Redistricting and the Supreme Court have cut voters out of US House races
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: Redistricting and the Supreme Court have cut voters out of US House races
#2[dead]
Re: Redistricting and the Supreme Court have cut voters out of US House races
#3I'm not sure how this is any different from before. Each person gets one vote. And if the district has a different number, that doesn't mean the voter is cut out of the races. The headline doesn't make sense to me at all.
Re: Redistricting and the Supreme Court have cut voters out of US House races
#4I’m ready for a modern form of representation that isn’t constrained by how many people an old building can hold. I wish small groups could have a representative with a proportionally small fraction of voting power.
Re: Redistricting and the Supreme Court have cut voters out of US House races
#5I'm not sure how this is any different from before. Each person gets one vote. And if the district has a different number, that doesn't mean the voter is cut out of the races. The headline doesn't make sense to me at all.
The voting rights act was a recognition that there's something wrong if a state with 10 congressional representatives and 30% black population ends up with only 1 or even 0 black representatives. That was often done by drawing districts such that the 30% of black voters are diluted by the 70% white voters.
The supreme court has called this "racial gerrymandering" which is a bit rich considering they previously ruled that gerrymandering itself was just fine. Apparently, only fine when it has partisan benefits.
Either way, the solution here is a tool not available when the VRA was passed, and that's fair ungerrymandered maps. There are tons of algorithms that produce fair maps, certainly much more fair maps vs the current gerrymandered maps. We even have algorithms that can measure the level of gerrymandering.
An anti-gerrymandering bill would be good for everyone and should be supported at the federal level. The only people it's not good for is incumbents.
Re: Redistricting and the Supreme Court have cut voters out of US House races
#6I'm not sure how this is any different from before. Each person gets one vote. And if the district has a different number, that doesn't mean the voter is cut out of the races. The headline doesn't make sense to me at all.
At the risk of raising the ire of the anti-AI crowd, this is exactly the kind of knowledge gap that AI can easily handle. Just point any AI at an article like this and say “explain this”. You don’t have to wait for someone else to provide a bespoke answer just for you.
You can have the answer if you want it.
Re: Redistricting and the Supreme Court have cut voters out of US House races
#7I'm not sure how this is any different from before. Each person gets one vote. And if the district has a different number, that doesn't mean the voter is cut out of the races. The headline doesn't make sense to me at all.
This is true for a direct democracy, but for a representative democracy like the US (and many other countries) there's more nuance. Combined with first past the post voting, there's a lot of room for suppression of voices that are not aligned with those already in power.
For say something like the state legislature race in a state, they count up all the seats they have won in each district, and whichever party has won the most seats wins the race. Voters are therefore put in buckets (districts) and their votes are counted in aggregate.
This allows a process called "gerrymandering" to redraw district boundaries arbitrarily. So if there is say a democratic-party majority voting bloc in a particular area, I can redraw the surrounding districts to split that geographic area into many parts, so their votes get split across multiple districts and hence "diluted".
The voting rights act asserted this is a form of voter suppression. Specifically related to black voter suppression, if a state is say 40% black by population and they have no black representatives, it warrants a closer look as to why.
I hope that wasn't too confusing of an explanation. I'm not from the US but I'm quite interested in these things.
Re: Redistricting and the Supreme Court have cut voters out of US House races
#8I'm not sure how this is any different from before. Each person gets one vote. And if the district has a different number, that doesn't mean the voter is cut out of the races. The headline doesn't make sense to me at all.
I can only assume you're being deliberately obtuse since we can very plainly see that gerrymandering directly changes who gets elected. It doesn't even matter if you understand how, the results are blatantly obvious. They can carve up a state such that one party sends proportionally fewer representatives than it's total vote would imply.
Re: Redistricting and the Supreme Court have cut voters out of US House races
#9I'm not sure how this is any different from before. Each person gets one vote. And if the district has a different number, that doesn't mean the voter is cut out of the races. The headline doesn't make sense to me at all.
Let’s say you’re a democrat (or republican, w/e) who lives in a district that’s 50-50 dem/rep. Then maps get redrawn so your district is 80-20. Is your vote worth the same as it was before? Is it a good or bad thing that only ~10% of the population’s vote matters?
Re: Redistricting and the Supreme Court have cut voters out of US House races
#10I'm not sure how this is any different from before. Each person gets one vote. And if the district has a different number, that doesn't mean the voter is cut out of the races. The headline doesn't make sense to me at all.
At the risk of raising the ire of the anti-AI crowd, this is exactly the kind of knowledge gap that AI can easily handle. Just point any AI at an article like this and say “explain this”. You don’t have to wait for someone else to provide a bespoke answer just for you. You can have the answer if you want it.
As a resident anti-AI curmudgeon, you're basically saying "just google it" but nowadays, LLMs store a lot of common-sense answers to plain-language questions, and this is probably a fine use for that. That said, I think there's value in asking questions like this. Conversation is how humans learn.