What’s even more unfair is area based voting, where your individual vote doesn’t count to affect the government, you instead vote for a local representative which in turn effects the government. Your vote for president or prime minister should be direct, not a postcode lottery even without gerrymandering.
Or even better, the position of president or prime minister should have little power.
You don’t want that. France tried that, a couple of times, it didn’t work. Government ended up deadlocked and falling every 6 months. Our 5th republic granted more power to the presidency, and now it’s a little better.
What you do want, however, is the head of state and the head of government to be two distinct persons. Which is not the case in the USA.
When the Senate’s full of cucks, they let you do it
I mean, you could go the other way. Presidencies are bad on their face and the chief executive should be promoted from the party with a legislative majority (ie, Parliamentary system).
Then go after single representative districts and the obscenely high constituent to representative ratios.
Area based voting is a necessity for electing a local representative. But it shouldn’t apply for national elections, on that I agree. The US is the only country I know of that applies area based voting in national elections.
And the UK, as the parliament is made up of local representatives. They should be two different people.
That is the Westminster system. It’s fine in that the head of the executive only has power so long as they have the confidence of the elected members. If the elected members lose confidence then the government falls. The government is the house, so your vote does directly influence the government on either the government or opposition side. Don’t get too jealous of the American system - it’s a bloody mess in its own right.
The Government isn’t the house, it’s the around 140 ministers appointed by the PM, drawn from both houses, plus the whips. Opposite them is the opposition frontbench, which is the leader of the opposition and the shadow cabinet, and their whips. Everyone else in the Commons from those two parties are backbenchers.
“Government” has two meanings here. The oppostion has an official role in “governance” which is why they have offices, sit in committees, have research budgets, vote etc. In a minority government situation The backbenchers have a great deal of control over the process. Opposition included. The “GOVernment” controls the process to great extent.
This isn’t like the American system where the minority partner is relegated to the sides. The opposition play a very strong role in the parliamentary process. It doesn’t map well onto American politics at all.
Your vote for president or prime minister
The whole reason a prime minister is different from a president is that they’re not elected by direct votes. They’re the leader of the party with the most representatives (more or less).
Obligatory mention of CGP Grey and his fantastic animal kingdom voting series: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY
I love that video. One awesome solution he brings up is letting math draw the district lines, specifically the shortest-split line method. There’s also an updated version of the method called Impartial Automatic Redistricting, that uses an approach similar to SSLM, but will only make cuts along the boundaries of census blocks (the smallest geographic unit used by the Census Bureau) to avoid cutting towns/neighborhoods in half, although it can create some odd results sometimes.
However, I think both of these would currently be illegal in the US under the Voting Rights Act for not taking minority representation into account. That is one downside to these methods, even though they’re probably still an upgrade compared to the heavily-gerrymandered system in the US. So in the US’s current system, the algorithms would have to be updated to somehow take that into account.
There are also a few other neat district drawing rules on Wikipedia that he didn’t cover which are worth a read.
And Alpha Phoenix demonstrating how to produce rigged boundaries that look natural and not suspicious:
It’s almost like the idea that representation based on land instead of based on people is flawed to begin with.
We were never going to do representation by population. We barely got the southern colonies to agree to apportionment with land. (This was the 3/5ths compromise.)
Not sure what you mean, get rid of districts? If you break up the population into groups then you get a geographic area.
Yes. Representation should be proportional. In other systems of democracy, you vote a party and if that party wins 25% of the vote, then they win 25% of the representatives. Gerrymandering works because it’s based on land being more important to representation than people.
I think you could move somewhat towards having both. Let them gerrymander as much as they want, but at the end you also appoint additional districtless seats nominated by the winners, proportional to the number of votes they won by.
y u no direct democracy?
In my opinion there shouldn’t be districts at all. Too much potential for fuckery.
Proportional representation is the way. X% of the vote means X% of seats, no shenanigans
The secret is that you need proportional elections within each district. What also implies that they should be bigger…
Or, in other words, just copy Switzerland and you’ll be fine.
(Personally, I’m divided. The largest scale your election is, the most voice you give to fringe distributed groups. I can’t decide if this is good or bad.)
In my country Germany the system is that every party above 5% can send representatives according to their percentage of votes. Then there are districts, who have to have size of approximately 250.000 inhabitants with German citizenship, who send a representative of the party with the most votes.
There a laws in place to not seperate counties, towns and cities when district lines have to be redrawn.
It’s a bit simplified of course.
The point of representatives is that they each represent a small portion of the population. If you remove districts, then who are house members representing?
Indeed that’s the intention, but in practice gerrymandering often leads to the opposite outcome where urban cores are divided up with large rural areas to suppress one side’s votes.
See Utah’s districts for the most obvious example of this. It would be logical to group Salt Lake City in one district, Provo + some suburbs in another, then the rural areas in the remaining districts. But instead the city is divided evenly such that each part of the city is in a different district, with every district dominated by large rural areas.
You can have an electoral division of your country without gerrymandering. Cf most european countries.
Most European countries do not use first past the post, but proportional representation with multiple elected representatives per voting district. There is far less incentive for politicians to gerrymander with proportional representation.
One of the main complications in the US is the racial mix. Looking at party lines and geographic boundaries is an over simplification
Say 20% of the population is black, and the state has five reps. Two neighboring cities each have 30% black population, and enough population to have two of the five reps. The rest are dispersed in rural areas. Do you draw that each city gets one rep? Or do you draw such that a district has a majority of black residents, with funny boundaries to accommodate the geography?
The former means that you will more likely end up with a white representative for both cities and the voice of the black community are not heard in the legislative body. The latter means that you have now gerrymandered to ensure a group gets a voice they deserve.
This is the real pain in the ass about the whole thing. Some level of drawing stupid districts is needed to create good. Pure geographically created boundaries will only cause segregation if we want minority groups to have an equal voice in the legislature.
But, people in power tend to fuck everything up.
When everyone votes along party lines, why does it matter if you have local representation ? Barely any of them actually vote how they think their constituents would want them to vote, they vote however the party tells them to vote.
This is a very cynical point of view that would make it even less possible for independants to be represented in the House, remove town halls from the system, and therefore make the entire system even less democratic and remove the entire point of a representative democracy.
There is zero benefit to this.
Proportional voting would actually make smaller parties be able to have representatives, breaking up the 2 party system and promoting more diverse point of views. You can also have mixed systems, with locally elected reps for a part of the house, and the rest of the house being filled in a manner that the end result is proportional to the global voting share
I’m not saying getting rid of local representation is the solution, necessarily. In fact, I personally think the opposite is true and we need more local representation.
It’s just with the current system, local representation is kind of useless and supports gerrymandering and corruption.
If I were in charge I would demand political parties to disperse completely and local representatives be the only people on the ballot to go ahead and make decisions for the people who voted for them. Vote for the person not the party.
The United States is not a nation anymore. It’s a corporation. It’s also 100% corrupt. When will people come to terms with this? As long as most people are in denial of this, it will always be so.
Fun fact, the term for running a nation like a corporation is fascism.
Well it’s already been this way for like 20 years almost. It’s been forming for many decades, but it’s a done deal.
I will never understand how the highest number of votes isn’t winning. Bucha cheatin ass bitches
Well, it’s a complicated issue. Let’s assume there’s a state where all but an area of 10 blocks votes for candidate X. If that area happens to be split between several cities, the people living there are SOL as their vote is basically useless. Gerrymandering allows them to have a say in what goes on. But yes, as with everything, corruption ruins it.
Gerrymandering by definition implies malicious intent
Yep. I just didn’t wanna draw a distinction between gerrymandering and regular settings of electoral borders because that’s a mouthful.
What? Without districts and zones, people vote individually. Majority wins. Pretty basic. Keep everything else the same, voting zones, districts, whatever, where people go, but count it as a PERSON no part of a preconfigured cheated group.
Or just do mail in ballots with online tracking that it was received. Done. Majority wins. No electoral college or other bs.
With all the shady shit the US does that other countries don’t seems like majority in US was designed to fail against money.
This way it doesn’t matter that you live or moved to an opposing zone, you still vote and count towards your vote, not a small group.
The issue is less to do with votes inside a district, and more with the apportionment of the districts themselves.
For something like the presidential election a popular vote makes (more) sense.
Where gerrymandering comes in is regional representatives. I’m supposed to have a congressional representative who represents me and my neighbors.
‘Districting’ is the general practice of defining what constitutes a group of neighbors. When done properly you tend to get fairly compact districts that have people living in similar circumstances represented together. The people living near the lake get a representative, as do the people living in the city center, and the people living in the townhouses just at the edge of town do too. (A lot of rules around making sure that doesn’t get racist or awful, but that’s a different comment). ‘gerrymandering’ is the abuse of the districting process to benefit the politicians to the detriment of the voter. Cutting the districts in such a way that people who tend to vote the same way get spread around to either never or always get a majority share, depending on if you want them to win or not.The above poster is wrong, and gerrymandering never had a valid usage. If 10% of the population has a political belief but they’re spread out amongst different districts, then they’re supposed to lose, not have the system bend over backwards to give them a special group.
Districting has value though, since it’s the way the system is supposed to allow people from smaller areas to have their voices heard without being drowned out by bigger areas, but fairly, such that each representative represents roughly the same number of people.Other countries also do this type of districting, they just have other systems in place that keep it from being so flagrantly abused.
My mind was stuck on presidential and more nationwide elections, which popular vote makes sense. Local things should be more regional like you described. If you don’t live by the lake, you have pretty much zero say on what those that do live there say.
100% thought you had done that, and just wanted to ramble some clarification in case. :) it’s pretty easy to focus on the “big” elections, and how what makes them shitty is essentially the “small” elections working properly-ish.
Personally, I’ve always wondered about a system where people directly vote for the representative they want regardless of geography, and then that person represents their constituency.
Geography used to represent a much more significant part of a persons interests, since you likely worked reasonably near where you lived, shopped and everything else. That’s less true now.
It’s moot since we’re not changing the fundamentals of our system anytime soon, but it’s interesting to think about.
Then the people living in those 10 blocks have to live with whatever the rest voted for regardless of whether it works for them or not with no hope of things ever changing because they’re in the minority.
Yes, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Your regional representative is supposed to represent your region. If you’re the minority in the region then you don’t get to pick the representative.
We don’t have a proportional voting system. The system is not designed to ensure that elected party makeup matches voter preference distribution.
The minority voters in your scenario get their say in the Senate votes where everything is equal and the district is the entire state.In any case, the scenario you’re describing is more representative of the cracking type of gerrymandering that’s the problem. A collection of voters in a region being split amongst multiple districts to dilute their votes is what gerrymandering is.
Hmm, I think I might have completely fucked up my phrasing somewhere because you seem to be agreeing with me.
It appears you’re saying that in some circumstances it’s appropriate to layout voting districts based on the political affiliation of the people who would end up in the various districts, with the intent of ensuring some seats are won by a minority party that would otherwise not hold power.
I’m saying that districting should be based on shared interests, predominantly geographic in nature because that’s how our system is designed, but that it should definitely not factor in political affiliation.
This means that if a political group is spread out and in the minority, they will not be represented by someone sharing their party affiliation, and that’s as it should be in our system.
I see. Yeah, that’s definitely entirely on me. When I said they should be grouped by political affiliation, I did mean “shared interests” but somehow forgot people treat politics like football teams.
Well, in a perfect world, people wouldn’t vote specifically to hurt others.
Integrity is most common in other countries, but not in the united states.
Pay more attention to home friend, Europe is sliding into corruption hand in hand with us. But that would get in the way of nationalism wouldn’t it?
Fragile Europeans: Americans are children who need a babysitter
Also fragile Europeans: a couple brown people arrive welp, back to the 1930s
At least in the UK, Germany and France, certainly. Although, tbf, Americans are their own kind of unreasonable, fearful and violent. Western Europe is America-lite.
Congrats, you have written the dumbest take I’ve read today
The US is failing more rapidly than other countries. But, it should be seen as an opportunity to look at your own country and think “ok, how would a morally bankrupt party exploit this thing that just used to be a tradition or a norm, and exploit it because there’s no actual rule?”
We really aren’t we just have a spotlight on us and third parties deliberately making it look bigger and worse
Where do we draw the line?
I’ll caveat this by saying that I detest gerrymandering and think it’s one of the roots of the decline of the US political systems.
That being said, I’m going to answer a question you might not have even asked with a bunch of information that doesn’t answer things better than “it’s complicated.”
The easiest “fair” way to divide up districts is based on equal polygons (say squares that are XX miles/km on an edge, for simplicity’s sake). The issue is that this doesn’t take into account population gradients due to terrain and zoning, or cultural/ethnic clusters. So, on its face it looks reasonable but you’ll end up with districts that cover a city with 1 million people of diverse cultural makeup standing equal with a district of 1000 people that are culturally/ethnically homogenous. Not actually fair.
So, you can try to draw irregular shapes and the next “fair” way to try and do that is to equalize population. Now you quickly devolve into a ton of questions about HOW to draw the districts to be inclusive and representative of the people in the overall area you’re trying to subdivide.
Imagine a fictional city with a cultural cluster (Chinatown in many American cities for example), a river, a wealthy area, a low income area, and industrial/commercial areas with large land mass and low resident populations.
How do you fairly draw those lines? You don’t want to disenfranchise an ethnic minority by subdividing them into several districts, you might have wealthier living on the river, you might have residents with business oriented interests in the industrial areas AND low income… It quickly becomes a mess.
A “fair” districting can look gerrymandered if you’re trying to enfranchise separate voting blocs in proportion to their actual population.
The problem is that politicians play this song and dance where they claim they’re trying to be fair (until recently in Texas where GOP said the quiet part out loud and just said they want to redraw lines to get more seats) but in reality they are setting up districts that subdivide minority blocs into several districts that disenfranchise their voting interests.
It’s disgusting, it’s a clown show. But none of OPs photos are representative of what a good district looks like, because every location is different and there’s likely an incredibly small number of locations that would divide that cleanly, if any.
So, it’s complicated. Needs to be independently managed outside politics as best as possible and staffed by smart people and backed up by good data.
Most sane countries leave electoral boundaries to an independent commission
The more I hear about this Jerry Mander fella, the less I care for him.
You jest, but it was named after a person:
The term “gerrymander” originated in 1812 from the redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry. The newly shaped districts, particularly one in Essex County, were said to resemble a mythological salamander. Federalist party members, critical of the practice, coined the term “Gerry-mander” (later shortened to gerrymander) by combining Gerry’s name with “salamander”
Fuck you Gerry, fuck you and your fucking madering
This is kinda if topic, but why does the US have term limits for the presidency, but not all the other major positions?
In the original Constitution, there are no limits for any of them. George Washington made it a tradition not to seek a third term, but it wasn’t actually enshrined into law until ~150 years later.
It was invented because FDR was so popular that without that rule, his bones would probably still be president to this day.
Ive never understood why someone who is popular can’t keep doing the job. I also don’t understand lifetime appointments like the supreme court without mandatory retirement ages or other mechanism to prevent mentally deficient people in the role
They focussed more on term length
- House: two years for frequent turnover, voice of the people
- Senate: 6 years for stability, maturity
- judges: lifetime, for independence from who appointed them and from politics of the day
While these don’t seem to be working right, anyone proposing changes needs to understand what they were trying to do and not make it worse trying to fix another aspect
It was added for the president with Roosevelt. Likely because the president has much more power than a single congressman.
Oh I knew it happened then, but I don’t really follow the reasoning.
I am glad it affects Trump, but I think Obama might still be president of he was ever elected (he may never have run as the world would have been very different anyways)
Why do votes need to be done by district? Just do it statewide
The purpose is to have the people of smaller areas represented by an individualized Congress member. So the people in say the backwoods of California, aren’t being spoken for by all big city people from LA/San Fran etc. When something is going on in your district, you are supposed to have someone who is empathetic to your cause and familiar to it. Then they bring that to the house and make the argument for you.
Aka, when someone brings up a federal code change proposition that will bankrupt the main source of jobs in your town, your legislature is supposed to go to bat, not fall in line and let your town die. 200 jobs being lost doesn’t sound like much to a large city, but in a town of 2,000 people that’s game over
Good point but for presidential elections, electrical districts don’t make any sense. You could just use the total votes for the whole state to allocate electoral votes. Also, if the districts are being manipulated to provide a skewed election result then are the districts really groups of people with similar needs?
Good point but for presidential elections, electrical districts don’t make any sense.
In 48 out of fifty states, they don’t matter for presidential elections. I think only Maine and Nebraska split their electoral college votes at all.
Also, if the districts are being manipulated to provide a skewed election result then are the districts really groups of people with similar needs?
The original purpose has indeed been corrupted in many places, and those where it hasn’t are tempted into a “race to the bottom” as states with modest but persistent majorities are gerrymandering their states to the hilt. Still, the original idea of electoral districts makes a lot of sense, and even moreso when communications and travel were much slower.
Because the concerns of farmers in California’s central valley are different from the people in Hollywood.
Right, but without districts you could have ranked choice voting so the farmers in central California can vote for candidates that they want to represent them and all of their votes should be able to elect those candidates. Meanwhile, people who vote in other regions should have enough votes to elect candidates of their choosing.
The candidates might all focus on the big population centers, and the central California voters might have to choose between LA candidate A, LA Candidate B and SF Candidate C.
This will lead to the majority of the state getting full say and suppressing minority views. This can be political, racial, etc.
California has a large Republican population. If it goes state wide they get zero voice as the full state will go blue.
These days I’m kinda fine with that, but in principle this is wrong. The same suppression logic can be spread to ethnic groups, etc.
From reading the comments of others I’ll say it seems like I’m pretty uninformed about how the actual process works. But what i meant was that if there are 6 electoral votes and each candidate wins 50% if the votes in the state then they both get 3 electrical votes. If there are 8 electoral votes and someone wins 27% if the vote they get 2 votes, not all or nothing
Gerrymandering is the reason I get upset when people assume all texans/southerners are hateful hicks. Lived there for years and the right/left split is pretty balanced, even leaning left on many big issues, in most of the area I’ve frequented. It’s just that poorer areas are rigged to fail and the powers that be have been running dirty campaigns for longer than many of us have been alive.
Just this last cycle, an old friend in the area received two different mail ads for (iirc) Ted “Zodiac” Cruz. One of them was in english and the other spanish. The english one was, for the most part, “honest” (as much as these types can be called honest, I mean) about his platform, while the spanish one explicitly lied in a way that made him seem like he was trying to benefit the immigrant community. Extremely fucked up and not too uncommon, according to a few inter-generational sources. That plus how jurisdictions are divided has made it extremely difficult for the left to get any major wins for the last handful of decades+. The south is even less ruled by the people than the rest of the US and the many decent people just trying their best to survive out there get shit on for what their oppressors choose all the time.
Sorry for the rant and tbc, there are also tons of shitheads out there too. Its just not like what many outsiders assume it is, and everything about the situation pisses me off something rancid.
Cracking and packing
Hmmm, interesting choice of colors, considering which famously colored party is currently in the news for aggressively gerrymandering…
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/31/politics/gerrymandering-texas-republicans-analysis
Texas Republicans are apparently going big with their brazen attempt to redraw the state’s congressional maps in the middle of the decade, outside of the normal redistricting process.
A draft map released Wednesday would add three new districts that would have voted for President Donald Trump in 2024. That would mean 79% of the state’s districts (30 out of 38) would have backed the president compared to his 56% share of the vote in the state.
It would also put two House Democrats who won Trump districts in significantly more danger in 2026.
The proposed map is intended to help the GOP hold on to the House — where they have a historically narrow majority and history suggests Democrats are very likely to pick up seats — in the midterm elections. The map could help Republicans flip five seats, significantly raising the bar for a Democratic takeover of the chamber.
All of which has set off a predictable round of whataboutism on the right. Yes, Texas Republicans are going for the bare knuckles on this one. But what about all those egregious Democratic gerrymanders? Both sides play this game, right?
Yes, both sides gerrymander. But that doesn’t mean they are equal-opportunity offenders.
** Republicans pretty clearly benefit more from gerrymandering, and there’s an increasingly strong case to be made that they go further in using the tools available to them. ** Gambits like what Texas is doing are rare, and it’s been Republicans who have led the charge.
But this is the subject of plenty of debate, and there’s a school of thought that gerrymandering has become effectively a wash.
Some analysts point to recent election results that show the percentage of House seats each side wins these days more or less matches their share of the nationwide popular vote for the House.
Republicans, for example, won about 51.3% of the two-party vote in 2024. And 51.3% of House districts is about 223 seats. They won 220 seats.
In fact, these numbers have tracked closely over the last four elections. While there was just a three-seat gap in 2024, it was only two seats in each of the previous three elections. Neither side is winning a significantly disproportionate number of seats.
But just because the seat totals so closely mirror the overall vote shares doesn’t necessarily mean gerrymandering didn’t have an impact – or that one side or the other didn’t go to more extremes to try and secure the seats they won.
The ways in which populations are distributed matters greatly, for instance – particularly if one side’s voters are a lot more concentrated. Just because a state is competitive doesn’t mean that a “fair” map would be a 50-50 one. Generally speaking, “fair” districts are thought to group people with similar interests or backgrounds, and respect existing geographic boundaries. Sometimes in order to get that 50-50 split or even a narrow advantage for your side, you have to get pretty creative.
In addition, gerrymandering can be a risky game. A really extreme gerrymander could backfire if your effort to create as many favorable districts as possible spreads your voters too thin and you wind up losing seats. (Some have wagered this could happen to Republicans in Texas, particularly if the GOP can’t replicate Trump’s big 2024 gains with Hispanic voters.)
If the results of that gerrymander weren’t as lopsided as envisioned, does it really mean it wasn’t an extreme gerrymander?
This reinforces why you can’t just look at seat totals and vote shares. You really need to look at individual maps and how aggressively they’re drawn. This is, of course, a somewhat subjective exercise that depends on what factors you look at. But some experts have attempted to do that.
The Gerrymandering Project at Princeton University, which evaluates the maps holistically, gives a “D” or an “F” rating to slight majorities of maps drawn by Republicans and those drawn by Democrats.
PlanScore, spearheaded by well-known academics, finds that more maps have a bias toward Republicans than Democrats across a number of metrics.
These PlanScore numbers, too, come with caveats.
One is that, in about half of states, the map-drawing process wasn’t fully controlled by one party or another – either because the state has split legislative control, or because courts or redistricting commissions do it. So even if more maps favor Republicans, it’s not just because they drew them that way.
The second is that a big reason more maps appear to have a GOP bias is that Republicans simply get more opportunities to gerrymander. They have full control of more states because they hold the “trifecta” of the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the state legislature. In the most recent round of post-Census redistricting, Republicans controlled the drawing of 177 districts (estimates on this vary slightly), compared to just 49 for Democrats, according to a 2022 report from the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.
(Part of the reason Republicans have more control is their superior standing in state governments and the fact that blue states have been more likely to outsource this process to redistricting commissions.)
The Brennan Center has also noted that Republicans appear to benefit from state courts having a more laissez-faire approach to partisan gerrymandering.
All told, the center found 11 Republican-drawn maps that had extreme partisan bias, compared to four drawn by Democrats, ahead of the 2024 elections.
Which brings us to the latest developments. They certainly reinforce the idea that Republicans are more ruthless about using this power.
The reason Texas is so controversial isn’t just that Republicans are drawing such a slanted map; it’s mostly when they have chosen to do it – in the middle of the decade, outside the normal post-Census redistricting process.
Maps are sometimes redrawn after that post-Census period, but usually it’s because courts force states to do so. When state legislatures have done this of their own volition, it’s been Republicans in charge.
Depending on how you slice it, we’ve seen three or four modern attempts like this at mid-decade redistricting.
The GOP did this in Texas and Colorado in 2003 (though the Colorado map was struck down) and in Georgia in 2005. They also redrew the maps in North Carolina in 2023 after a newly conservative-leaning state Supreme Court reversed an earlier decision and opened the door to partisan gerrymandering.
State legislative expert Tim Storey told the Washington Post back in 2003 that the strategy appeared unprecedented at the time.
And while Democrats are talking about a tit-for-tat in which they would do the same thing in states like California and New York, that would be a response to the GOP’s own gambit. Not to mention, Democrats would also face major legal and political hurdles in these states to make that a reality.
Indeed, Republicans seem to be leaning in on a mid-decade redistricting arms race, knowing they have superior capabilities and can take things further — just like they have before. _
