rest of time.

[GreatJustice]

I would like to point out California, as an example of what the republican death march to the right may actually end up looking like. California has been having the exact same thing for the past couple decades. The republican base decides that they would rather have someone who is ideologically pure than someone who could actually win office. They then proceed to elect these people in the primaries and watch them lose the actual election. If someone who isn't pure enough for them (I.E. someone who can win) is elected, they won't vote for them. They'll just stay home. Thus, they effectively take their own party out of the game. Anyone who actually wants to be elected become a democrat, cause they're the only game in town.

Statewide parties are often radically different from national parties. IIRC California actually could be marginally competitive for the Republicans under the right circumstances, but the California GOP is practically to the right of the regular GOP and has a big focus on social issues, hence their inability to get anything done. Of course, what happens in a lot of states, especially in the Rust Belt, is the GOP does very well statewide, redistricts the hell out of the state, and then proceeds to do well in the federal elections afterwards. The Dems do that too, but the Democratic states with gerrymandering tend to already be safely in their column, or else are too small to gerrymander effectively anyway.

And in some states, the parties are basically just vessels for random people of wildly different ideologies to run in. For example, New Hampshire is nominally Democratic now, but the governor pledged not to raise the income tax and the old (Democratic) governor vetoed medical marijuana bills coming from (the Republican) legislature. One of the Democratic state reps is an honest to god anarchist who ran against his roommate.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Edit: Upon snooping around Wikipedia for unratified outstanding amendments, would anybody like to write an alternate history in which the modern Congress has over 5,000 members? It's even more gridlock-tastic! And it came just this close to being passed.

It also makes you wonder what intracongressional bickering would be like if the House were fifty times bigger than the Senate, instead of just over four times bigger.

It could still happen. The amendment will be pending until the end of the United States if it isn't passed. I'd support it or another amendment like it, because we have far too few representatives. Our number of representatives is similar to that of European countries while our population is orders of magnitude larger. We need a lower house with thousands of members like India's or China's, because we're in that population range.

As for re:gerrymandering, I still support the math solution by way of shortest splitline. You can't corrupt a mathematical division formula that you can't even effect.

[FearfulJesuit]

except for Maine and Kansas.

Nitpick: it's Nebraska, not Kansas.

Not that it really matters much...

And what would happen if we had a House that big? As I see it, one of the reasons that a two-party system works congressionally is that the logistics of launching a candidate (except in small, quirky places like Maine or Vermont) make it impossible to do unless you're in one of the parties, or Michael Bloomberg.

So: a House dominated by the Dems and Republicans but with deciding votes decided by a rabble of minor regional parties, and a Senate and White House where the two-party system remains unchanged.

Alse, MSH, re: splitline: what do you do if just by coincidence the splitline formula gerrymanders the House to hell? It's unlikely, sure, but it could happen, and wouldn't it be better to require each state to district according to popular votes (so that in the Michigan example, the House delegation would be seven Democrats and six Republicans?)

Also, since there would still be a certain unfairness in the delegations (because very small states get more representatives per capita), what would the entire U.S. look like if treated splitline as one state with a delegation of 435 representatives?

[Nadaka]

This is why I still support an amendment requiring party proportional allotment of house seats within a state. It eliminates gerrymandering, at least until someone is bold enough to reshape the state lines.

[FearfulJesuit]

Now here's an idea. What would happen if every ten years we redistricted the states using the splitline algorithm, generating fifty equipopulous states, each of which further got (let's say) ten representatives also generated using splitline?

Is...is there a program for that somewhere?

[mainiac]

People always say that both sides do it with gerrymandering.  But it's only republicans that win majorities in seats that they lost the popular vote in.  Yes democrats tend to win majorities by greater margins then their share of the vote but that's because its a fucking first past the post system.  For instance in Maryland Democrats won 62% of the vote but won 7 of the 8 seats.  That looks like gerrymandering.  But the democrat margin statewide was 28%.  And this margin actually understates things because democrats racked up their votes in noncompetitive races with low turnout.  If the congressional districts were not "neutral" but instead random it would be surprising to see republicans win even one seat, let alone more then that. 

Basically Maryland geography boils down to that there are only two areas that could support republicans even if you gerrymandered in the republicans favor, the western hills and the eastern shore.  But these are both sparsely populated areas.  So they both need to be connected to something more.  In the west if you run out of republican counties and go south you hit the DC suburbs where the huge democratic margins drown out the small republican margins in the west and democrats win.  Go east and the democratic margins are smaller so republicans win.  In the east if you go into culturally connected by geographically unconnected annapolis the huge democratic margins in annapolis erase the small republican margins across the bay and democrats win.  If you go north the suburbs aren't democratic enough to put things in play.

So it was basically two possible seats with two equally valid way to do each.  Nowhere else in the state is competitive, the democrats already have 6 seats baked in, even if you tried to gerrymander for republicans.  So faced with these two seats the democrats decided they would split the district, go democratic friendly in one, go republican friendly in the other.  And for this democrats get accused of gerrymandering.  Because apparently the republicans are entitled to two seats even though the republican friendly parts of the map do not amount to two seats worth of voters.  Unless the democrats deliberately gerrymander against themselves at every opportunity, they aren't playing fair.

Nobody bothers to actually learn the fact on this though because "both sides do it".  We know that republicans are gerrymandering (loosing the popular vote but taking the seats 2-1) so we assume that democrats do the same because fairness.  Because that is how politics works, you punish the sinner and the sinless equally.  If I ever became a dictator on day 1 I would decree that anyone saying both sides are to blame would be shot.

[Darvi]

Mainiac for el presidente?

[PTTG??]

Let's try it then; a constitutional amendment banning gerrymandering and providing a universal, nationwide system of determining districts.

This mathematical formula will be based solely on population density and geographic connectiveness; we will make each district have the same total population.

And we will put a 1-year deadline with no extensions. Because otherwise it will never, ever be implemented.

There's one more thing- we need the republicans to THINK that the democrats gerrymander, so that the republicans think they're fighting the dems by passing this ammendment.

So, whatever you do, don't try to convince republicans the democrats aren't just as bad- only liberals.

[GreatJustice]

People always say that both sides do it with gerrymandering.  But it's only republicans that win majorities in seats that they lost the popular vote in.  Yes democrats tend to win majorities by greater margins then their share of the vote but that's because its a fucking first past the post system.  For instance in Maryland Democrats won 62% of the vote but won 7 of the 8 seats.  That looks like gerrymandering.  But the democrat margin statewide was 28%.  And this margin actually understates things because democrats racked up their votes in noncompetitive races with low turnout.  If the congressional districts were not "neutral" but instead random it would be surprising to see republicans win even one seat, let alone more then that. 

Basically Maryland geography boils down to that there are only two areas that could support republicans even if you gerrymandered in the republicans favor, the western hills and the eastern shore.  But these are both sparsely populated areas.  So they both need to be connected to something more.  In the west if you run out of republican counties and go south you hit the DC suburbs where the huge democratic margins drown out the small republican margins in the west and democrats win.  Go east and the democratic margins are smaller so republicans win.  In the east if you go into culturally connected by geographically unconnected annapolis the huge democratic margins in annapolis erase the small republican margins across the bay and democrats win.  If you go north the suburbs aren't democratic enough to put things in play.

So it was basically two possible seats with two equally valid way to do each.  Nowhere else in the state is competitive, the democrats already have 6 seats baked in, even if you tried to gerrymander for republicans.  So faced with these two seats the democrats decided they would split the district, go democratic friendly in one, go republican friendly in the other.  And for this democrats get accused of gerrymandering.  Because apparently the republicans are entitled to two seats even though the republican friendly parts of the map do not amount to two seats worth of voters.  Unless the democrats deliberately gerrymander against themselves at every opportunity, they aren't playing fair.

Nobody bothers to actually learn the fact on this though because "both sides do it".  We know that republicans are gerrymandering (loosing the popular vote but taking the seats 2-1) so we assume that democrats do the same because fairness.  Because that is how politics works, you punish the sinner and the sinless equally.  If I ever became a dictator on day 1 I would decree that anyone saying both sides are to blame would be shot.

Again, Maryland is a tiny state and is harder to gerrymander in the first place. It still has some exceptional gerrymandering, though, especially that (horrifically ugly) 3rd district. Massachusetts is too, especially with regards to basically chopping up parts of Boston and its more Democratic outlying towns to keep the swing districts in the east solidly in their column. Beyond all of these, however, is Illinois, where Chicago is chopped up into solidly D districts that spread a little ways outwards. Just look at the 4th district:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yes, they ran the district through an Interstate just to connect the two halves of the district together. It looks like a very ugly horseshoe. That's possibly the worst district in the entire US, though I'd love to see if anything can beat it for sheer stupidity.

[Zangi]

Having thousands of representatives in Congress may not be too bad... it'll be harder for a 2 party system to keep in lock-step,  allowing many more factions to appear.   Just like a public highschool lunch period.  Ok... maybe it won't be worse then how it is now?

[mainiac]

Again, Maryland is a tiny state and is harder to gerrymander in the first place. It still has some exceptional gerrymandering, though, especially that (horrifically ugly) 3rd district.

Democrats won the 3rd district with 85% of the vote.  The purpose of gerrymandering isn't to pack as many of your votes into a district as possible, tt's to do the opposite.  The actual reason the districts are ugly is because the population of Maryland is dominated by a few small cities.

I am shocked, shocked that you would wade into this topic and use ignorance as an excuse to blame democrats.

[GreatJustice]

Again, Maryland is a tiny state and is harder to gerrymander in the first place. It still has some exceptional gerrymandering, though, especially that (horrifically ugly) 3rd district.

Democrats won the 3rd district with 85% of the vote.  The purpose of gerrymandering isn't to pack as many of your votes into a district as possible, tt's to do the opposite.  The actual reason the districts are ugly is because the population of Maryland is dominated by a few small cities.

I am shocked, shocked that you would wade into this topic and use ignorance as an excuse to blame democrats.

Untrue. Gerrymandering can be used both to dilute the vote to win more seats and to create seats that are comically secure by splitting up the little areas around it that would otherwise make it somewhat competitive.

Are you seriously arguing this isn't a gerrymandered district?

The 3rd's gerrymandering is at least somewhat non-partisan, though. The 6th district is quite a bit more obviously partisan, seeing as how they took the one Republican district in western Maryland and shoved a bunch of DC into it to make it more D.

[FearfulJesuit]

It's not often that I'll rush in to defend GreatJustice, but the Dem-friendly gerrymandering of Maryland (and it is gerrymandering) is pretty well-known.