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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

#81

Post by drewmol »

CalChris wrote: post #18
jghn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the point of the Senate. The House is supposed to be the proportional one.

No, the House isn't proportional. There is a minimum of one House member per State: each State shall have at Least one Representative . At 321.4 million / 435 = 738850. Wyoming wouldn't even get a House member. Vermont wouldn't either.

It was intended to continue to grow with population, I copied this from a previous comment of mine bc I'm lazy:

"The U.S. Constitution called for at least one Representative per state and that no more than one for every 30,000 persons." [1]

The Appointment Act of 1911 and subsequent Permanent Appointment Act of 1929 capped the total number of House congressional representatives at 435 [2], so the degree of seperation between an individual elector and their representative in any given congressional district continues to grow as population increases. This also has an effect on the Electoral College, as it's membership numbers are based on the number of congress persons. Furthermore, I will assume this limit, combined with a growing population will increase the chances of a Presidential Candidate winning election without also winning the national popular vote, as we have seen on multiple occasions in recent decades.

[1] http://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/The....

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#82

Post by wand3r »

dvt wrote: post #23
thephyber wrote: post #11

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…

I also caught some discussion about it on NPR. One argument, even as I am just as cynical as above poster; is that the Republicans did such a good job gerrymandering that best case they can keep their status quo and more than likely; they will be worse off. This was iirc because they balanced the demographics do well with their support base and any restructuring will actually hurt them. Based on the NPR bit which seemed to make a reasonable argument to me; an uniformed person, potentially they could back something like this.

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#83

Post by nindalf »

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.

Does each voter have a particular representative they can express their opinion to? As I see it, calls from constituents is an influence on politicians because they know these are the people who they depend on. I don't know how it works in Germany so maybe there's a provision for this.

Also, the unintended consequence of such an electoral system is that it encourages extreme views, rather than moving towards the centre. Of course gerrymandered districts have the same effect, but centrism is worth striving for, I think. It ensures that a majority of people have a candidate who isn't far from their own views. You can see how proportional representation would help parties like the UKIP do far better than they otherwise would have, which is not necessarily in the best interests of the nation.

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#84

Post by nindalf »

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…

> oversight branch

And who watches these watchmen?

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#85

Post by delhanty »

I'm political in outlook, sympathetic to the proposal, and like to see politics on HN as long as it has sort of hacker angle to it.

On the other hand, IMO this sort of story crosses the threshold into general politics, which in the long term degrades HN and hence doesn't really belong here.

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#86

Post by nostrademons »

baron816 wrote: post #12
zeckalpha wrote: post #3

I feel like most of these changes would require a constitutional amendment.

We don't just need a Constitutional amendment, we need a new Constitution. People act like the Constitution we have came down from the heavens in a beam of light. But it was written by a bunch of guys who had never lived in a real democracy before. In fact it was written at a time when there pretty much hadn't been ANY democracies in the whole world for two thousand years. We've had two hundred years of experience an…

Great Britain had become a constitutional monarchy and rough parliamentary democracy (and Great Britain, for that matter...Scotland and England merged soon after) with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. British politics in the mid-1700s was a contact sport, and many of the upper-class colonists who would become the Founding Fathers spent their formative years watching Britain wrestle with what it means to be a democracy. Many of the principles in the Constitution come from bitter experience, and are direct reactions to misbehavior on the part of colonial governors, magistrates, or members of parliament.

There are certainly parts of the Constitution that are woefully out-of-date, but it's not really true that it was written in a vacuum, nor that the United States was the first democracy for two thousand years.

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#87

Post by mozumder »

nindalf wrote: post #84
mozumder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> oversight branch And who watches these watchmen?

is that something people haven't figured out?

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#88

Post by CalChris »

drewmol wrote: post #81
CalChris wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the House isn't proportional. There is a minimum of one House member per State: each State shall have at Least one Representative . At 321.4 million / 435 = 738850. Wyoming wouldn't even get a House member. Vermont wouldn't either.

It was intended to continue to grow with population, I copied this from a previous comment of mine bc I'm lazy: "The U.S. Constitution called for at least one Representative per state and that no more than one for every 30,000 persons." [1] The Appointment Act of 1911 and subsequent Permanent Appointment Act of 1929 capped the total number of House congressional representatives at 435 [2], so the degree of seperation…

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand

Remember, the same people who wrote the Second Amendment wrote this. In any case, that was superseded post Civil War by Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. That allows for the Reapportionment of 1929. It would seem that that would override the 1 House member minimum but it doesn't because, because nothing.

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#89

Post by maxerickson »

rayiner wrote: post #75

This is my election district: http://imgur.com/a/C1UmB . It's in the dictionary next to "illegal gerrymandering." The southwest lobe near D.C. is predominantly African American, while the northeast lobe near Annapolis is predominantly Caucasian. Though I can't figure out who is being disenfranchised.

Apparently Republicans.

http://www.fairdistrictspa.com/updates/efficiency-gap-votes-...

Re: Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

#90

Post by uncletaco »

IncRnd wrote: post #43
CalChris wrote: post #10

We have gerrymandering at every level, but first with the States. Why does Wyoming have two Senators and California have two Senators? We have 12% of the population of the US. Wyoming has 0.18%, smaller than DC. Of course, this continues with the House and the Electoral College. Et cetera. However, there is no incentive for Wyoming and ND and Alaska and ... to fix this. No Taxation Without Representation? Sure, but t…

>> Why does Wyoming have two Senators and California have two Senators? The answer is that the US is not a Democracy, and the Senate was created to limit the short term vacillations of the people. When you think of representation in the House, think of representation of the States. The United States of America not the United People of America.

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.
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