• Judges choose Va. redistricting map favorable to Dems; six GOP districts go blue
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/federal-judges-choose-va-redistricting-map-favorable-to-democrats-six-gop-house-districts-would-get-bluer/2019/01/22/401b2618-1ebc-11e9-9145-3f74070bbdb9_story.html?noredirect=on Federal judges choose Va. redistricting map favorable to Democrats; six GOP House districts would get bluer https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/NS0itE-U2xrAr2LvPfjFS934zLY=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/PIMUWSHWHII6PGXXUUF4GMAAII.jpg Virginia House Speaker Kirk Cox (R-Colonial Heights), could see his district become majority Democratic under a federal redistricting plan approved by federal judges. He says the decision will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. (Timothy C. Wright/For The Washington Post) RICHMOND — Federal judges have selected a Virginia House of Delegates redistricting map that appears to heavily favor Democrats, redrawing the lines of 26 districts and moving several powerful Republicans into unfavorable configurations. Six Republicans would wind up in districts where a majority of voters chose Democratic President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, according to an analysis of the maps by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project. No current Democrats would see their voter majority change to Republican, based on those election results. Virginia does not register voters by party. If the court’s map selection stands, it would create a favorable environment for Democrats seeking to take control of the House of Delegates in elections this fall, according to the analysis. All 100 seats in the House are on the ballot, and Republicans hold a 51-to-48 majority. Get fucked you Russian shills
.....It isnt that they are favorable to dems, its that they actually represent the populace. Fuck off ya shite pricks.
While yeah it's obviously beneficial for now I really don't like gerrymandering one way or another. Our MP ridings are much the same sometimes.
I wonder if in this case Democrat = fair, or if it tips the balance a little further blue than is necessarily even.
This has been going on for a while, and I think this is a fair map. What happened was that the government declared the republican house drawn maps to be illegally gerrymandered, and gave the house a deadline to redraw the maps. Governor Ralph Northam, a democrat, said he would veto any attempt by the republicans to redraw the maps, and he did that. So, failing to meet the deadline, the federal government got to redraw the maps, and put an economics professor from the University of California to lead the commission to redraw the maps. There was an appeals process, but ultimately it looks like the federal government is going to side with its own maps of the republican drawn ones. Since it was the federal government and a commission of academics/experts, not politicians, who drew the maps, I personally am confident that they're fair
Geographic bounding of voters is such a complex problem. It's different on a state, by state basis. The wiki list is: Compactness, contiguity, equal population, preservation of existing political communities, partisan fairness, and racial fairness. Makes my head hurt thinking of how to ideally draw these districts. A while back I used to think that "come up with an automatic system and let it loose" (e.g. mathematical clustering algorithms) - but maybe it isn't that simple. Don't get me wrong, I'm super glad that they are getting rid of that gerrymandering bullshit in this case. I just wonder if there wouldn't be a less corruption prone system of making these districts.
Just out loud thinking, but what if you drop the idea of geographic boundaries and did something more demographic, like age ranges? I've given it roughly the amount of time it took to write this post to think about it, but surely there are other ways to divide voting outside of location. Alternatively, what if you just removed districts as a whole and had the entire state vote on their representatives using something like ranked choice voting? If your state formerly had 8 districts, you would instead get 8 votes for representatives. The top most favored candidates become representatives.
Because then the more populated urban and suburban areas would steamroll the rural areas, who would get no representation at all. I don't have a problem with this, but that's the thinking
I understand the need for rural areas needing their own representation, because their needs are completely different to those of urbanites. But those districts should be weighted accordingly. It's all the more confusing when it comes to national representation.
Exactly - with the increases of urbanization do we accept the decline of farmer's relative power? The distribution of population and the way we interact is changing quite quickly. Do farmers deserve higher than usual representation? Should minorities? Makes my head spin round and round - glad it isn't my job. The reason I like geographic boundaries is, right now, they are the easiest to prove someone qualifies as being in that literal box. If you split it by some other function, say, occupation then what is the qualifying mark and how do you choose what proportion each job gets (silly example, but just making a point).
538's podcast episode on Arizona redistricting is a really interesting look at how it can be very difficult/impossible to come up with objectively 'fair' district lines: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/want-competitive-elections-so-did-arizona-then-the-screaming-started/ I can't quite tell if this is already what you're describing, but a multi-member electoral system like party list PR is indeed a solution to gerrymandering - districts are much larger and each of them elects multiple representatives, so if a district is 70% GOP/30% Dem it gets 3 GOP reps and 1 Dem rep for example. Gerrymandering becomes much harder/impossible because even if you split a party's voters between different districts they will still get to elect reps anyway.
This, more or less, was one of the options presented to British Columbians in the referendum on ranked choice vs FTTP. Unfortunately FTTP won and maybe half the voters even bothered to send theirs in. Fucking damnit.
I wonder if maybe not using hard boundaries would help. It would result in some citizens technically being represented by multiple representatives but maybe if districts were drawn without regard for the territory of neighboring districts it would help avoid the issue of gerrymandering altogether. From what I've gathered over the past few years it's the exact boundaries clashing with each other that are the biggest issue. So removing that should theoretically fix the problem.
This is what is called bloc voting, and if you think FPTP is bad, bloc voting is FPTP on steroids. Under FPTP, that state might have had 6 seats held by one party, and 2 seats held by another party. Under bloc voting, all 8 seats would most likely be held by a single party. Consider the example: 1,000 voters across the state. Red party fields 8 candidates, and the Blue party also fields 8 candidates. 550 voters each use their 8 votes for each of the 8 Red party candidates. Likewise, the remaining 450 voters each use their 8 votes for each of the 8 Blue party candidates. The Red party wins by a landslide, taking all 8 seats. This is because each Red party candidate has more votes than any of the Blue party candidates. More practical alternatives you might find intriguing include: single non-transferable vote, which is similar to bloc voting except each voter only gets 1 vote. Hong Kong uses this. A severe problem of this method is that minor parties are often extremely over-represented, as larger parties tend to split their own vote if they field any more than ~2 candidates. single transferable vote, which is used in Australia and Ireland. It’s like the single non-transferable voting system, but with preferential voting integrated into it. It’s a very fair system when used with Droop quotas and the Gregory transfer method, but it can be very difficult for voters to understand, and in Australia it has led to ballot papers comprising more than 100 candidates contesting a mere 6 seats. list-proportional systems like d’Hondt and Sainte-Laguë, which are used all throughout continental Europe. In summary, if a party wins 40% of the vote in a district which returns 10 seats, that party is likely to win 40% of the 10 seats, or 4 seats (give or take 1, depending on the specific voting system).
you can't legally do at large districts without a constitutional amendment. as for geography it is important because it prevents cracking of districts to favor rural constituencies. My district is cracked , my town is cut with surgical precision into 3 different districts spanning across half my state, which is not fair. My representative has never once come up here and campaigned, hell he has barely campaigned at all because he has such a huge rural farming constituency.
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