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?

Federal government won't do anything about it. States control their own elections and therein lies the conundrum. Texas is proving very willingly that it doesn't care about the rules as long as they win.

centuries*

when lawmakers break the law and nobody enforces the law, it stops being the law.

We've lived in a fascist country for a long time.

worked for about 250 years for a select group of people only

didn't work for the native americans, slaves, poor people, etcetera

Even strong checks can't hold back bad faith actors indefinitely

Apologies if I misunderstood the american election system, but the fact that for the past 100+ years you've had a bipartisan system in which both parties pander to the wealthy tell me it hasn't really worked. Or rather only worked for the ruling elite.

No, it depends on a population that actually cares about democracy and will punish those "bad faith actors" at the polls. Unfortunately, we're dealing with Americans here.

Yes if you elect people that agree to the majority of the house, senate, president, state houses, and governors, they tend to get their way.

For about 200 years, a candidates morality was an important factor, now we apparently don't care, especially the MAGAs.

Because they think they have the vast majority of those institutions with the ability to inflict violence on their side.

And from where I'm sitting, it looks like they're right

Because it worked for people like them in China and Russia.

Gerrymandering can still be effective with ranked choice. It's harder, but you can still do both cracking and packing, you just have to model top-2 or top-3 preferences.

Popular vote is already the norm for gerrymandered areas.

I mean we should definitely implement Ranked Choice up and down the ticket, and implement Popular Vote for President, but neither actually solves Gerrymandering.

I'd like to say "independent" redistricting organizations are the solution, but the practical success of those is mixed. The incumbents just pack those with cronies, or ignore them, sometimes with the assistance of the judiciary.

Nope, that would only help with state-wide and national elections, not for district-level ones. If they're gerrymandered to be a majority republican district, the winner will be a republican even if there is ranked choice and popular vote. Or vice-versa if gerrymandered to be a Dem-majority district.

Which is why they pump the uninformed majority of voters full of the idea that the current system will always save them. My father in law has a degree in political science and still thinks that we'll vote Trump out in 2028 to fix everything. Decades of things generally continuing to function for the middle class white demographic has brainwashed every democratic voter over 50 I know to believe we're still well within the acceptable bounds of politics.

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.

Implement an actual independent electoral commission, proper scrutiny, paper ballots only (seriously, the US are fucking brain-dead for using voting machines, it's caused issues at elections dozens of times), and all this goes away.

But yeah, ranked choice voting is definitely high on the list also

We should make it proportionate to economic output. Not number of people. Seems like the capitalist way.

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.

If democrats had an ounce of intelligence, they would be fighting for standard algorithms to manage redistricting.

The problem with that is they would need to regain power to be able to fix anything. But that would also assume they did, in fact, have the intelligence to fix problems while in power. Unfortunately, the reason the fascists are fighting so hard to dismantle democracy is to ensure that they can never lose power again despite their growing unpopularity.

It’s a bit more complex than that—if you create districts on a purely geographic basis (like minimizing district perimeters), you usually amplify slight majorities into disproportionately large ones (e.g., a 55% demographic majority translating to a 90% legislative majority). An algorithm that tries to create districts that proportionally translate demographics to representation usually ends up with district boundaries that superficially resemble gerrymandered ones.

Oh? Then why are repubs gerrymandering so hard? Because they'll pick up 5 seats in Texas by doing it. And they're going to do the same in all the red states they can and pick up an extra one here and an extra one there and get a nice, cushy permanent House majority by blatantly violating district-drawing "norms" to a mind-boggling degree like this. Because now they can.

But don't worry about Dems fighting back by doing a damn thing, let alone gerrymandering harder.

Except we're talking about Texas, where Democrats have never held enough power to do any significant gerrymandering. Assuming you're acting in good faith and not just a bot, is it possible that you're failing into the trap of assuming that because one of the most heavily gerrymandered districts (Texas 35th) is blue that Democrats did the gerrymandering?

They didn't. Republicans did, to pack as many blue votes into a single district as possible so multiple others around it could be red. If the districts were drawn fairly, the thin corridor connecting Austin and San Antonio would be red, and multiple districts above and below that corridor would be blue.

Lol except democrats have been using bipartisan/non-partisan commissions to do it in blue states, so it means the house will forever be favoring republicans, unless democrats actually have the spine to play dirty.

Here in the best country on earth we just count the votes of our people and decide based on that. No district bullshit whatsoever. And that is how we ended with a backwards blackrock cocksucker and a corrupt von der leyen.... But seriously just count the votes in general, the us has such a fucked up system....

Texas 13th is horrible too. They cut the city of Denton out of Denton County and stretched it all the way to the top of the pan handle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_13th_congressional_district