GOP has the majority of state governors.
GOP has the majority of state legislatures.
Both of the above are currently drawing Congressional districts based on the latest census data.
Both of the above are currently rolling out voting rules that are nominally about preventing fraud (of which there is zero evidence of anything widespread) but will impact the ability of people to vote.
Gerrrymandering indeed has a long history, and it's a bit like nukes - if the other side is already using them, it's hard to hold off on your side.
In 2018, North Carolina saw 50% of the vote go to Republicans, but they received 77% of the Congressional seats. A couple rounds of that is a recipe for a permanent minority for the other party.
Should the region/counties that have a smaller population but different work forces or geographical makeup not have representation? Population alone cannot dictate the house of representatives.
But that is how the House is explicitly defined in the US constitution: "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers..."
Part of the problem is that the number of Representatives in the house has been fixed at 435 since the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. There would be no "small/rural/unique regions aren't represented without drawing crazy district lines" argument if the number of people represented per US Rep were lower.
And, as we see now, the lines of districts are simply not drawn according to regional peculiar needs. They are drawn by party affiliation, by the parties themselves. Which is insane.
That is what the Senate is for. A minority party should never get control of all three branches of government with only 46% of the popular vote. Control of one branch of government is sufficient to exert influence on the legislative process. In our current setup, the minority party has zero reason to appeal to the median voter. This results in increasing polarization as the two parties are no longer competing against each other for voters, but instead are trying to drive turnout.
The ability of the partisan brain to consistently be outraged by the perceived foul play of the other side, while never bothering to check how one's own side is measuring up, is a fascinating phenomenon.
This is really easy to sanity check. For example CA, the best known blue state in the nation. 2020 elections, 79% of the Congressional delegation is D, while only (edit) 66% of the popular vote went for (edit) Ds.
But, but, but, the other guys are even worse than us. We won't stand for truth, fairness or justice, obviously the correct course of action is to out-foul them whenever we can. And then we wonder why the country is on the brink of an ugly divorce.
California, indeed no state, uses proportional representation. The last person to recommend looking at that was ... Lani Guinier. In fact, it's a good idea but it would mean that Wyoming wouldn't get two Senators for its population of 578,000. As a Californian, yeah, proportional representation is a good idea.
California passed non-partisan redistricting back in 2005. This took re-drawing the districts out of the hands of the legislature. It was proposed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and passed as a ballot proposition by the electorate.
First of all, your numbers are wrong[1]. And second, thanks to Trump, R's lost a lot of seats in CA by close margins. Before Trump, the CA delegation was more balanced. It should also be said that CA Democrats are a super majority. Once you get into super majority territory, it would essentially require a reverse gerrymander to protect minority seats.
CA uses a nonpartisan process to create their congressional maps. If and when the Republicans manage to claw their way out of super minority status, I fully expect that the congressional delegation will return to a more balanced state.
I don't think anyone on either side really thinks this is a problem. Look at Utah for a counter example, 75% of delegates with 60% of the congressional vote.
No one on the left is complaining about Utah. When elections are winner take all, big majorities result in oversized representation. And there are still ways for minority party voters to exert influence in these states. For example, they can vote for the more moderate candidate in the other parties primary. The problem is when a state is voting closer to 50-50 like Wisconsin. The Republicans hold a near super majority in the state legislature despite receiving fewer total votes. And because the legislature controls redistricting, Republicans can essentially maintain permanent control of the legislature. That is not healthy for Democracy.
But if you really wanted to fix the CA delegation representation, I would fully support moving to a system where the congressional delegation is determined by statewide popular vote. But that introduces a whole set of issues. For example that means folks would vote for the party instead of candidate, which means we could see further entrenchment of party insiders. The flip side is it would probably make it easier for third parties to get representation in congress. I think this generally would be a hard sell in the US though. I think both core left and core right are too distrustful of their respective party bosses to trust the selection process, and we are a very diverse country, geographically and culturally. So having local representation is meaningful (for example, neither AOC or Taylor Greene would survive a process like this, but both of them have very passionate followers that deserve some representation in congress).
Gerrymandering and disproportionality are separate issues: the former implies the latter, but the First Past The Post voting system (where the winner is the person with the plurality of votes in a given district, irrespective of magnitude) tends to generate the latter even if apportionment is fair.
Example: the United Kingdom. We have independent redistricting, and the Boundary Commission are genuinely not in anyone's pocket. The criteria are debatable in some areas, but gerrymandering is essentially absent. And yet, if you look at the most recent general election, the SNP won the overwhelming majority of the seats in Scotland with only 45% of the vote! [0]
Now that's partly because there are four effective parties in Scotland, but they would have done very nearly that well against any single opposition party. FPTP magnifies the seats for the more popular party.
Bluntly, if the votes are distributed completely evenly, 51% of the votes gets you 100% of the seats. See the Eisenhower/Stevenson presidential election in 1956: Eisenhower got 86% of the electoral college votes for only 57% of the popular vote, because he was (a bit) more popular nearly everywhere.
There are systems which aim to have seats and votes be proportional: they're very popular in democracies beyond Great Britain's former colonies. So the gap you mention is, in principle, fixable. But it's not in either party's interests to do so, so it's likely to persist.
The plan to fix it would be proportional representation (independent redistricting is also a good plan for most states but California already has that). It seems to be getting a bit more attention recently but nowhere near a major push for it that I've seen, even here in Oregon where unaffiliated voters outnumber Republicans and are getting closer to outnumbering Democrats as well. I think we have a decent chance of getting independent redistricting in the next few years and hopefully the state supreme court will improve the districting passed by the legislature.
Edit: We also don't have the top two system that California and Washington have and that high number of unaffiliated voters is even under a closed primary system.
Edit2: Unaffiliated voters in Oregon do include most non-voters, unlike some states.
> There is a noticeable gap there, any plan to fix it?
A gap doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem, unless you believe that proportional representation is important enough to do away with seats having a regional tie completely.
If you don't want to go all that way, algorithmic/automatic redistricting goes a long way to address issues.
[edit since I was obviously not very clear. I'm not suggesting you do actually want to get rid of all districts, just making the point that by nature regional representation and proportional representation are in conflict in pretty fundamental ways. You can hack around it with ideas like floating representatives, super-regions, etc. but you can't really solve it. Gerrymandering, otoh, is an issue in its own right.
I probably should have said "not a problem, or at least not a problem addressable at this level of the system"]
Proportional representation does not necessarily (or even usually) completely do away with seats having a regional tie, although it does increase the size of the region.
> A gap doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem
Yes, it does.
> unless you believe that proportional representation is important enough to do away with seats having a regional tie completely.
Two problems here:
(1) it prevents a false dichotomy that the only way to address the gap is erasing regional ties completely, and
(2) it confuses the question of “does a problem exist?” with the question of “is there a means of fixing the problem that doesn't have it’s own, equally or more significant problems?”
For a concrete scenario: a 50/50 split state with three Congressional seats. One party will likely get one seat, the other two. Potentially by tiny margins.
There will be a major gap in representation, even with perfectly fairly drawn districts.
Heck, even with three seats with PR you get that result; that's a proportionality problem from limited granularity.
This is also why strong, independent, unitary executive systems are themselves an additional proportionality problem on top of any that exist in the legislative branch, as a one-member body is the extreme limit case of granularity-limited proportionality.
Of course, granularity-limited proportionality in a representative body has a fairly obvious trivial approach for mitigation to any arbitrary extent desired, so proportionality gaps from this source are neither non-problems or problems without corrections available.
Order of magnitude means 10x. This is 27 vs 16, not even a binary order of magnitude :)
I agree that gerrymandering is a major issue. I wholeheartedly disagree that it can be solved if framed through partisan lenses.
Our brains crave to know who is on our side and equate that with the good guys. As long as we don't make an explicit effort to snap out of this very seductive mode of thinking, the future is tribal. Memorably, "why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"
Thanks for the link. The congress vote went 66-34. The congressional delegation, 79-21. There is a noticeable gap there.
Perhaps this is a moment to step back, and at the very least analyze the full data set? How much being in charge of the State Legislature gives room for gerrymandering promoting candidates from the same party? Is it really a one side issue, or both parties engage in it with abandon whenever they get the chance?
Well, that was a deeper foray in US politics than I ever wanted. Hastalavista!
The point is, barring consequences for doing it, or a Constitutional amendment banning it, once the other side is doing it, you're fighting with one hand tied behind your back if you don't reciprocate.
It's bad, but it's largely unavoidable in the current legal setup.
This is what I don't understand. Why can't legislators be proactive when it comes to protecting voting rights? We don't need to see any evidence of fraud to ensure the safety of voting rights.
Gerrymandering erases any hope that they will take up a genuine interest in voting rights when they can just manipulate the entire system in their own favor.
No, the State of Florida isn't protecting voting rights, your words. It is attacking voting rights.
For example, Florida passed Amendment 4 in 2018 which returned the voting rights of most felons after they'd served their sentences.
This amendment restores the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation. The amendment would not apply to those convicted of murder or sexual offenses, who would continue to be permanently barred from voting unless the Governor and Cabinet vote to restore their voting rights on a case by case basis.
The state government wasn't protecting voting rights when it litigated the result. Indeed they are attacking the will of the citizens of Florida as expressed by their votes.
There are good arguments both for, and against tightening, or loosening up a number of processes around voting.
Currently in the US, most voting processes are significantly weaker than processes around getting a driver's license, purchasing alcohol, or buying a gun. This encourages participation at the cost of security.
On the other hand, having to be at a certain place in a specific time window, or having to produce a strong identity can reduce voting participation to a minor extent. If this was altered such as by mass mail-in voting then this would reduce security at a benefit of accessibility.
Part of the penalties for a conviction can be paying a fine to your victims or to the state. A logical example of your argument would be that you'd permit Bernie Madoff to vote after his release (provided he lived) regardless of whether or not he fully compensated the numerous victims of his financial crimes.
Its basic data science to identify what kind of errors the current system introduces. Is it Type 1 errors or type 2 errors.
Type 1 = right people not being able to vote
Type 2 = wrong people voting
The US has massive type 1 errors by far. So far I have only seen one instance of Type 2 error - a Republican voting twice. When I see people pounding on reducing non existent type 2 errors I have to question their intent.
You should look at Democratic states. Illinois looks quite gerrymandered as well. I think Maryland (maybe?) was quite bad as well. This is a bipartisan thing. It just so happens that Republicans have the majority of states.
At a national level, Senate Democrats have been trying to pass laws that place general limits on the practice. It would be nice for "both sides" arguments if some version of this project enjoyed bipartisan support: unfortunately it does not.
I don't think the federal government has the authority to stop states from gerrymandering? Am I mistaken? It seems like the Democrats are just virtue signalling.
I think the "elections clause" (Article 1, Section 4, clause 1) gives Congress broad authority to override state laws regarding how its own representatives are elected. (Note: edited to simplify...)
I am aware of that clause but I am not sure I interpret "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections" as the same thing as drawing district lines.
You can be for reform while at the same time benefiting from the current system. If you don't have power, it doesn't matter what your opinions are. If the playing field isn't level, you still must either play on it or forfeit. If you decide to play, it doesn't mean you want the field to remain as it is.
My point is, if Democrats actually cared about this they would fix it in the states they have power in. Instead, they just benefit from it without trying to reform it. It feels like virtue signalling to me. If you think it is a problem then fix it.
I'll gladly trade you the state-level advantages held by the GOP for the national media machine controlled by the Dems. I think the media is the most powerful over the long haul.
I know that a lot of conservative news outlets have been repeating this over and over, but the facts just simply don't support this statement.
The largest TV news organization by viewership is Fox News, and has been for a long time. Fox News was founded to give conservative voices a bigger platform. So it was founded to be a right-leaning (biased) platform.
But that does not make everything to the political left of Fox News left-leaning. And if you start to look at talk-radio listenership then the numbers lean hugely to the right, and often far to the right. The left-wing equivalents are tiny. People who lean to the left tend to gravitate towards centrist media like NPR News, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Again, I know that those are often painted as being left-leaning in the conservative media, but they are starting to paint Fox News the same way, and their politics have been tending right for a decade now.
Conservatives have an extremely powerful media machine too. Some of the most viewed personas on TV and online are conservatives, with the same being true for radio.
Of course there is zero evidence of Voter fraud. States don’t even check for dead voters or voters who moved out of state. Diebold designs black box systems that aren’t audited by hackers.
Saying there is no evidence of voter fraud is like refusing to get an MRI and saying there is no evidence of cancer.
Not sure what you're talking about, there was definitely evidence of voter fraud.
Not on a large scale, but still voter fraud.
It just happened to be from the party that complains about voter fraud non-stop, ironically projection, and gets zero media coverage.
In the event it does get media coverage, it's typically presented in skewed or twisted way.
For example, an Arizona audit found 99 non-counted votes for the current president, and 261 falsified votes for the challenger.
Instead of stating this outright, the number one cable news channel in the United States briefly mentioned it as "360 votes found for the current president" - no mention of the falsified votes of the loser.
Do you have any direct refutations to my allegations? Do you have proof states are auditing for dead voters for example? I am willing to change my opinion if there is evidence to suggest credible voter fraud audits happen, but so far I have not been able to find any.
CA: https://www.ocvote.com/registration/keeping-your-registratio... (this one is particularly detailed on the methods used, including "The Registrar of Voters office checks the obituaries listed in the newspapers daily" and "a list of deceased voters provided by the California Secretary of State’s office multiple times per year")
Yeah, 15 seconds of the slightest search efforts can bring any of this up.
I've found time and time again that anybody who believes there is or ever has been even the slightest issue with "dead voters" is somebody who simply can't be reasoned with, and engagement just isn't worth the effort.
They're completely lost and engulfed in a sea of "their own research"
The problem with all of this is that it's complicated, people misstate things, and everybody is eager to prove that "their side" is right.
So then you get excessive claims like "no state purges voter rolls" which is just easily falsifiable, and then it gets falsified and leads one side to believe that to be the end of it.
Whereas what really happens is that a state goes to purge its voter rolls, they have a list of 100,000 "dead people" and the list is erroneous and contains hundreds of live people, because government databases are full of dung. So then they get sued, often right before the election, to prevent any of the names from being purged, including any of the 99,000+ who were actually dead.
Another thing that happens is that someone dies between the last purge and the election. Then either they submitted their ballot before they died (but were ineligible to vote because they weren't alive on election day), or they were sent a ballot after they died and a member of their family submitted it. So there are always a few dead people in every election who voted after they died, and some of these are actually fraud (in the second case), and others aren't "fraud" but they're still invalid votes that shouldn't be counted. Rarely if ever does this, alone, change the outcome; but the ballots are there.
Which results in the over-claim on the other side. "There are zero dead people voting." Also easily falsifiable.
Then each side gets to declare the other side wrong and biased and hidebound and irrational.
What you say is true, but at the same time there was a voter fraud commission started in 2017, formed with the explicit charter of investigating such claims. This commission was disbanded after they couldn’t make progress showing that “thousands and thousands” of people fraudulently voted in 2016, causing then President Trump to lose the national popular vote. He made very specific claims about people being bussed around New England to vote across state lines, which is why he claims he lost New Hampshire that year.
The claim is perpetually that there is a problem that needs to be fixed. Literally millions of dollars and an entire political party has set out to answer this question in the affirmative, but they can’t even prove their claims in a court of law. The most telling instance if this in the last year was Rudy Giuliani refusing to make a claim of “fraud” in front of any judge after the 2020 election, but claiming “fraud” as often as he could in front of any TV camera.
So yes, both sides have overstated their case at times. But only one side is perpetually making a very strong case that they will never take to court where they have to provide specific evidence of their claims. It’s very notable and telling that the extreme case they say is the status quo (rampant voter fraud that stole the election from Trump not once but twice) has never been proven by them or anyone else.
> Then each side gets to declare the other side wrong and biased and hidebound and irrational.
Here is where we are right now. A team of auditors in Arizona spent months trying to show fraud occurred there that tipped the scales in Joe Biden’s favor. The result of their audit was that Joe Biden won a slightly larger margin than originally counted. How was this result spun by Trump?
“We won on the Arizona forensic audit yesterday at a level that you wouldn’t believe … They had headlines that Biden wins in Arizona when they know it’s not true … He didn’t win in Arizona. He lost in Arizona based on the forensic audit."
Did you get that? Trump loses Arizona, demands a recount, gets the recount, recount determines Trump did in fact lose, Trump claims exact opposite, and millions of people follow his lead and repeat this lie.
That is the level of reality denial and irrationality coming out one particular party. This is a mind bending level of denial and delusion.
So when you say things like the above, that “each side gets to declare the other wrong” it really serves to blur the context and normalize this insanity, making it seem like the two sides are the equally deluded. Yea maybe if you look only at the extremes, but this is the main stream GOP party leadership pushing this, not the fringe. The two sides are not the same on this issue.
Let me see if I can try to make the case for the other side here.
> Did you get that? Trump loses Arizona, demands a recount, gets the recount, recount determines Trump did in fact lose, Trump claims exact opposite, and millions of people follow his lead and repeat this lie.
> Official Canvass has 3,432 more ballots cast than the list of people who show as having cast a vote (VM55)
> 9,041 mail-in voters show returning more ballots (EV33) than they were sent (EV32).
> 277 Precincts show in the Official Canvass as having more ballots cast than people who showed up to vote (VM55) for a total of 1,551 excess votes.
> There are 2,472 ballots shown in EV33 that don’t have corresponding entries in the VM55, and only 2,042 ballots show as rejected in the Official Canvas for a discrepancy of 430.
> 397 mail-in ballots show as received (EV33) that never show as sent (EV32).
> 255,326 Early Votes show in the VM55 that do not have a corresponding EV33 entry.
The trouble with this is that you can find that the numbers don't add up, but then what? You don't know which ballots were the extra ones. All you can do is count them again and then you get the same count from before.
There was one category of irregularity where they could actually redo the count. Ballots that were in some way messed up get "duplicated," i.e. copied onto clean ones. But they still had both the originals and the duplicates. The counts didn't match, which is bad. They had more duplicates than originals. But they could redo them.
The assumption in doing this was that the "extra" duplicates should be discarded, rather than that some of the originals had been lost. Under that assumption, Trump lost a few hundred votes. Naturally this is the only part of the report of any significance to media outlets on the blue team.
Trump goes the other way. Declares that all of the remaining irregularities would have been votes in his favor.
There is apparently no way of proving it one way or the other at this point; the information is not available. We don't know which ballots were the "extra" ones in the other cases. Which means he can't prove it. Because nobody can prove it one way or the other. But something went wrong.
Having a number of unexplained irregularities that exceeds the margin of victory for the state is bad. "Undermines confidence in the election," as they say. If nothing else we need to make sure this doesn't happen again by figuring out how it happened this time and keeping better records going forward.
> The most telling instance if this in the last year was Rudy Giuliani refusing to make a claim of “fraud” in front of any judge after the 2020 election, but claiming “fraud” as often as he could in front of any TV camera.
This is why the media is such a trash fire.
After the election they were filing a zillion lawsuits all over the country. Some of them were alleging fraud. IIRC one in particular was about something like the state violating its state constitution, or violating election laws, something like that. So he says it on camera in court; that particular case wasn't about fraud. The media picks it up like he's made a confession of wrongdoing.
All of the coverage was like this. One side: Massive fraud unprecedented mountains of evidence! Other side: There is no fraud whatsoever stop looking immediately STFU!
As far as I can tell what actually happened was something like this.
Most elections are pretty messed up. There is some fraud here and there, and a vast sea of incompetence. The 2020 election was like that on meth, because of COVID.
Then it all mostly just cancels out. If each party commits a similar amount of fraud, and the effects of incompetence are random, it doesn't change the outcome. Also, most elections aren't close enough for it to matter.
Then Trump figured out you can challenge individual districts. If you go into a district that went 80% for Biden and find all of the problems that actually did happen there, you might invalidate enough ballots to matter, and probably the same 80% of them went for Biden.
This is kind of a dick move, but in theory it's a valid thing to do and the response from the other side should be to go into a district that went 80% for Trump and find all the problems there. Then if the problems cancel out it doesn't change the outcome and all you're doing is excluding all the ballots that actually ought to be excluded.
In practice there are two reasons Democrats didn't want to do that. First, it would have taken a long time and they wanted to be able to declare victory. This isn't really a legitimate reason but you can see why they would want to do this.
Second, mail-in ballots. If a higher percentage of mail-in ballots were messed up than in-person ballots, and more of the mail-in ballots went for Biden, uh oh. You don't know that's going to happen before you look, but it could, so do you really want to look?
So then it's a media war. Trump sucks. He's making a zillion fraud claims and most of them are crap because he's just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. But if they just let him, something might stick. Maybe not, but "maybe" is a big risk. So the other side decides that they want to suck too. If a report comes out, it's bad for Trump. It doesn't matter what it says; strip out anything that helps him, remove all context, find some excerpt that sounds like it's bad for him, whatever it takes.
Then everybody is doing the Big Lie. Mischaracterizing everything the other says, acting as political operatives instead of journalists. It's not the truth vs. the lie; everybody's lying. The other side is evil. They must be stopped.
Come on. The other side is the guy sitting next to you on the subway.
There is an obvious flaw, which is that someone could die between the time voter registration for the election is finalized and when ballot is submitted. The fact that you ignore this suggests that you are not discussing this in good faith.
> Snodgrass was busted after a Delaware County election worker questioned the signature on his father’s ballot. A subsequent investigation revealed the ballot had been mailed to H. Edward Snodgrass on Oct. 6 — a day after the 78-year-old retired businessman died.
Voter registration isn't "finalized"; quite a few states have same-day registration or provisional balloting. There's verification steps that happen on and after election day.
Both of the above are currently drawing Congressional districts based on the latest census data.
Both of the above are currently rolling out voting rules that are nominally about preventing fraud (of which there is zero evidence of anything widespread) but will impact the ability of people to vote.