No Rights Reserved -- this is great, all fonts should be public domain, but I would love to see actual CC0 attached, otherwise I can't trust it really being public domain legally, which discourages me from using it.
Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts
131–140 of 195 posts
Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts
#132Massachusetts created Gerrymandering yet we are not represented by a single glyph. Rewrite them!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-did-term-gerrym...
Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts
#133FiveThirtyEight did a great podcast series on gerrymandering in 2017 [1]. It turns out to be a much more complicated topic than I expected. Some gerrymandering is even legally required to ensure proper representation of minority groups even if they live in somewhat distributed communities. 1: https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/gerrymandering-podcast/
State representation usually clusters around class issues not ethnicity. And even if it didn’t, why arbitrarily focus on ethnicity? Handicapped people need representation, yet we don’t draw districts that ensures they get one. And if we did, and started splitting votes by who we think need the most representation, we might as well do away with democracy and start arbitrarily arranging representatives.
This is one reason why proportional representation is a better system. Parties can form to represent different types of interests, and their power is proportional to the number of votes they get. Instead, in the American winner-takes-all electoral system, the Supreme Court decides which groups need representation and mandates that they get gerrymandered districts.
Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts
#134In Wisconsin, the now permanent ruling party won 60% of seats with only 48.6% of the vote.
The politicized SCOTUS' 5 to 4 decision to up hold that gerrymandering was hardly a surprise:
https://www.wpr.org/us-supreme-court-ruling-effectively-ends...
Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not quite sure I follow you, could you elaborate?
One of the arguments in favor of the electoral college is that it boosts the voice of people who are in areas with lower population density. This is to ensure that minority interests are respected and taken into account by presidential hopefuls. Without this protection the voices of people who live outside the 5 major metropolitan areas simply wouldn't matter and candidates would have no reason to listen to their iss…
Why are people so keen on evening out geographical representation, why not age, or gender, or sexual orientation, able bodiedness or some other arbitrary measure like left handedness?
I think if any measure should be focused on getting equal representation its class. But guess which class is both by far the largest, but still has the least representation. Perhaps it is the purpose of arbitrary drawing of districts to keep it that way.
Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also district shaping is more complex than you might think. For instance some distracts were purposely built around a minority groups neighborhoods so that they would have a representative. If you made the districts purely based on grids then the group would be too small to have any representative. Which maybe is the wrong solution. But you get funky district shapes for all sorts of reasons that are not the corruptio…
Isn't it interesting that folks will justify gerrymandering when it's built to support a minority group, unless that minority group is the one particular subset of the population who aren't generally allowed specific representation?
That is because what you are referring to as "one particular subset of the population who aren't generally allowed specific representation" does not need any help in making sure they have representation. One, they are not (currently) a minority and two, they have the vast majority of the power in this country already.
So no, it isn't interesting.
Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts
#137Massachusetts created Gerrymandering yet we are not represented by a single glyph. Rewrite them! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-did-term-gerrym...
Massachusetts also has an unusual shape that makes sense on closer inspection, like I'm guessing some of the glyphs do.
Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proportional would be nice, but that's a more radical change. I am an incrementalist and believe restoring sanity to the existing system is the good first step, and easier to get done.
Sometimes a system is so bad that the only reform is a revolution. Incrementalism is simply an unrealistic option in many cases, including voting reform (and climate change)
I doubt that a revolution in the USA would go so well considering the military hardware that some state police departments have.
Even, a political grass roots revolution would be unsuccessful as many people are resistant to change and would not back it.
Incrementalism is the best approach as it slowly changes people and doesn't get their defenses up from the get go.
Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's currently a push to take it to the supreme court so it can be stopped once and for all. Archive link because the Baltimore Sun doesn't like Europe: http://archive.is/a3mMR
If they do this doesn't this mean 5 cities will dictate who is in charge of the country?
It makes sense that the majority of the population should be able to “dictate” (really: have majority influence on) policy, doesn’t it?
Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the arguments in favor of the electoral college is that it boosts the voice of people who are in areas with lower population density. This is to ensure that minority interests are respected and taken into account by presidential hopefuls. Without this protection the voices of people who live outside the 5 major metropolitan areas simply wouldn't matter and candidates would have no reason to listen to their iss…
This is why we have the senate, two votes per state even though alaska has less people than the city of Seattle. The point of the electoral college was that news travels slowly so voting for a rep to vote for you to represent your district was the right thing to do. Now, everyone can vote for themselves and probably should and we can have it counted in a day or two.
The original intent of the two chambers of congress was that the Senate would represent the state (government) itself, and the House would represent the people living in the state. It wasn't until later that senators were elected by the people rather than appointed by the governor.
If the electoral college was apportioned correctly and the size of the house not artificially capped, there wouldn't be any reason to compare "voting power" of low-population vs high-population states.