Despite claims in the article to the contrary, the term Gerrymandering is very specific to drawing absurd shaped districts to give your party an advantage, not merely having districts that give an advantage in general. The latter is pretty normal. Every time there's an opportunity to redraw districts (due to population changes requiring it because the number of districts change), the party in control of the process, which is usually the party in power in the state legislature, will *always* draw them in ways to benefit them. To say, in just this one case, "OMG! That's so unfair", is pretty ridiculous.
It's always going to happen. It's pretty much unavoidable. Everyone does it.
Gerrymandering is when you do so to a ridiculous degree. Which is not the case in NC this time around. I think the case in question raises some legitimate issues, but also has some potential dangers. Who gets to decide what is "fair"? What criteria do we use? Is it "normal" for every single district in a state to have an equal ratio of people based on political orientation? That seems pretty unnatural to me. And to do this in a "fair" way would often actually require the very sort of bizarre Gerrymandered shapes, because of the simple fact that people don't distribute themselves geographically in anything remotely resembling an even distribution based on political alignment. One need only look at a state map showing precincts by party vote to see this. Democrats tend to clump together in tight high population areas, while Republicans are spread out everywhere else. You'd have to actively decide to slice out portions of the high population cities and loop them with much larger geographical regions in order to achieve a balance.
I'm not sure that's even desired here. IMO, while not perfect, the idea of allowing the party which has political power to do such things is fine. We do this in everything else, right? The party in power gets to do things like write the laws they want, right? No one goes running to the Courts every time a political party passes a law they don't like, insisting that it's somehow wrong for them to pursue their agenda just because they won a majority in the election. Um... Yeah. That's exactly how our political process works. If the law itself is unconstitutional, that's one thing, but merely results in something you don't agree with politically? That's the nature of living in a county where people get to vote for things. A significant percentage of the population is always going to not get what they want.
If there's a better and more "fair" way of doing this, then propose it. Just complaining because you don't like the outcome isn't productive. And in this particular subject, it's interesting that the political left is just recently so up in arms about this, but that's because over the last couple decades, the GOP has made huge gains in state legislatures, giving them more power to do this. Go back 50--60 years, and it was the Dems who Gerrymandered, and didn't seem to mind at all that it was "unfair". I actually think that the problem the Dems are facing is that sometime around the 1960s, their party began to be more increasingly urban focused. So much of what today is labeled as district unfairness (ratio of congressional seats in a state compared to total votes for each party in that same state), can be explained by this fact. The GOP doesn't have to create bizarre shapes on a map to have a political advantage in the districts. They just have to prevent the Dems from doing so in the other direction.
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King Nobby wrote:
More words please