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This is sad that america is being shown how little voting matters when district manipulation occurs. If both dems and repubs do it equally then it might be a wash but it sure exposes a shaky, questionable system.
Exposes? Everybody that pays attention has known about the bullshit that is gerrymandering forever.
It's literally en par with election fraud. Just because it's done beforehand using statistics doesn't make the resulting elections any less of a sham.
It is essentially the highest crime that can be committed against a democracy, and it has been treated as "dirty politics" for decades; with the Supreme court of clowns approval.
This is one of countless examples that already proved America was a failed state, long before Trump appeared.
Yes it's at the top of the list with citizens united and first past the post... Everyone knows it's bullshit.
All these first past the post countries have the same problem, that the only people who could change the broken system are the people who benefit most from its brokenness. This suggests it's a mistake to put the management of electoral systems under the control of elected politicians. The alternative I guess would be some kind of independent, non-partisan body, but then there is always the question of who runs that body and how you prevent its capture by people with a specific political agenda. It's always going to be an ongoing process of review and change, but giving management of the whole thing to the same parties that stand to be elected seems particularly risky.
America isn't really a democracy...
We keep saying it is, but it's not
In order to get the numbers in the current system to replace it with a more democratic system, shit like this needs to happen.
That's the only way to "fix" the current system, to replace it
Last year I heard a story or two of people who didn’t even know that Biden wasn’t running anymore and that was within a week of the election. Informed US citizens are rarer than you’d think.
Too bad the vast majority of the people don't.
Single representative geographically constrained districts are already a bad system. The fact that these districts have swollen from 15-20k (at the nation's founding) to 600k+ (in the modern day) have only escalated the degree to which politicians (and their donors) get to pick their voters.
If you want to talk about fixing our broken political system, we need to consider uncapping the total number of House Reps (an artificial limit imposed back in the 1920s to benefit incumbents) and shrink district sizes and afford voters the freedom to select representatives outside the constraint of voting districts.
Bemoaning the gamesmanship over district shapes, at this stage, is just arguing over how you want the game to be rigged. But the idea that districts which are more swing-y are somehow "more fair" than ones that are entrenched by a particular party ignores the dynamics that swing a district to begin with (money, media access, internal party politics). People outside the party duopoly are still wholly unrepresented. People on the losing end of an election are also unrepresented. And people who can't access their elected representative (because they can't afford a $2000/plate fund raising lunch) are also unrepresented.
The US came very close to having a first amendment that had a low cap for the number of people one house rep could represent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment
Dems control districting of fewer seats than reps. That's just a path to permanent minority rule by the reps.