Gerrymandering Shadow Government Democracy Mafia Mod Topic

[skitter30]

i live in a good country so i dont know much about gerrymandering

what are the arguments for it over pure democratic vote?

There aren't arguments for it over a pure democratic vote

Basically states get to determine how the redistricting process works, and some states allow the party in power in that state's legislature to draw the districts. Some state parties are corrupt and have redrawn districts to grant them an unfair advantage in elections - like splitting a democratic city into four parts so that no one district has enough democratic votes to win the election

There are several civil rights groups trying to fight this in the Supreme Court currently

Like this isn't optimal so much as a tactic used by corrupt politicians to gain and obtain power

(And there's another issue that about 100 years ago Congress capped the size of the House of Representatives at 435 I think, which means that more popular states do not have proportional representation in the electoral college - CA has 55 votes for just under 40 million people while Wyoming has 3 for just under 600,000)

[skitter30]

You might be thinking "Gee, jjh927 sure is talking out of his ass. Nobody's changing the borders of places" but it's the way these things were originally set up and general political sentiment tied to locations still carries from hundreds of years ago

Districts within states (ie the districts for the House of Representatives) are redrawn every 10 years, and some states' redisteicting appear to explicitly favor one party or the other

[skitter30]

There is no argument for it being a good thing and to my knowledge it doesn't happen in America any more. It's just a thing that some people in positions of power do to secure more power

Some states (like North Carolina and possibly Pennsylvania iirc) are actively embroiled in court battles trying to argue that the state districts have been gerrymandered and give an unfair advantage to the Repiblican party