My one hope is that this eye-for-an-eye redistricting will eventually lead to a constitutional amendment to have all congressional districts drawn via some nonpartisan algorithm rather than by state politicians. Probably over optimistic of me, though.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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My only qualm with that is that if you select an algorithm, it needs to be selected, which means that the people in control of that selection can decide what's non-partisan in the selection criteria.
I'm more in favor of defining properties that districts must have and then selecting a districting commission by lottery. Make it so you can't be fired for being on the commission, and pay people 20% over their wage for the time they're on the commission.
If an algorithm has an outcome that seems flagrantly incorrect, you can't subpoena it and ask about its reasoning. The courts are already geared towards handling complaints regarding how a commission handled its responsibilities.
My only qualm with that is that if you select an algorithm, it needs to be selected, which means that the people in control of that selection can decide what’s non-partisan in the selection criteria.
Anyone with a sibling that has had to divide something equally to share it knows how to solve this. One group chooses the algorithm and the second group chooses which side they get to on.
The first group, who have the power to introduce bias disadvantaging one side cannot benefit from it, and worse, they'd hand the power to the second group. It forces the first group to choose a method with built in equality because the second group could force the first group to take the disadvantaged side.
One group chooses the algorithm and the second group chooses which side they get to on.
In practice this would require the second group to basically have a switch that switches all voters' preferences. So I don't think that's gonna work here.
In practice this would require the second group to basically have a switch that switches all voters’ preferences. So I don’t think that’s gonna work here.
That wouldn't be the variable choice by the second group in what I'm suggesting.
In this scenario if the first party choices algorithmic weights which favor their voters, given them a controlling outcome, the second party would be able to substitute their own weights making the algorithm shift the districts to give the second party the control. The rules would forbid baking the weights into the algorithm meaning the first group would work very hard to produce an algorithm producing equal representation districts without being able to swing it either way by weighting it.
this seems to assume a baked-in 2 party system I would prefer not to continue to plan around
Unfortunately I don't think that's how algorithm development works, not if you want to make a fair one.
Not for nothin', but there is an entire college discipline dedicated to this called "Conflict Resolution." People trained in it are the ones who tend to get sent by the UN to an accord meeting to negotiate for peace or for mutual use of a contested resource.
It's a whole corner of Sociology with journals and everything.
You really really really don’t want to have a constitutional convention in this current political climate. Especially since republicans control more state legislators than dems do. Imagine the heinous shit the fascists will put in.
You still need states to ratify what was passed during the convention anyway, and even then, it has to be ratified in 3/4s of states, and 9 of the top 10 earners in the US economy are solid blue states with strong blue state governments. 🤷
eventually lead
It's equally likely that it will end with the US being carved into semi-official fiefdoms divided by faction as with the Guelphs and Ghibellines in medieval Italy.
Replace Guelphs and Ghibellines techbro A and techbro B, and yeah, sounds about right.
That's not necessarily the case, unless there are massive migration movements inside the US. The split is not really per state, but mostly between urban and rural areas inside each state, instead of a large scale political segregation.
Not a US american so sorry if this is a stupid question, but why aren't these congressional districts the same as administrative districts?
Not a stupid question. Our government is confusing. It's basically still being carried out verbatim, and the entire thing was built and architected in an era when the fastest anyone could travel is by speed of wind.
In the US, government is generally federalist, meaning, each state is its own independent entity (legally speaking) with the autonomy to describe, create, and manage laws specific to their culture in their state. This boils down even further with municipal zones, which are typically related to city or township governance (covering shit like local police, trash, fire, streets).
Each state has the power to define both its voting districts, as well as the way they vote. For example, states in the West traditionally had fewer people over sparser distances, so traditional paper balloting was foregone in lieu of 'caucusing,' which is literally about measuring the amount of bodies or the scale of voices.
In the early 1800s (roughly 40 years after the founding of the country we know now), a man named Eldridge Gerry figured out that it was technically legal under federal law to flip the way districting happens on a per-state basis — instead of people choosing their district, the district chooses its voters.
So, over time, Gerrymandering proved to be one of the only successful ways to gain an edge in a population where conservatism was shrinking and leftism and socialism were building in popularity. It has continued simply because it is a foundation of power in our bicameral (two parties) system.
Just FYI, it is so named "Gerrymandering" after Eldridge Gerry, as well as the fact that his resulting districts looked on a map like a slithering salamander.
No. States are allocated a number of seats in the House of Representatives based on population. It’s up to each state to decide how to subdivide its territory into roughly equal population districts to elect each of their allocated House seats. Texas decided to redraw their map to make them advantageous to the Republican Party, so California has retaliated by redrawing their maps to be more advantageous to Democrats.
The US Senate is much more straightforward: Each state gets two senators, but they’re on non-overlapping six year terms. Only one is up for election at a time, so it’s statewide election for the seat.
How would you define an administrative district? It's likely similar I'd imagine, but not sure where your frame of reference comes from.
Well I don't need to, they are predefined administrative units. Take the federal state of Northrhine-Westphalia in Germany as an example:
In the US, after a census every 10 years, each state is allocated a number of House congressional districts based on population. The House has 435 members (not including non-voting members from territories like Puerto Rico). The number for any given state fluctuates each census, so predefined districts won't work.
One way to combat gerrymandering without a constitutional amendment is to increase the size of the House. It's set by statute and hasn't been changed since 1911.
Another is to use Iowa's redistricting method, which has appropriately boring maps: https://waynecountyelections.iowa.gov/global/maps/iowa_congressional_districts_82470.pdf
Ideally it makes sense to divide districts based on population. But the elections system in the US has so many flaws, it feels like optimizing at the wrong position.
I mean if you subsume the votes under the "state level" in a first step, wouldn't it be logical to go the next step subsume under county level (or whatever your administrative units are being called)?
Division based on population can never be stable because people are moving, so I feel this is the wrong metric in the first place.
Again I am not living in the US, so if I made some wrong assumptions please correct me. I don't know much about your election system.
The Iowa method is basically collecting the counties together into roughly equal population. But states get a lot of leeway in the exact methods.
(Aside: it's weird that the US uses that term in most states, because none of it was ever ruled by Counts. Although Louisiana does call them a "Parish" instead, which is a weirdly religious term for effectively the same thing.)
Increasing the size of the House would also increase the number of electoral college votes and would make it far less likely that there's a split between the electoral college and popular vote. So doing that and replacing first-past-the-post voting covers pretty much everything structurally wrong with the US election system.
Are all of these the same population size? That is roughly what our districts are, partitions of our populace into ~equal regions. Our nearest second level partition would be counties, which are drawn based on characteristics that largely remained static since their creation (1600s). Districts are generally redrawn every 10 years, but well… here we are.
In theory, districts are supposed to be race blind, and group together people based on rough location. But they don’t necessarily need to be the least complex shapes (hexagons), because that generally isn’t how humans have settled in areas. Again, in theory it was meant to capture groupings of people who would want or deserve similar representation but aren’t optimally clumped together. Instead, both sides have abused the lack of simple shapes rule to really fuck with representation. In particular, these last 20 years have seen the worst gerrymandering abuses because computing power progress made it feasible to gerrymander with ease. In theory past it has generally been held that redistricting happens every 10 years, so the middle of every third president.
If Republicans don't like it they can get on board with efforts to stop gerrymandering everywhere. Glad we're on the same page now!
or... they can gerrymander every other red state
They're already maxed out on several.
If they've maxed out some, maybe they'll be dumb enough to try to max it out even further and actually undo it.
but not every
California Assemblyman James Gallagher, the Republican minority leader
"You move forward fighting fire with fire and what happens?” Gallagher asked. “You burn it all down.”
These people are absolute pieces of shit. He's just saying whatever will hurt democrats without touching republicans.
Also, this is dumb as fuck. "You do what we do and what happens? Everything falls apart".
Bitch so you KNOW you are fucking up this country AND you're saying it out loud?!
USA. Please, how dumb folks ya have in there? ;-; How can they not see the meaning?
Many of them are very much not dumb. With the gop you have to start with the inverse of Hanlon's razor and assume they're evil until they can prove that they're simply morons instead.
But he warned that Newsom’s approach, which the governor has dubbed “fight fire with fire,” was dangerous
We didn't start the fire....
Controlled burns are something we learned from native peoples to care for the land, that some of us simply cannot fathom working. Fighting fire with fire is very effective indeed.
Yah, fire was never used to backburn until it was learned from some unspecified group of natives. Throughout dozens of thousands of years that humans have used fires.
Some of the hokey shit people come up with.
Yeah five is not enough.
Better to burn it all down then just let the other side burn all my shit.
Relevant CGP Grey video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY&list=PLkLBH5Kzphe0Qu8mCW1Leef2xSxPK1FIe&index=4
Isn't it already too late to wait until the midterms to decide this? Texas will already be electing five new Republicans to the House in November. This won't "balance the scales" for at least another two years after that.
That means Republicans will maintain their majority for Trump's entire 2nd term...and by then, they will have rewritten the entire playbook to make sure they all stay in power permanently. The only way to stop that, is to take back the House and Senate...now. Not two years from now. This November, now.
(Correction...I apparently don't know what year it is.)
Isn't the mid term 2026? It's only 2025
Lol! Man, you just totally made my day. I don't know what I was thinking. Thank you. Maybe there is still hope.
POV: It's election season and you're watching "Jerry loves drawing Salamanders" on the interdimentional cable, the best show on the Central Finite Curve!
Wonder how many of those idiots will sit it out again this time.
Edit: spelling