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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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Number 2 is the actual ideal, not number 1. Number 1 represents, "good," gerrymandering that politicians argue for, but it really only serves them. They get to keep highly partisan electorate that will reelect them no matter what, which means they can be less responsive to the will of their voters. They only have to worry about primary challengers, which aren't very common, and can mostly ignore their electorate without issue.
It's also important to note that this diagram is an oversimplification that can't express the nuances of an actual electorate. While a red and blue binary might be helpful for this example, a plurality of voters identify as independents, and while most of them have preferences towards the right or left, they are movable. The point is that actual voters are more nuanced and less static than this representation.
Number 2 is how distracting would work in an ideal world; it doesn't take into account political alignment at all, but instead just groups people together by proximity. A red victory is unlikely, but still possible if the blue candidate doesn't deliver for his constituents and winds up with low voter turnout. It also steers politicians away from partisan extremism, as they may need to appeal to a non-partisan plurality. That being said, when literal fascists are attempting number 3, we'll have to respond in kind if we want any chance of maintaining our democracy, but in the long term, the solution is no gerrymandering, not, "perfect representation," gerrymandering.
the fascists aren't attempting 3, they've already been doing it for decades. now they just want to do even more, because it's open fascism season so why be coy about it.
Everyone's been doing either one or three for decades, the fascists are just more effective at it. What's changed is that they're doing it in a non-census year with the explicit goal of changing the outcome of the 2026 midterms. The only states with have unbiased districts are the places where people have passed ballot measures against partisan districting, but Democrats have been just as happy as Republicans to pull this shit.
~~2 and 3~~ 1 and 2 are indistinguishable if you don't take political alignment into account. What counts as a line or a column in real life? You need to group/sort people by something in order to draw any of those lines.
Edit: somehow I missed the actual numbers in the image and counted them starting from the sample, so when I said 2 and 3 I was thinking of 1 and 2.
~~Do you mean one and two? Two and three are clearly different, as three has no pattern other than disenfranchisement.~~ I agree that one and two are both valid ways to divide the squares visually, but the text is stating that one is, "perfect," and two is, "compact but unfair," implying that the goal should be getting each political group some representation. That is still allowing politicians to pick their constituents, and even if it's more fair than three, it still built to serve the candidates, not the voters. Compact (i.e. a system that divides districts entirely by geography and population, without consideration towards demographics or political alignment) should be the actual desired outcome.