Trump Isn’t the Only One to Blame for the Gerrymander Mess

[John Clark]

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription.

Trump Isn’t the Only One to Blame for the Gerrymander Mess

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority kicked away the best, even last, chance at a national solution to a national problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/opinion/trump-roberts-supreme-court-gerrymander.html?unlocked_article_code=1.eE8.h1XW.m5LE7bBkvvam&smid=em-share

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/opinion/trump-roberts-supreme-court-gerrymander.html?unlocked_article_code=1.eE8.h1XW.m5LE7bBkvvam&smid=em-share

[Brent Meeker]

There is no good way to draw up Congressional Districts.  Suppose your state is entitled to 7 Congress critturs.  And it's 40% Republican.  So you should create a map with 3 majority R and 4 majority D.  But that means if you're a D and live in an R district your vote means nothing and vice versa.  The problem is having one representative=one district.  The usual measure of how much gerrymandering is bad, is how the mix of the representatives differs from the mix in the Presidential votes; which would go away if the representatives were elected at large, like Senators.  So to make it good we should create districts that elect at least three or four representatives using rank-choice (when a state elects more that 3 say).  

Brent

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0LOa%2BLDifOqXkmwt4E35Kzuoibxpp5uQ5Gh4Sy8UNP%2BA%40mail.gmail.com.

[John Clark]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2025 at 6:19 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> There is no good way to draw up Congressional Districts. 

True but some ways are less bad than others. The least bad way would be every four years a computer program would use data from the census (but ignore party affiliation) drew districts that had shapes that took advantage of natural dividing lines like rivers and lakes but were as close as possible to regular polygons (not ridiculous fractals as they are now) and contained an equal number of registered voters.  

 

> Suppose your state is entitled to 7 Congress critturs.  And it's 40% Republican.  So you should create a map with 3 majority R and 4 majority D.  But that means if you're a D and live in an R district your vote means nothing and vice versa. 

That's just a consequence of the fact that in a democracy with a diverse population not everyone is going to get their way. However there is an easy way to minimize that problem, let people vote for more than one person in presidential elections (or any election for that matter), and whoever gets the most votes generated by 161,000,000 registered voters gets to be president. In today's system only 538 people get to vote for the presidency, members of the elite Electoral College. Many people think they're voting for a presidential candidate but they're not, they are voting for somebody who is allowed to vote for the president. That's nuts.   

Suppose there were 3 people running for president, X, Y, and Z. In your opinion X would be a wonderful president but you realize his chances of winning are vanishingly small. You think Y would be an OK average president, he's nothing to get excited about but has about a 50% chance of winning. And in your opinion Z would be an apocalyptically dreadful president but also has about a 50% chance of winning. So, who do you vote for?

In today's system I would vote for Y without hesitation, but for reasons I've never understood millions of people would vote for the hopeless cause X. But if they were allowed to vote for more than one person then they could vote for X AND Y. Such a system would discourage the election of radical left wing or radical right wing candidates and I think that would be a good thing because there is a top to good but there is no bottom to bad.  

 

> The problem is having one representative=one district. 

The original idea was that if there is a local problem then there is one guy from the same locality and is familiar with the situation that you can complain about it to. That would be nice but I think it works better in theory than in practice and is an advantage we can afford to sacrifice.

 

> The usual measure of how much gerrymandering is bad, is how the mix of the representatives differs from the mix in the Presidential votes; which would go away if the representatives were elected at large, like Senators. 

If we're going to fantasize about solutions that are never going to happen .... A better idea would be to eliminate the Senate entirely and just have the House of Representatives. That way you wouldn't have the ridiculous situation where Dakota has 4 senators but California only has two even though California has 23.7 Times as many people in it than the population of North and South Dakota combined. And of course we should eliminate the ridiculous electoral college and whoever got the largest popular vote should be president, if that had been the case we would've never had George W. Bush and the Iraq war, and we would've not had Donald Trump, at least not in 2016. 

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

t5.

[Brent Meeker]

On 8/15/2025 4:39 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, Aug 14, 2025 at 6:19 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> There is no good way to draw up Congressional Districts. 

True but some ways are less bad than others. The least bad way would be every four years a computer program would use data from the census (but ignore party affiliation) drew districts that had shapes that took advantage of natural dividing lines like rivers and lakes but were as close as possible to regular polygons (not ridiculous fractals as they are now) and contained an equal number of registered voters.  

 

> Suppose your state is entitled to 7 Congress critturs.  And it's 40% Republican.  So you should create a map with 3 majority R and 4 majority D.  But that means if you're a D and live in an R district your vote means nothing and vice versa. 

That's just a consequence of the fact that in a democracy with a diverse population not everyone is going to get their way. However there is an easy way to minimize that problem, let people vote for more than one person in presidential elections (or any election for that matter), 

Just as I wrote, " So to make it good we should create districts that elect at least three or four representatives using rank-choice (when a state elects more that 3 say)," except applied to Presidential elections.  The difference is that changing the way Presidents are elected takes a Constitutional Amendment, which will be opposed by that majority of states the Electoral College advantages, but election of Congressmen can be changed at the state level.

Brent  

and whoever gets the most votes generated by 161,000,000 registered voters gets to be president. In today's system only 538 people get to vote for the presidency, members of the elite Electoral College. Many people think they're voting for a presidential candidate but they're not, they are voting for somebody who is allowed to vote for the president. That's nuts.   

Suppose there were 3 people running for president, X, Y, and Z. In your opinion X would be a wonderful president but you realize his chances of winning are vanishingly small. You think Y would be an OK average president, he's nothing to get excited about but has about a 50% chance of winning. And in your opinion Z would be an apocalyptically dreadful president but also has about a 50% chance of winning. So, who do you vote for?

In today's system I would vote for Y without hesitation, but for reasons I've never understood millions of people would vote for the hopeless cause X. But if they were allowed to vote for more than one person then they could vote for X AND Y. Such a system would discourage the election of radical left wing or radical right wing candidates and I think that would be a good thing because there is a top to good but there is no bottom to bad.  

 

> The problem is having one representative=one district. 

The original idea was that if there is a local problem then there is one guy from the same locality and is familiar with the situation that you can complain about it to. That would be nice but I think it works better in theory than in practice and is an advantage we can afford to sacrifice.

 

> The usual measure of how much gerrymandering is bad, is how the mix of the representatives differs from the mix in the Presidential votes; which would go away if the representatives were elected at large, like Senators. 

If we're going to fantasize about solutions that are never going to happen .... A better idea would be to eliminate the Senate entirely and just have the House of Representatives. That way you wouldn't have the ridiculous situation where Dakota has 4 senators but California only has two even though California has 23.7 Times as many people in it than the population of North and South Dakota combined. And of course we should eliminate the ridiculous electoral college and whoever got the largest popular vote should be president, if that had been the case we would've never had George W. Bush and the Iraq war, and we would've not had Donald Trump, at least not in 2016. 

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

t5.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0dq%2B_5JmqN-e1KVCcFeEC4bVOk5vT-%2BYPFLyK817oTzA%40mail.gmail.com.

[John Clark]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2025 at 5:38 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> changing the way Presidents are elected takes a Constitutional Amendment, which will be opposed by that majority of states the Electoral College advantages,

Yes, and it only takes a quarter of the states to kill a proposed constitutional amendment. So that route is hopeless.

 

> but election of Congressmen can be changed at the state level.

I am not a lawyer (thank Darwin!) so I'm unsure if the changes you recommend are constitutional, but I am absolutely certain that if Trump's hand picked bought and paid for Supreme Court figures those changes would put the Republican Party at a disadvantage it will rule that they are flagrantly unconstitutional, but if those changes are advantageous to the Republican Party it will rule it's perfectly constitutional.  

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

s/t