Virginia Redistricting PASSED!!
- Thread starter Chumpsky
- Start date
Yeah, this is what I had said a few days ago. I disagree with all partisan gerrymandering. But also, its a race to the bottom, and both sides feel they have to right now to survive. The only solution is a law outlawing it nationwise, so there isn't this call and response by both sides.
We could have such a good conversation about the various avenues to proportional representation if only the adults participated.
Probably none in va, but potentially lots as the republican South responds to Virginia
According to chat GPT, the popular vote nationally in 2024 with respect to the House of Representatives was 49.75% for the Republicans and 47.15% for the democrats. So, apparently by accident, the House of Representatives from that election does reflect the national vote. Personally, I think that a national redistricting standard needs to be developed.
I would add that I am extremely suspicious of anything proposed by Adam Schiff who is one of the co-sponsors of one of the bills. He is a Bernie Madoff level fraud.
So one of the things I'm actively talking about at work is the run rates on production orders not matching what we're actually doing. Some of the parts are running 150% of standard and some are 50% of standard. And by dumb luck and at a high level, the total impact to the hours in the schedule isn't that bad. But that doesn't mean that individual machines and departments aren't totally hosed. This is much the same way with Gerrymandering (and, to be fair, it's not nearly as bad at the federal level as it is for several state legislative bodies).
While I think there could be some merit to being suspicious about the author of a bill, I don't think it's worth worrying about the co-sponsors unless the bill otherwise looks bad.
Also I think districts are fundamentally flawed. I think we need to move to multi-member districts with proportional representation or mixed member proportional representation if we really value having "our own" representative.
Florida is going to be interesting. On the one hand, my understanding is that state law may preclude political gerrymandering (not sure of definition). On the other hand, callais basically says partisan considerations can essentially trump racial effects in map drawing. So, while callais may clear paths for some states, I’m not actually sure how much it helps in Fla., unless they’re saying callais actually puts existing majority minority districts at risk as unconstitutional race based districts that must be “corrected”
I think Florida would have a very difficult time arguing that what they're attempting to do isn't a partisan gerrymander with all of the very public comments that have been made. Their Supreme Court would have to either completely ignore the law, say the law is unconstitutional (or was it a Florida Amendment) or say "oops this is illegal but undoing it would be haarrrrrd" to allow the proposal to occur.
To be clear, I'm not saying at all they won't do one of those three.
Edit: it was an amendment so it's going to look really bad for the courts to allow this to happen.
"Compactness" is so subjective that, IMHO, it has little meaning. If you looked at each state's map, you would fined plenty of districts that make a mockery of the notion of compactness, and not all of them are bad. The geographical distribution of voters is just not a neat, regularly-shaped thing. to begin with.
It's also very difficult to solve for "competitiveness" while maintaining "compactness". I know I've got my biases here but competitiveness is significantly more important to me.