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.

We need drastic change but not using the one proven method of bringing it!

Classic

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.

If our laws were transparent how would anyone read them

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.

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.

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.

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.

Another thing was that in the past it wasn't actually possible to properly coordinate parties. Communications technology just wasn't there. I'm sure every congressman had a high-tech "telephone" in their house, but they weren't always home, and there certainly weren't answering machines.

More importantly, mass media wasn't there either. People knew their reps from local town halls and canvassing. They weren't bombarded with mass media featuring the president or the party leader. Sure, they'd show up in newspapers, but not audio/video. So, that meant that congressional reps had a lot more "fame" in their districts, and the leaders had a lot less. So, that gave the reps more independence.

Money also was less of a factor. It's always been a problem with US democracy, but national parties didn't have a stranglehold over their members because of money like they do today.

Mandelbrot has entered the chat

i guess in the US there’s gridlock anyway, so what the hell right?

Historically there were many compromises where representatives worked with the other party to find a solution they could all agree to. We like to think that’s how politics work.

However over the last few years it’s gotten much more divisive. Currently it seems like everything is a party line vote. It seems like one party especially elevated party loyalty above serving constituents, above doing the right thing. There is no more voice of the people, only the party and the evil orange overlord.

Filibusters have always been a thing, where you can hold the floor as long as you can talk about something, delaying everything. That was both a challenge for someone to do and had a huge impact when Congress had the motivation to do what they saw as right for their constituents. Now it’s automatic. You simply need to declare it. A majority vote is no longer enough for most choices because you always need the supermajority sufficient to overcome the filibuster, to “silence the representative “. Now you can’t get anything done.

For most of our history, Congress understood their highest priority was to pass a budget, and they did. Now that is no longer important. Brinksmanship means there is no longer a downside to hold the whole country hostage over whatever issue so they do. “Shutting down the government” by not passing a budget has become the new norm. Meaning we not only can’t get anything done but disrupt everything else.

you can’t hold parties to election promises

You can't do that today either. In fact, it's worse today. What are you going to do if your party doesn't fulfill its electoral promises? Vote for the "bad party"?

this is proportional vs representative democracy

it’s a choice between which you value more: your ideals (proportional - lots of minor parties get elected who better represent your morals and what you want accomplished) or someone to represent the area you live in (representative - inevitably leads to, actually, MINORITY rule because the majority across most districts votes for the party that they hate least - partly because first past the post, but also because in individual districts parties need to get above 50% to win, and that’s just a hard ask for minor parties no matter the area you live)

The idea is to have state-wide races where parties, not individuals, compete. Let's take Washington State, as an example, because it has a nice and even 10 representatives. Instead of having district campaigns, you would have one big statewide election where each party puts up their best campaign, the people vote, and then the votes are counted on a statewide basis and tallied up. Let's say the results are in and are as follows:

• Democratic Party: 40%
• Republican Party: 28%
• Libertarian Party: 11%
• Green Party: 8%
• Working Families Party: 6%
• Constitution Party: 4%
• Independents: 3%

For each 10% of the vote, that party gets allocated one seat. So Democrats get 4, Republicans get 2, and Libertarians get 1. The remaining 3 seats are doled out to whichever party has the largest remainder. So the Republicans and Greens with 8% get one more each, and the Working Families Party with 6% gets one. The Constitution Party and the independents will go home with zero seats.

The final distribution:

• Democrats: 4
• Republicans: 3
• Libertarians: 1
• Greens: 1
• Working Families: 1

There are two ways of determining which exact people get to actually go and sit in Congress: open list or closed list. A closed list system means that the party publishes a list of candidates prior to the election, and the top N people on that list are elected, where N is the number of seats won by the party. A simple open list system would be that everyone on that party's list has their name actually appear on the ballot and a vote for them also counts as a vote for their party, then the top N people of that party with the most votes are elected, where N is the number of seats won by a party. In a closed list system, the party determines the order before the election (they can hold a primary). In an open list system, the voters determine the order on election day.

The main drawback of this system is that with a closed list system, the voters can't really "vote out" an unpopular politician who has the backing of their party since that party will always put them at the top of the list, and open list systems tend to have extremely long ballot papers (if each party here stood the minimum of 10 candidates and 10 independents also stood, that would be 70 candidates on the ballot). It also forces the election to be statewide which means smaller parties can't gain regional footholds by concentrating all their efforts on a small number of constituencies. Small parties in the US don't tend to do this anyway, but it is a fairly successful strategy in other countries, like the Bloc Québécois in Canada or the Scottish National Party in the UK. That being said, a proportional system would still increase the chance that smaller parties have of obtaining representation. Small parties in the US have almost invisible campaigns but if they took it seriously, they'd only need to get 10% of the vote to guarantee a seat, and even with 6-7% they'd still have a good shot at getting one, which on some years they almost do anyway even without a campaign.

The other drawback is that it eliminates the concept of a "local" representative (oddly-shaped and extremely large constituencies notwithstanding), so if a representative votes for a policy that is extremely unpopular in their constituency, it is less effective to "punish" them for it within that constituency as long as the candidate or their party is still popular statewide.

Should probably read it in a Texan accent

Gerrymandering by definition implies malicious intent

No vote woule be useless because they would all count the same.

What? Without districts and zones, people vote individually. Majority wins. Pretty basic. Keep everything else the same, voting zones, districts, whatever, where people go, but count it as a PERSON no part of a preconfigured cheated group.

Or just do mail in ballots with online tracking that it was received. Done. Majority wins. No electoral college or other bs.

With all the shady shit the US does that other countries don't seems like majority in US was designed to fail against money.

This way it doesn't matter that you live or moved to an opposing zone, you still vote and count towards your vote, not a small group.