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Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

uglygerry.com

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Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#81

Post by EGreg »

meddlepal wrote: post #65
pergadad wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could drop the whole issue by turning to a representative democracy with proportional voting, where it's about policy not individuals raising money.

Yes and the barrier to do that is so much higher than OP's suggestion. It's so high that it's nearly impossible. Idealism is great and all, but you gotta have a practical plan to achieve something.

The barrier remains regardless of whether you contact your rep, or not. We may as well ask for both.

Multi member districts is not a bad idea for the House of Representatives. Can be done on a local level. But there needs to be a constitutional amendment.

Why not simply switch to a system where a state itself is a giant multi member district, like a parliamentary system?

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#82

Post by toddsiegel »

pergadad wrote: post #56
toddsiegel wrote: post #24

It says tweet your reps. To be clear, you should probably contact your state rep about this (and send an email, not a tweet). They have the power to do something about it. This is very important, esp. in light the recent US Supreme Court decision on this subject[1]. Gerrymandering creates safe districts that make primaries hold increasingly more weight then general elections, which is leading, in a significant way, t…

Or you could drop the whole issue by turning to a representative democracy with proportional voting, where it's about policy not individuals raising money.

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.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#84

Post by zw123456 »

I think that a solution this problem as well as many others like undo influence, too much money needed and so on, could be solved by increasing the number of representatives. I believe that the only stipulations in the constitution is that each state must have at least one and that a representative cannot represent less than 30K citizens. The number was frozen 35 in 1911 by the house, but they could change that if they wanted to without changing the constitution.

The reason I think this would help on a number of levels is as follows 1) Gerrymandering becomes more difficult if there are a lot more districts. 2) influence peddling and lobbying is diluted if there are more representatives. 3) the voter can have more influence and contact with their representative if their congress person represents a smaller sized constituency.

I think arguments around the size of the building (the capital) are silly, who cares where they meet, it can be in a stadium, or even better why bother having them all in Washington DC. it can all be done with telepresence in todays world and then you as a citizen could go down to say the court house and sit in the audience as your representatives interact via telepresence.

I get it that perhaps all this seems crazy or whatever, but none of it would require any changes to the constitution. It could be done by the House itself with no consent from the Senate or President.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#85

Post by meddlepal »

EGreg wrote: post #81
meddlepal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and the barrier to do that is so much higher than OP's suggestion. It's so high that it's nearly impossible. Idealism is great and all, but you gotta have a practical plan to achieve something.

The barrier remains regardless of whether you contact your rep, or not. We may as well ask for both. Multi member districts is not a bad idea for the House of Representatives. Can be done on a local level. But there needs to be a constitutional amendment. Why not simply switch to a system where a state itself is a giant multi member district, like a parliamentary system?

> Why not simply switch to a system where a state itself is a giant multi member district, like a parliamentary system?

Because this isn't software... you can't just "switch" to a different form of government like that.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#86

Post by padobson »

legitster wrote: post #45
tunesmith wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More competitive? Or more representative of the overall population? Because those two things are at odds. Say you have a state that is split 55/44, and has nine districts. Do you want nine districts each at 55/44, meaning 9-0? That's more competitive, but less representative of the state. Or do you want five districts for one, and four for the other? That's more representative of the state, but less competitive. Redi…

This is SUPER important. People think redistricting is a panacea, but it actually sounds like a super tough nut to crack. Even states that have non-partisan districting enshrined in law are going through their own controversies and it doesn't (at first blush) appear to be solving anything. 99pi/538 did an excellent series on the topic I would recommend.

Came here to say something like this.

Chief Justice Roberts' opinion[0] touches on the legislative evolution of the problem. The advent of districts was instituted by congress to encourage proportional representation - and it worked! Gerrymandering is actually an improvement over the older system that led to situations like GP is describing.

Gerrymandering is not the problem, it's a symptom. The problem is first-past-the-post elections. Ranked-choice voting or some other proportional system isn't a panacea either, but it's much better than judges re-drawing political districts instead of elected representatives.

[0]https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-422_9ol1.pdf

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#87

Post by runarberg »

clmckinley wrote: post #80
tunesmith wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More competitive? Or more representative of the overall population? Because those two things are at odds. Say you have a state that is split 55/44, and has nine districts. Do you want nine districts each at 55/44, meaning 9-0? That's more competitive, but less representative of the state. Or do you want five districts for one, and four for the other? That's more representative of the state, but less competitive. Redi…

The problem with this analogy is that the 55/44 split is not equally distributed across a state. In virtually every case there are pockets of one or the other. As long as you keep the goals of uniform, compact and consistent sizes they should do a much better job of getting closer to the 4/5 you are looking for or maybe a couple of safer and a couple of swing districts. What happens now is that the party in control (…

> My bigger question is when the political split is more like 80/20 case should the 20 be guaranteed representation?

Yes they should. They should get around 20% of the representatives.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#88

Post by the-pigeon »

labster wrote: post #19
yholio wrote: post #2

In case it's not entirely clear, the font ridicules the practice of gerrymandering: toying with electoral district borders so that the results favor the incumbent while corralling the voters of the adversaries. So extensive is this practice that the resulting shapes can approximate any letter of the alphabet. Quite readable too.

Except that it uses non-gerrymandered districts from California, where elected officials are not allowed to draw the lines. So any statement is lost, but I guess it’s a fun art project.

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 corruption people typically think of.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#89

Post by schoen »

hammock wrote: post #83

Reminds me of the butterfly alphabet: https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/archive/Vm4Dpv... Sad there are no examples of the font in a sentence though. Is it readable? If it was the point would be stronger.

You can download the OTF font file from the bottom of the page and try rendering text in it yourself.

I made a sample for you at https://imgur.com/TjqUYQt

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#90

Post by padobson »

bcatanzaro wrote: post #42

Could we reduce the power of gerrymandering by increasing the number of districts? At the first census, there were 3.9M people and 65 districts. Now we have 327M people and 435 districts, so the number of people per district has increased by 12.5X. I would think this makes gerrymandering more lucrative, since gerrymandering works because of quantization error.

Let's do a 100x - 43,500 districts. This would probably fix Citizens United too, it'd be really expensive to buy 43,500 congress members.
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