As Texas Republicans try to muscle a rare mid-decade redistricting bill through the Legislature to help Republicans gain seats in Congress – at President Donald Trump’s request – residents in Austin, the state capital, could find themselves sharing a district with rural Texans more than 300 miles away.
The proposed map chops up Central Texas’ 37th Congressional District, which is currently represented by Democrat Rep. Lloyd Doggett, will be consumed by four neighboring districts, three of which Republicans now hold.
One of those portions of the Austin-area district was drawn to be part of the 11th District that Republican Rep. August Pfluger represents, which stretches into rural Ector County, about 20 miles away from the New Mexico border.
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…
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.
If we do that, they will be all Republicans
Republicans rarely have a majority of the congressional votes. They get their majority in Congress from uneven representation and gerrymandering. In proportional representation, they’d lose their majority.
I’m not sure you understood any of the words you are replying to.
Reality has a left leaning bias, this is why the US has a gerymandering issue in the first place. If the right could get into power without rigging things, they would, but they can’t, so gerrymander it up.
Edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment, but I can’t for the life of me figure out which one it was meant to be a reply to. Perhaps the one that the one I’m replying to is replying to.
There’s a quote about that. “If conservatives can’t win in a democratic system, they won’t abandon conservatism, they will abandon democracy.”
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.
And so many things were just ‘common sense,’ and not enshrined in laws because the thought was that anyone breaking them would be held accountable by the populace. We now have a critical mass of stupid, self absorbed, or malicious people that laws don’t matter, much less norms.
We also have mechanisms of communication, propaganda, and control that were beyond imagination 249 years ago.
I mean, a second Trump term means that any “but surely they wouldn’t accept somebody who-” is out the window. His two impeachments weren’t for affairs or for perjury. They were EACH for betraying the damned country in totally different ways.
Yeah, but “he tells it like it is” /s
centuries*
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.
GOP, not all of Texas.
Won’t matter unless the progressives of the state get organized.
And you pretend that the Democrats haven’t been doing this since they were the Democratic Republican Party.
The Democrats proposed a bill last congress to ban gerrymandering and every single Republican voted against it.
It was also full of Democrat shenanigans that they knew the Republicans would not vote for, so they tossed in jerrymandering, knowing the bill would never pass to make it look like they were for it.
Without jerrymandering, the Democrats would lose many seats because they’d no longer be able to take large swaths of rural and suburban areas, then make a wonky looking maps to link them to cities to ensure the suburban and rural voters get outvoted by the urban voters. They’d also no longer be able to carve out mostly black districts that they have no chance of ever losing.
Without their jerrymandering, they wouldn’t have single party control of Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
You can’t spell “gerrymander” even after replying to people who spelled it correctly… and even being that wrong, it’s the most accurate thing you’ve written.
Republicans have gerrymandered Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, N. Carolina, S. Carolina, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Ohio and Mississippi.
Democrats have gerrymandered New Mexico, Nevada, Illinois, and Oregon.
What’s even more hilarious is that you named Vermont as being gerrymandered… it has ONE congressional district, LOL… ONE! That’s some big-brain analysis, my friend.
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Over a century. It all started with the Democratic Republican Party that eventually became the Democratic Party.
It started in 1812. Although the Democratic-Republican party did evolve into the current Democratic party over the course of two centuries, it’s hardly fair to call them the same party. That’s eight generations between then and now and the political landscape has changed dramatically.
As for the “both sides do it” whataboutism, like so many “both sides” issues the current Republican Party benefits far more from gerrymandering than the current Democratic Party, and this is before this especially egregious Texas mid-census redistricting.
It’s such a silly and disingenuous argument. The most recent version of gerrymandering arguably began with REDMAP in 2010, which was in response to Obama winning. Before that, it was used almost exclusively to disenfranchise black voters before the voting rights act in 1965. Before that, it was used by both parties in unison to maintain the supremacy of incumbents.
If you think that the Democrats are the only ones to gerrymander until now you’re not intelligent enough to be weighing in
They both do it. Democrats are just the ones who invented it, then like everything they do, they cry victim when the Republicans also do it and try to act like they’re filled with righteous indignation knowing that they also jerrymander.
The American system adopted it from across the pond. Rotten and pocket burroughs were frequent in the 18th century and actually started getting outlawed in the 19th century right when the Jeffersonian republicans went hard with it.
The Jeffersonian republican/democratic republican is the father of both major parties, it split into the northern republicans (anti- slavery) and southern democrats (mostly pro-slavery).
Neither of those parties resemble the modern parties, which flipped ideologies during the Civil Rights Movement, among their most recent changes.
So, it would be safer to say that American gerrymandering was created by the precursor to both modern parties.
I thought they flipped sides after lbj passed the civil rights act…
It wasn’t a single event that flipped the parties, it was a long evolution over time.
And now the Republican Party has made another major evolution, and turned into the MAGA Party. They no longer follow any of the tenets of the Republican Party - smaller government, lower taxes, economic responsibility, family values, etc. - and only follow the MAGA tenets of hatred, bigotry, cruelty, treason, fiscal mismanagement, incompetence, weaponisatuon, and pedophilia.
The Republican Party is as dead as the Whigs, and should only be referred to in a historic, scholarly setting, as the precursor to the MAGA Party. All Democratic politicians should stop saying Republican Party in all media appearances, and only refer to them as the MAGA Party.
Democratic leadership should even hold an official press conference making the announcement that they are unilaterally declaring the Republican Party dead, replaced by the MAGA Party, and then never refer to the Republicans again. Making this fundamental declaration about the Republican Party without consulting them, will likely make them go even crazier. I can already hear them howling like the baboons they are.
Most of those people grew up in the Republican Party, and it is their identity. To kill it, and replace it with a preschool fingerprinting like the MAGA Party will grind up many of them. Many are only MAGAs Of Convenience, and they won’t like it at all. I want to see them howl that they are officially sidelined from history, and scream that they are NOT MAGA, they are REPUBLICANS!
There is stress between MAGA and the traditional GOP that they try to hide, and pretend doesn’t exist, and this would put tremendous strain on that partnership.
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?
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
Things have improved for those groups over time, notably. We took a shit system and tried to make it represent all of us.
Arguable that things have improved for poor people in the last 50 years. In relative terms they are objectively far worse off. And native Americans were arguably better off in the early colonial days pre-manifest destiny. I know US liberalism loves the myth of linear progress. But I think it isn’t necessarily accurate.
Oooh that liberalism! Promoting human rights! Ruining all of my evil schemes to catch the smurfs!
Liberalism promotes capitalism. Which isn’t great for human rights.
So no, criticising liberalism as an ideology, built upon capitalist and statist-nationalist ideals does not make me an evil person trying to “catch the smurfs”.
We’re going to have to end all human rights to defeat capitalism, guys. It’s the only way, trust me.
I have a hard time believing your good faith. Are you seriously arguing there’s no pro-human rights ideology except liberalism?
Liberalism ≠ Human Rights
If so please please learn about political philosophy. There’s a lot more than “liberals” and “conservatives”.
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.
The system has basically always been two-party. It’s the only stable arrangement for FPtP voting anyway. So, yes, it has been status quo for 250 years.
First fast the post
2 Fast 2 Postious
Thank you for the correction.
Even strong checks can’t hold back bad faith actors indefinitely
Sure does help, though.
Any system that ultimately doesn’t work for the greater good is bound to fail, because someone will come along promising to deliver the people from their woes.
It’s happened very many times throughout history, and yet many “checks” are perpetuated on convention alone, in many systems around the world.
You’re just asking for it, at that point.
Letting politicians draw their own electoral boundaries, and “certify” their own elections is beyond ridiculous.
Git gud, USA, yikes.
Brought to you by the independent electoral commission gang.
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.
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.
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.
In Australia it’s kinda 4 different things that stops gerrymandering from being a problem:
- independent electoral commissions (federally) draw the boundaries
- the commissions take public input and complaints
- very strict criteria for changing boundaries (geographically sensible, community - be it economic, local interest, etc -, population equality)
- and, the final one which is imo super important but I don’t think would ever happen in the US: compulsory voting (we get fined if we don’t vote)… this largely eliminates voter disenfranchisement and manipulation
We have RCV, but you’re completely right: that’s a solution to a whole different problem… and independent commissions are only part of the solution - you need to ensure their independence with rules that make it infeasible for them to be anything but non-biased
On the last bullet point, we probably need to federalize voter qualification and registration, first. Whether you can vote or not depends on what state you are in (felony disenfranchisement, e.g.). Some states let you register on voting day; others close registration weeks before voting day (and some incumbents try to purge voters as close to the deadline as possible). It’s really quite a mess. :(
I think if we made it easier to vote, we wouldn’t have to make it mandatory – federal holiday on voting day, open/unrestricted early voting for a least a week before voting day. I’m against mandatory voting unless there’s a “[X] Democracy is dead / a sham in $District” protest vote option or something similar. Incumbents already claim my support when I’m just trying harm-reduction and I actually support someone that never made it into the primary for wanting to tax the rich.
I’m against mandatory voting
Yeah I think that’s the general consensus outside of Australia, but we fucking love it here… there have been a few very unpopular suggestions to repeal it, and we keep proving that it’s near universal that we love it
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
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.
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.
These assholes are going to make violent revolution inevitable. Why they think they will survive that revolution is a mystery.
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
Oh there is no doubt they have a monopoly on violence, but America has more guns than people and virtually no mental health care so…
So…those with a monopoly on violence will use it ruthlessly against any disorganised violence. Have a look at Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
The only way individual citizens with small arms will have any impact on organised groups with automatic weapons, armoured vehicles artillery and air support is if they one get seriously organised in an underground fashion and two convert some of the military groups to their side.
If they don’t do both those it’ll just be massacres and wholesale internment in concentration camps. The MSM have already shown they’re happy to whitewash whats going on, so you’ll never hear about the majority of extra-judicial killings until years later if ever.
The US has about 3 months left to raise a serious resistance, otherwise the show is over and the fat lady is singing.
Organization is a weakness. Attack the leadership and it’s less effective.
How do you attack a large number of individuals engaging in stochastic violence unconnected from each other?
How do you attack a large number of individuals engaging in stochastic violence unconnected from each other?
The same way every oppressive regime has.
Look to history and there have been some succesful insurgencies, there’s also been a LOT of oppressed populations ground down into compliance. Random individuals operating on their own have never to the best of my knowledge achieved significant change. Groups of people working in cells to minimise infiltration and quisling risks however have.
I am glad you are optimistic, and I wish you luck in your endeavours. I certainly would like to see your fascist regime fall.
Because it worked for people like them in China and Russia.
it’s all I cling to, to make it through every day
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.
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.
I think this is an important point that https://bdistricting.com/2020/ glosses over. Some of the representation “guarantees” that were part of the VRA are actually defeated by doing purely geographic districting. Oft-times there’s enough BIPOC population that’s widely distributed, but needs to be “packed” (to use the gerrymandering terminology) in order to given even a chance of proportional representation.
My state of Arkansas is a good example https://bdistricting.com/2020/AR_Congress/ BIPOC is >= 25% of the population, but to get a distract that was 50% BIPOC it would have to snake across the state in a way that would be very visually similar to a gerrymandered district.
Multi-member districts can help, but they cause a loss of representation locality.
It may be that it’s impossible to produce an algorithm that satisfies all our (collective) fairness constraints.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq-Y7crQo44
This is a really neat video about algorithmic redistricting. It doesn’t really make any claims about the politics around drawing maps but it does a great job of showing how easily the maps can be manipulated to give set results. It’s really neat to see how the different things we can optimize for may or may not produce “fair” results.
Really worth a watch imo!
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.
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.
New York and California are already starting the redistricting process. This is a poor move by republicans in the long run since more of their states are already maximally gerrymandered.
Good to hear!
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…
The USA is a union of 50 semi-independent states, not a single homogenous country, which is where most of the complexity comes from.
But, doesn’t your country (you didn’t say which it is) have any districts (or geographic subdivisions of some kind) where the inhabitants living within it send a representative to the national level to advocate for their interests and vote on national legislation with their local interests considered? That’s what we’re talking about here, except with an extra layer in between, where each State (being a semi-independent entity) gets to decide how it draws the boundaries of the districts within it.
we also have states but when we vote for our national government every vote is counted on it’s own whereas in the us the votes win districts which decide on the election outcome and can be manipulated through gerrymandering
Here, the only office not directly elected by popular vote is the US Presidential/Vice Presidential ticket, where it is determined by the infamous Electoral College, where each state has a different number of votes to cast, one for each senator and representative seat they have. Most states award all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in their state, but a couple of them (Maine and Nebraska) do it differently, so sometimes the other candidate winds up getting one of their electoral votes.
All other elected offices are determined by popular vote for the seat being elected. So,
For a US Senate seat (where each Senator represents the entire state), every voter in the state votes in that race and the winner is determined by popular vote [1].
For the US House of Representatives, each state is divided into a number of districts, with the number based on the population of that state relative to the US population as a whole. So a state with a large population gets many districts and a state with a lower population gets only a few (in some cases, only one!). The voters in each district elect their representative for their own district and the winner is determined by the popular vote in that district.
[1] Before 1913, people didn’t directly elect their Senators, the state legislatures did! So we’ve at least made progress there.
I don’t think Democrats can Jerrymander much harder than they have been since 1812.
Democrats won’t fight for standard anything because they would lose many, MANY seats in their own states because they’ve been Jerrymandered all to hell to ensure that non Democrat voters are always the minority in their districts.
S.2747 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Freedom to Vote Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress https://share.google/eRglTkE8X7S8e1oPZ
If you can’t win, cheat. It’s the official slogan of conservatives worldwide.
“Why should I have to pay taxes for roads and schools in Austin when I live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere by choice?”
-Desired Outcome
Reminds me of Kansas…
Republicans are cheating scum.
Aportionment voting. As close to possible make sure the voting for a party gets appropriate representation then vote in who by primary. If this is a 100 seat senate and the state goes 48%red 51% blue and 1 % green each color holds a primary after the election to choose who will represent this platform that got them elected. This creates unity inside a party on issues in which everyone should campaign on and if you aren’t striving to enact the platform it is more seen and you are less likely to be voted in in the primary next time. This creates more parties as if you have a different platform what is the point being in the same party. You still have to play smart like the green party should work green if they have the same agenda that way people don’t get upended but generally this is better
I live in CD4, and it’s already just as ridiculous. A massive swath of rural voters to drown out relatively diverse parts of Plano, TX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas's_4th_congressional_district
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's_13th_congressional_district
Yep. It totally makes sense for Denton and Amarillo to have the same representative. /s
