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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34012702
Where do we draw the line?
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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politics
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I don't know if that is completely true but I think in countries without the first pass the post system this is not even a problem. For example in Germany every voter has one vote and they are all added together in the end. The districts are only for managing the vote counting but have almost no influence on the end result.
Gerrymandering isn't a thing with presidential elections. The districts are used for congressional elections where there are multiple representatives per state.
Oh, I actually didn't know that. Does it not work for presidential elections?
Nope, presidential elections use the total for the whole state and electoral college fuckery. Although counties are used like you described for reporting purposes (except for Louisiana which has parishes instead of counties).
Yeah, Germany has a sort of mix of single transferrable vote and proportional representation. I'm jealous!
in the german federal election you have 2 votes, one for the local candidate and one for the party. the candidate with most votes (simple majority) will go to the parliament. so the local district matters.
I do know that there are two votes. But in the last election reform the direct vote has drastically lost importance. It is no longer guaranteed that every person who won the direct vote will go to parliament. The distribution of seats will only be decided by the party votes. The only exception remains that parties with three direct candidate wins will be able to go to parliament without winning at least five percent of the party votes.
...and Hungary.
Why, don't you like the maps that somehow cuts apartment buildings in half and that the opposition needs to lead by 3-5% for a tie?
then eat something
Ah, I saw this term in the past. Never understood, I could barely see the relationship to US elections. And, I'm a complete alien to the sophisticated methods billionaires use to sustain their US dictatorship, but it seems to me that this only works because of some "given" stuff like having only 2 parties, and having electorates... Disclaimer: I don't want to bother that much into understanding this, like going through lengthy articles on the web. But will definitively read your answers (thanks!)
A lot of stuff in the U.S. is like an early draft of democracy that never got changed.
Whoever gets the most votes wins (aka "first past the post"), but if there are more than two people running, it's very common for the winner to have less than a majority of the public supporting them. It's why we don't see much in the way of third parties.
Instead we have primaries, which are just elections for members of a specific political party, but which have much lower participation than the general election. These are also "first past the post" elections, so as a result we end up with a lot of candidates that people aren't happy with, but you have to vote for the lesser evil.
The house of representatives is vulnerable to gerrymandering, especially because each state draws it's own districts by it's own rules.
The Senate is unfair as written in the constitution - each state gets two senators, regardless of population. So a state like Wyoming or Montana gets two senators while they have a lower population than individual cities like New York or Los Angeles. It's one big reason why we can't get any popular laws passed.
Ideally I'd love to see the president elected by ranked choice voting, the Senate eliminated, and the house of representatives elected by single transferrable vote. But we're so far from that it's science fiction.
You've got it backwards.
This kind of voting forces the existence of two party systems.
Suppose you have two parties one left wing that gets 60% of the vote and one right wing that gets 40% in every district. Right now the left wing always wins.
If the left wing party splits into two blocks of 30% each, the right wing always wins.
So if you want to win, you can never split from the large parties, even if you feel unrepresented.
If you"re unrepresented, how is it winning?
A little thought on drawing district borders that I've had kicking around for a while.
Putting aside all thoughts of gerymandering, let's start with: What is the point of dividing a state up into congressional districts?
And the answer, of course, is supposed to be to make sure that there is someone in Congress who is looking out for the interests of people in your community.
But what is your "community?"
Sure, it's the town, or the part of town you live in. But giving each individual town or neighborhood a representative isn't remotely feasible,
And odds are you probably don't spend all of your time within that tight little bubble around your home. You probably work, go shopping, and/or spend at least some of your leisure time in places outside of that bubble.
I know in addition to the town I live in, I work in another town about 10 miles away, I shop at stores in about 3 other towns at least once a week, I regularly visit my parents and sister who live in a town about 20 miles away, I go hiking, biking, and kayaking in a few different parks around the area, I have a membership to an independent movie theater in another town I regularly go to, I go to bars and restaurants in a few different towns, and to get to all these places, there's probably a half dozen or so towns I drive through but rarely have any reason to stop in.
All-told, it's maybe about 20 towns where I spend probably 90+ percent of my time, those are the areas that are important to me, and ideally if the world revolved around me, that would be one congressional district to make sure that my interests were being represented.
In my case, that's a pretty neat, compact little district, it more-or-less encompasses the towns along 3 major roads that run roughly parallel to each other, and it also happens to be roughly ⅓ of the county I live in.
And for a lot of people who live here, their home range is probably pretty similar. Like I said, it's along some major roads, and basically everything you could need or want can be found within those 20 or so towns.
That's not really enough people to make a congressional district out of (since the number of seats is capped at 435 currently, although when the nation was founded each district only represented about 30,000 people, and if we'd stuck with that ratio it would probably be enough to make about 3 or 4 districts)
I don't hate how my current district. It probably makes a lot of sense on paper, it's basically my county with about a third of a neighboring county tacked on.
That other county is somewhat rural and divided up into thirds. One third is with our county, one third is with another neighboring county, and those are probably the most urban/suburban parts of that county, and it kind of makes sense that they'd be lumped in with our largely suburban counties, the last third is the most rural, and it's lumped in with a few other very rural counties, so that makes sense.
However, I rarely go to that county, if the maps were being drawn specifically for me, it would probably include parts of 2 or 3 other counties before that one. I'd probably even be willing to cede parts of my county to another district in exchange for those parts.
And I think a lot of people here would agree with that. Those other areas I'd include are along major roads and easily reachable from our area, so a lot of people probably shop, work, etc. along those major arteries.
So my ideal district would kind of end up looking like a weird blob with some squiggly branches and nodes along major roads.
And I suspect it would be similar for a lot of people around the country.
So I kind of feel like the ideal way to draw these maps is to just ask people what they feel like their district should be.
Maybe present them with a map of their general area on a computer screen, and have them select towns they visit and drive through regularly until they've selected a big enough population to be a district
Then take all of those maps and sort of average them together and see what most people consider to be their community
Do it maybe every 5 or 10 years when people go to vote.
Not a defense of gerymandering but it's fundamentaly impossible to draw electoral maps that represent people perfectly. Someone has to draw the maps at some point and bias is going to have an effect on that.
And that's assuming people are well represented by their candidate of choice.
This is true if you are drawing maps. But you can mitigate it. Right now in the us it is just wholly unmitigated corruption. My state passed an amendment to have an independent nonpartisan board draw the maps but the republicans ignored the amendment and continued their bullshit of drawing maps purely for their gain.
I've been campaigning against gerrymandering in my state since 2016:
You're right that no map will be perfect. The best practice in cases where you're limited to electing a single candidate per district is to have people who don't have a conflict of interest draw it - an independent redistricting commission.
In our state's proposed bill members of the commission can't be politicians, lobbyists or families of those groups. 4 members are selected from the largest political party, 4 from the next largest political party, and 3 from independents/smaller parties.
Then you have a variety of conditions on the way they draw - not allowed to consider partisan advantage, must hold x number of public hearings, versions of maps must be published in advance of final selection and more.
Final approved map must receive at least two votes from each of the three blocks.
Lastly there's a fail-over process where if a winning map cannot be selected, then any member of the commission can propose a map, and they hold an elimination vote until one remains.
All that said, I think the best long term solution is single transferrable vote. Way fewer wasted votes, pretty much everyone has someone who represents them, encourages third parties.
I'm for direct democracy and I was trying to push in that direction but I'm all for fighting against gerymandering !
Props to you for fighting it since 2016, the plan bill look very nice !
When you say direct democracy what do you envision?
I'm all for that where practical, but the complexity of the necessary tasks and knowledge of issues quickly exceeds what people can realistically keep track of. Governing and legislating needs to be a full time job I think.
It's hard to conceive a perfect system but to paint broad stokes :
Direct democracy mean that the final say is always in the hand of people rather than elected politicians. That doesn't mean they aren't people whose job is to draft up and propose legislation ! But thoose people can't decide instead of everyone and have to listen to specialist and concerned people. To vote a law they have to convince and prove to everyone that it will be a net positive.
Think about it, how many time did you see senators that don't know what a computer is vote laws that reshape internet for the worse. Or think about how leftist in the US are stuck with a center-right party ( Democrats ) that only listen to their donors.
Having direct democracy doesn't mean that everyone has to be politicaly litterate or that legislation specialist stop existing. Ideally it's a system that reward people solving problems and discourage self interested politicians.
Of course they are a lot of obvious flaw in what I said ( the first being how to decide what people mean ), it's an ideal after all and I'm sure that there is a better way to define it. But that's the neat thing about direct democracy, we can all find something better together. ( rather than beg a politicians whose only skill is being elected ).
Thanks for your reply. I'm still having a hard time understanding how it would work. Say for example that there needs to be a new law. How would it get written, and then how is it passed?
The same way public petition work, if a law is needed people will campain around the issue and among thoose people some will draft legislation that could be made into law.
So in this system, would all citizens have to vote on a bill in order for it to become law? How would it be determined that a law is valid/good enough to be brought up for a vote? You could imagine thousands of proposed bills each year. And certainly most citizens wouldn't pay the kind of attention you'd hope would be given to legislation affecting the entire nation, even if it was only a hundred bills.
I do like the idea of a referendum, where if you get enough signatures then it goes up for vote to the entire electorate. But I think that needs to be in tandem with professional legislators.
but when a party or candidate want to change it, you should pay attention
Yes ! I totally agree !
I was pushing for direct democracy rather than telling people go give up fighting gerymandering, guess I failled to make my point ><