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This repub regime is really showing us how much our system of government depends on having good-faith actors in (elected) positions of power. There truly are not sufficient checks in place to protect against one election's worth of bad actors.
Kind of amazing that this all worked for about 250 years, and heartbreaking that it could crumble in the next 2.5.
worked for about 250 years for a select group of people only
didn't work for the native americans, slaves, poor people, etcetera
Things have improved for those groups over time, notably. We took a shit system and tried to make it represent all of us.
Apologies if I misunderstood the american election system, but the fact that for the past 100+ years you've had a bipartisan system in which both parties pander to the wealthy tell me it hasn't really worked. Or rather only worked for the ruling elite.
The system has basically always been two-party. It's the only stable arrangement for FPtP voting anyway. So, yes, it has been status quo for 250 years.
Even strong checks can't hold back bad faith actors indefinitely
Yes if you elect people that agree to the majority of the house, senate, president, state houses, and governors, they tend to get their way.
No, it depends on a population that actually cares about democracy and will punish those "bad faith actors" at the polls. Unfortunately, we're dealing with Americans here.
These assholes are going to make violent revolution inevitable. Why they think they will survive that revolution is a mystery.
Because they think they have the vast majority of those institutions with the ability to inflict violence on their side.
And from where I'm sitting, it looks like they're right
Oh there is no doubt they have a monopoly on violence, but America has more guns than people and virtually no mental health care so..............
So...those with a monopoly on violence will use it ruthlessly against any disorganised violence. Have a look at Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia.
The only way individual citizens with small arms will have any impact on organised groups with automatic weapons, armoured vehicles artillery and air support is if they one get seriously organised in an underground fashion and two convert some of the military groups to their side.
If they don't do both those it'll just be massacres and wholesale internment in concentration camps. The MSM have already shown they're happy to whitewash whats going on, so you'll never hear about the majority of extra-judicial killings until years later if ever.
The US has about 3 months left to raise a serious resistance, otherwise the show is over and the fat lady is singing.
Organization is a weakness. Attack the leadership and it’s less effective.
How do you attack a large number of individuals engaging in stochastic violence unconnected from each other?
How do you attack a large number of individuals engaging in stochastic violence unconnected from each other?
The same way every oppressive regime has.
Look to history and there have been some succesful insurgencies, there's also been a LOT of oppressed populations ground down into compliance. Random individuals operating on their own have never to the best of my knowledge achieved significant change. Groups of people working in cells to minimise infiltration and quisling risks however have.
I am glad you are optimistic, and I wish you luck in your endeavours. I certainly would like to see your fascist regime fall.
Because it worked for people like them in China and Russia.
I will never understand how this obvious manipulation has been legal for decades.
The pretense is gone now though, which is fascinating. And scary.
It’s literally just partisan warfare with legal exploitation, and voter bases apparently think it’s justified. I mean, what are they gonna do, side with the other party over it?
centuries*
Federal government won't do anything about it. States control their own elections and therein lies the conundrum. Texas is proving very willingly that it doesn't care about the rules as long as they win.
GOP, not all of Texas.
Won't matter unless the progressives of the state get organized.
when lawmakers break the law and nobody enforces the law, it stops being the law.
Ranked choice
Popular vote
All this goes away.
Gerrymandering can still be effective with ranked choice. It's harder, but you can still do both cracking and packing, you just have to model top-2 or top-3 preferences.
Popular vote is already the norm for gerrymandered areas.
I mean we should definitely implement Ranked Choice up and down the ticket, and implement Popular Vote for President, but neither actually solves Gerrymandering.
I'd like to say "independent" redistricting organizations are the solution, but the practical success of those is mixed. The incumbents just pack those with cronies, or ignore them, sometimes with the assistance of the judiciary.
In Australia it’s kinda 4 different things that stops gerrymandering from being a problem:
We have RCV, but you’re completely right: that’s a solution to a whole different problem… and independent commissions are only part of the solution - you need to ensure their independence with rules that make it infeasible for them to be anything but non-biased
Nope, that would only help with state-wide and national elections, not for district-level ones. If they're gerrymandered to be a majority republican district, the winner will be a republican even if there is ranked choice and popular vote. Or vice-versa if gerrymandered to be a Dem-majority district.
Which is why they pump the uninformed majority of voters full of the idea that the current system will always save them. My father in law has a degree in political science and still thinks that we'll vote Trump out in 2028 to fix everything. Decades of things generally continuing to function for the middle class white demographic has brainwashed every democratic voter over 50 I know to believe we're still well within the acceptable bounds of politics.
If you can't win, cheat. It's the official slogan of conservatives worldwide.
The worst part is that democrats will fight back by gerrymandering harder, and it just won't be as effective because gerrymandering always benefits the person behind. If democrats had an ounce of intelligence, they would be fighting for standard algorithms to manage redistricting. If it was federal law to minimize district perimeters, this whole nonsense would end.
If democrats had an ounce of intelligence, they would be fighting for standard algorithms to manage redistricting.
The problem with that is they would need to regain power to be able to fix anything. But that would also assume they did, in fact, have the intelligence to fix problems while in power. Unfortunately, the reason the fascists are fighting so hard to dismantle democracy is to ensure that they can never lose power again despite their growing unpopularity.
It’s a bit more complex than that—if you create districts on a purely geographic basis (like minimizing district perimeters), you usually amplify slight majorities into disproportionately large ones (e.g., a 55% demographic majority translating to a 90% legislative majority). An algorithm that tries to create districts that proportionally translate demographics to representation usually ends up with district boundaries that superficially resemble gerrymandered ones.
I think this is an important point that https://bdistricting.com/2020/ glosses over. Some of the representation "guarantees" that were part of the VRA are actually defeated by doing purely geographic districting. Oft-times there's enough BIPOC population that's widely distributed, but needs to be "packed" (to use the gerrymandering terminology) in order to given even a chance of proportional representation.
My state of Arkansas is a good example https://bdistricting.com/2020/AR_Congress/ BIPOC is >= 25% of the population, but to get a distract that was 50% BIPOC it would have to snake across the state in a way that would be very visually similar to a gerrymandered district.
Multi-member districts can help, but they cause a loss of representation locality.
It may be that it's impossible to produce an algorithm that satisfies all our (collective) fairness constraints.
Oh? Then why are repubs gerrymandering so hard? Because they'll pick up 5 seats in Texas by doing it. And they're going to do the same in all the red states they can and pick up an extra one here and an extra one there and get a nice, cushy permanent House majority by blatantly violating district-drawing "norms" to a mind-boggling degree like this. Because now they can.
But don't worry about Dems fighting back by doing a damn thing, let alone gerrymandering harder.
"Why should I have to pay taxes for roads and schools in Austin when I live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere by choice?"
-Desired Outcome
Republicans are cheating scum.
Oh no. anyway, here's a map of Illinois' congressional districts.
Oh no! Just cause Illinois district is fucky doesn't mean Texas' should be even more fucky. It's not a god damned contest.
