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The only real solution to gerrymandering is to use a minimally-complicated algorithm. The algorithm need not actually determine the districts. It can instead s

• Feniks 9y ago
  Or you could just do away with it all and go for a one man one vote system. Why a vote in Kansas needs to be tallied differently from a vote in New York in the 2020 elections is beyond me.
  • rukittenme 9y ago
    Because presidential elections are not popular elections. Kansas has proportional representation in the House but is absurdly over-represented in the Senate and slightly over-represented in the Presidency. This is of course by design. The founder's obviously knew about proportional representation and they deliberately chose to disregard it. Shouldn't that give you pause to figure out why?
    • dbcurtis 9y ago
      Indeed. With our current system, rural voices are at least marginally relevant. With a purely proportional system, rural voices would not even be heard.
    • mikeash 9y ago
      The major reason is that smaller states wouldn't have joined any proposed Union that made them irrelevant, so the founders had to have things like the Senate to get them to join at all. This is, of course, no longer relevant.
      • twoodfin 9y ago
        If it’s no longer relevant, it should be possible to convince small states both red & blue to accept an obviously superior system. But it is still relevant for just about all the reasons it was relevant then.
        • philwelch 9y ago
          I think if you had some way of forcing the issue, and telling states like Kansas and Mississippi that they didn't get to have disproportional control over the federal government anymore, and if they didn't like it, they could just stop being subsidized by California and New York, either they would go along with it, or they would secede from the union and deteriorate into third world countries.
      • rukittenme 9y ago
        Why would states persist in a union that made them irrelevant? The politics are still as relevant today as it was then.
        • s2g 9y ago
          Because the alternative is worse.
        • mikeash 9y ago
          It’s way harder to leave than it was to refrain from joining. Another major factor is that Americans mostly see themselves as citizens of the USA first, and citizens of their state a distant second.
    • philwelch 9y ago
      > The founder's obviously knew about proportional representation and they deliberately chose to disregard it. Shouldn't that give you pause to figure out why? Turns out the reason was slavery. A huge proportion of the Southern population was enslaved, and slaves didn't vote. The free staters didn't want slaves to even count toward state population for the purposes of congressional apportionment, while the slave staters did, so they compromised on counting the slave population at 3/5 of the free population. As a result, prior to the abolition of slavery, the votes of free men in slave states were always represented at a higher proportion than the votes of free men in free states. Many of the founders were wise and educated men who thought carefully and critically about how to establish a sustainable republic. But to do so, they had to win the votes of a cross-section of the American establishment of the time, many of whom thought that owning human beings, using them as farm labor, and whipping them if they disobeyed were morally acceptable things to do. And upon making a series of political compromises with these people, they had to rationalize those compromises in such a way to make them palatable to the general public.
      • s2g 9y ago
        Most of them were perfectly fine with owning people.
      • slededit 9y ago
        A lot them even owned their own slaves.
    • s2g 9y ago
      They also didn't choose to tie electors to the per state popular vote and chose the electoral college in part to prevent the election of terrible candidates.
  • krapp 9y ago
    >Why a vote in Kansas needs to be tallied differently from a vote in New York in the 2020 elections is beyond me. population of Kansas (state): 2.9 million population of New York (city): 8.5 million Without some sort of balancing mechanism, you wind up with a single populous city's votes mattering more than the votes from every city in a less populous state.
    • shouldgowork 9y ago
      Without some sort of rebalancing mechanism, you wind up with a singe empty state's votes mattering more than every voter in a city.
      • rukittenme 9y ago
        The mechanism you're talking about is the federal government.
    • mikeash 9y ago
      What is wrong with that, exactly? If the city is substantially larger than the state, it seems reasonable to me that its votes would matter more.
      • krapp 9y ago
        I can see an argument either way. More populated areas to legitimately represent commercial and cultural centers, but also, the needs of the entire system have to be considered.
        • mikeash 9y ago
          What is it about rural voters that make them more important to the entire system?
          • rukittenme 9y ago
            Resources.
  • Anon1096 9y ago
    Districts don't matter for the presidential election. They only affect apportionment in the House of Representatives, which is region based and is 1 man 1 vote (within state boundaries. Even across states the differences in voting power isn't as aggregious as the Senate or overall electoral college).
    • dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Districts don't matter for the presidential election. Except in Maine and Nebraska (selection of Presidential electors is largely a matter of state law, and most but not all states are winner take all.)
  • dragonwriter 9y ago
    Like many features of the original constitution, protecting slavery (the slave states were modtly low population states, with even smaller voting populations, and were particularly concerned that equal representation would eventually turn against them—abolitionism was already a thing at the time of the Constitution, and they were very concerned about it taking hold) was a major concern. The representation structure (and it's special protection against revision by amendment) plus the 3/5 compromise plus the explicit, limit term, protection of the slave trade, among other provisions of the Constitution, were protection against that eventuality.