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Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

delaney.house.gov

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Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#171

Post by heurist »

notadoc wrote: post #131
heurist wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh I agree that it's a good start and gerrymandering is bad, but can you honestly imagine this type of bill passing in this political environment? Congress has a, what, 12% approval rating?

I think it's being presented in the hope that a future Congress will run with it. Or that his constituents will appreciate his ideas. It is beyond this Congress to fix the system they've brazenly manipulated for their own benefit.

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#172

Post by uncletaco »

IncRnd wrote: post #100
uncletaco wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a democracy, albeit a flawed one. The only criteria for being a democracy is having the ability to elect your rulers. Also, despite what the Senate was created to do, all Senators are now elected by citizens of their states. With the janky exception of the president you vote directly for rulers at every level of government.

>> The only criteria for being a democracy is having the ability to elect your rulers That's incorrect just looking at the definition of the word Democracy. Don't look at Google's definition of the word. Google almost always gets their definitions imprecise or incorrect. Look in a dictionary, either online or one that you have. You may also want to consider that you posted your comment on a page about gerrymandered e…

I understand that I posted my comment on a page about gerrymandered elections, but there a polities in the world that are republics but not democracies: North Korea, China (at the national level), Turkmenistan.

Any polity where a country is at least de jure considered a public matter can call itself a republic.

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#173

Post by marcell »

mitchty wrote: post #150
marcell wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a bit of a troll? You haven't given any substantial reason for why North/South Dakota makes sense, while North/South California doesn't, except that "Republicans... wanted 2 states that would vote Republican", which obviously is not a legit reason. If it were, we would split North Dakota into 100 Dakota's so that it would give 200 Republican votes in the senate. Also: > Yes, as someone from North Dako…

> This seems like a bit of a troll? Umm, no, thats the accepted reason why the territory was split in two instead of becoming a state outright. From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Territory because apparently one must link history or be called a troll. > Admission of new western states was a party political battleground with each party looking at how the proposed new states were likely to vote. At the…

> Are you proposing we merge these lesser states together and allow California to be the one state to have separations due primarily to population?

You're ignoring my overall point. The concept of "states" doesn't make sense in the way it did when the country was formed. The 13 colonies were actually separate states, with separate governments and economies that agreed to join together to form a single state/country.

However, as you pointed out, the process of creating states became political. An example (as you showed) North/South Dakota were split for political reasons, to achieve a certain voting outcome. The criteria being used to separate them is a political one, not something based on separate economic structures, or separate governments, or some other notion of what a "state" is.

This shows that the notion of a "state" has changed since the late 1700's. Some current "states" are the result of political calculations, where as the original 13 states were separate entities in some other sense.

> Are you proposing we merge these lesser states together and allow California to be the one state to have separations due primarily to population?

I'm saying the entire concept of a "Senate" with 2 reps for each "state" doesn't make sense today. It's an outdated concept from a different reality.

The Senate does have other useful properties, of course, but the current division of states doesn't make sense.

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#174

Post by estebank »

anarazel wrote: post #113
breatheoften wrote: post #57

How about something sensible -- take a census of which party each person supports and then you get proportionate representatives from each party above .15% of the population. Elections then just determine who gets the seats allocated to each party. That's roughly how it works in Germany. Poof -- suddenly there is no such thing as gerrymandering.

> How about something sensible -- take a census of which party each person supports and then you get proportionate representatives from each party above .15% of the population. Elections then just determine who gets the seats allocated to each party. That doesn't solve the issue that there's different directions within a party, and that the choice within a party has significant influence. In the US there's a lot of d…

Part of that problem in the US is caused by the current electoral system naturally devolving into a two-party system. Under the German system multiple parties can sprout without having a spoiler effect.

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#175

Post by dvt »

tptacek wrote: post #168
dvt wrote: post #23

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…

I liked every part of this comment up to "Jon Ossoff's crushing loss", which is crazymaking. Unless I'm missing something very important, Ossoff was competing for a district that hadn't gone to a Republican by less than 20 points in the entire history of the district (it was redistricted sometime around ~2000). Ossoff --- who is not a great candidate! --- took one of the most solidly Republican suburban districts in…

The fact that the Democrats outspent the Republicans by a factor of 7[1] and still lost. But that's exactly my point: the Democrats tried to manufacture a candidate in a time of dire need instead of first going for school boards, local municipalities, etc.

For what it's worth, Handel was a pretty terrible candidate too. Just goes to show how weak the Democratic strategists are. Obama won because he was an excellent candidate. Here's a novel idea for Democrats: get more awesome people to run for office.

[1] http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2017/06/19/the-race-for-georgia...

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#176

Post by dllthomas »

ionised wrote: post #161
dllthomas wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, let's say I'm a doctor, I'm well convinced that smoking is quite harmful, but I find myself too addicted to manage to quit. Certainly, my nonetheless quitting is the best outcome. But telling people to quit despite not doing so myself is preferable to telling people not to quit, isn't it?

That is not a case of hypocrisy being the right thing, but rather the doctor doing the right thing in spite of the hypocrisy, not due to it.

Sure, I don't think you can find a case where hypocrisy is the right thing to do for the sake of hypocrisy. That's not really an interesting observation when clearly no one places a positive first-order moral value on hypocrisy.

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#177

Post by blurbleblurble »

aptwebapps wrote: post #118
blurbleblurble wrote: post #51

I'm reading a lot of resignation, and I feel it too. Why is it than when SOPA came out or when health care is on the line, people rally super hard, but when election reform is out, there's almost no effort? Why can't we get passionate about this too?

SOPA was not a core issue for many members of Congress so it was possible to keep it from passing. Healthcare reform was a core issue for most Democrats, who had the majority at the time, so it was possible for them to pass something. I don't think enough people are exercised about this issue for it to have much chance of going anywhere any time soon.

I think that's what makes stuff like this so daunting... People are ignorant of the gravity of these things, and write them off as technicalities, but really they skew the entire dynamic of our political system so that existing polarizations are more readily exploitable, and so that attempts at working across the isle are unstable. I'm not saying there aren't other elements at play, but the election system needs major reform...

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#178

Post by tptacek »

dvt wrote: post #175
tptacek wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked every part of this comment up to "Jon Ossoff's crushing loss", which is crazymaking. Unless I'm missing something very important, Ossoff was competing for a district that hadn't gone to a Republican by less than 20 points in the entire history of the district (it was redistricted sometime around ~2000). Ossoff --- who is not a great candidate! --- took one of the most solidly Republican suburban districts in…

The fact that the Democrats outspent the Republicans by a factor of 7[1] and still lost . But that's exactly my point: the Democrats tried to manufacture a candidate in a time of dire need instead of first going for school boards, local municipalities, etc. For what it's worth, Handel was a pretty terrible candidate too. Just goes to show how weak the Democratic strategists are. Obama won because he was an excellent…

Read the story carefully. It's not a factor of 7, or even close to that. A larger proportion of Handel's support came from outside the campaign.

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#179

Post by mburns »

mozumder wrote: post #73
mburns wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. How is starting from scratch preferable to passing 3 or 4 amendments in the current system to address the largest issues we've struggled to fix over the decades?

Because you need a lot more than three or four amendments, each of which might not be ratified. It would be a lot easier to start from scratch. If you look at the list of lies told by trump, you'll find that they each need amendments to fix, not just laws passed, since it laws are only as good as a president that enforces them. the entire structure of government can change. There isn't an oversight branch that enforc…

>Because you need a lot more than three or four amendments, each of which might not be ratified.

They would be separate battles, sure, but I think 3 or 4 amendments would solve a majority of the underlying structural problems we face.

A few well-chosen amendments would break our current congressional gridlock, allowing laws to be passed to further address systemic problems but don't themselves require constitutional amendments.

1. voting rights & auditability

2. gerrymandering / district drawing

3. campaign finance

Just these 3 changes alone would radically shift the accountability and representation of politicians in federal government. It would be transformative in terms of policy shifts.

>If you look at the list of lies told by trump, you'll find that they each need amendments to fix, not just laws passed, since it laws are only as good as a president that enforces them.

This is not true. Trump is only 'protected' from Impeachment because the house is not representative of the nation. This is caused by (1) gerrymandering districts and (2) setting an artificial 435 maximum on the number of house representatives. Fixing (2) doesn't even require an amendment, technically, and would shift the electoral college such that Trump would not have won in the first place.

>A parliamentary system is more useful.

It would be interesting for a state to actually adopt a parliamentary system.

>There isn't an oversight branch that enforces checks and balances, for example.

That is the Press. There certainly could be more explicit legal protections to formalize the role journalists play in investigating corruption and whistleblowers.

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#180

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #178
dvt wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the Democrats outspent the Republicans by a factor of 7[1] and still lost . But that's exactly my point: the Democrats tried to manufacture a candidate in a time of dire need instead of first going for school boards, local municipalities, etc. For what it's worth, Handel was a pretty terrible candidate too. Just goes to show how weak the Democratic strategists are. Obama won because he was an excellent…

Read the story carefully. It's not a factor of 7, or even close to that. A larger proportion of Handel's support came from outside the campaign.

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