131–140 of 180 posts
Surely guaranteed to go nowhere.
Solid start though. Even if the redistricting measure was dropped, a federal holiday for election day and top-two primaries would clear out a lot of the clogs in our election systems. I'm not sure the top-two measure is constitutional though.
Better than open top-two primaries: ranked-choice voting. Better than districting by committee: multi-member districts. Election Day holiday: good, but throw in automatic voter registration. https://represent.us/ http://fairvote.org
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world wouldn't run without at least a little hypocrisy. I don't think hypocrisy is inherently immoral. Some immoral actions are hypocritical, but some hypocritical actions are the right thing to do.
Can you give a concrete example where being an hypocrite would be the right thing to do?
It's a good thing because if some countries went down a political path, it would be very adverse to our self interests and the interests of the world at large (Iran 1979, Cuba 1959, Germany 1939, etc).
Also, "the right thing to do," is a very relative term.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > > the party in power will never allow this to make it to the floor of the House for a vote > The implication here is that the Democrats don't gerrymander. This is patently false. I don't think that's really the implication. At the moment it is pretty clear that the GOP currently overall benefits more from gerrymandering [1]. And they are in power, despite having lost the popular vote [2]. The GOP has control over…
> Are you really arguing that to be able to be against the concept of gerrymandering, you've to give up any chance of ever actually being able to do anything about it? Not really. I'm arguing that most (in all honesty, probably all) gerrymandering complaints by Democrats are sour grapes because they got outplayed. In fact, Delaney himself was "first elected in a gerrymandered district created specifically for him," a…
I fail to see how that's an argument for anything. Unless maybe, if you want to argue that Delaney is voting against his personal interest.
> Gerrymandering is generally not that big of a deal and cracking down on it doesn't solve much, as populations are naturally segmented[1]. > [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/ca....
That primarily seems to be an argument for it not being that a huge issue in CA. Or maybe that the mechanisms for redistricting weren't great in CA.
Given that a significant numbers of states have houses with significantly different party percentages than the popular vote suggests, this is a hard to understand argument.
I'm not sure how this would end gerrymandering. Setting up a committee to handle districting doesn't solve anything. If I remember correctly, didn't someone finally come up with an algorithm which evenly divides populations such that average distance from the average location of the district residents is minimized? A law which mandated use of that or a similar algorithm for district boundaries would actually help. Ju…
> If I remember correctly, didn't someone finally come up with an algorithm which evenly divides populations such that average distance from the average location of the district residents is minimized? I had a colleague (mathematician) who suggested presenting district-ers with a dramatically distorted map of the region to be districted in which neighbourhoods were unrecognisable, and all that could be seen was popul…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the party in power will never allow this to make it to the floor of the House for a vote The implication here is that the Democrats don't gerrymander. This is patently false. The Democrats are just pissed that the Republicans did a massively better job at it in the past decade. In many ways, it was an arms race, and the Democrats chose not to focus on small and local districts and elections (instead, worrying about…
Assuming the parent post hasn't been edited, it doesn't seem to say what you suggest it does (at least not by my reading). So, before we succumb to knee-jerk reactions that continue the political dysfunction, can we all just put our energy and minds toward solutions? Revenge politics (they did it, so we will to! get them back!) hurts.
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Tu quoque . [0] One of the most powerful fallacies in politics. Shuts down countless reform attempts. Loved by the corrupt. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
I'm not sure it's that effective these days. The American electorate just seems to expect that its leaders will be hypocrites and rewards them for it.
I'm not sure how this would end gerrymandering. Setting up a committee to handle districting doesn't solve anything. If I remember correctly, didn't someone finally come up with an algorithm which evenly divides populations such that average distance from the average location of the district residents is minimized? A law which mandated use of that or a similar algorithm for district boundaries would actually help. Ju…
There are undoubtedly other factors to consider than proximity and party affiliation. The key takeaway is that districting is an opinionated act, algorithm or not. If we're going to "solve" gerrymandering, we need to figure out what "successful" districts look like first.
While it doesn't sound like a bad proposal and could probably get a strong majority of votes in some alternate dimension, the party in power will never allow this to make it to the floor of the House for a vote.[1] The more cynical I become, the more I think the party in power doesn't actually want to solve any problems, they only want to focus on wedge issues to ensure they can use {rage, fear, some other emotion} t…
> the party in power will never allow this to make it to the floor of the House for a vote The implication here is that the Democrats don't gerrymander. This is patently false. The Democrats are just pissed that the Republicans did a massively better job at it in the past decade. In many ways, it was an arms race, and the Democrats chose not to focus on small and local districts and elections (instead, worrying about…