This is why we should stop letting states decide how their votes are counted and sent in, because they cheat for their own teams. The feds should go to every god damn state and count the votes without those states being allow to fuck with it, states themselves are commiting election fraud openly without consequence.
Little bit off topic but as an outsider this whole continual redrawing of districts seems so dodgy. Making it so there are more white Republicans than black Democrats and using little sneaky tricks to get as many red districts as possible.
It seems they need to basically keep moving the goalposts just for them to have any chance at winning, yet they cry to the heavens about elections being rigged. Shameless shower of arseholes.
Redistricting by itself isn’t bad, gerrymandering is. In California, we don’t do gerrymandering, there’s a committee of four Democrats, four Republicans, and two independents that all have to work together to redistrict the maps.
Eh...having an "algorithm" figure it out isn't a panacea. After all, someone writes the algorithm. All that does is shift the responsibility to a black box that only a few people know how it actually works, and give the illusion of impartiality when algorithms often operate on the biases we give them.
The problem is not the transparency, it’s about the process of choosing who write the algorithm, what factors are prioritized, and how it gets updated. Stating that it will be “open-source” does nothing to address those questions.
The current process of explicitly partisan redistributing is also 100% transparent. Every Congressional hearing is public. Anyone can get the transcripts, staff notes, and review every version of a bill as it goes from introduction to floor vote. All the litigation around maps is similarly public record. But just because you know who, what, when, where, and why a problem exists does not mean you can fix it.
It does though because you can have experts brought in by both parties as well as independent experts brought in to validate the algorithm does what it does.
The current process is transparent but at the end of the day it's five or six people with different biases for each state. An algorithm implements uniformity across the entire country. You can have a non-partisan committee set the initial inputs and revamp them every X number of years.
This is a zero sum problem. All the possible inputs are a known state so you can mathematically create an optimal distribution.
I agree with the intention, but then who gets to write that code/create the algorithm? And of those written/created, who gets to decide which one is the "fairest?" What are the emergency valves when the algorithm does something unintentional? What if the code written is sabotaged, and can we depend on our usual tech illiterate electorate to know when something is wrong, and how to solve it?
Not to say its a bad idea in itself, but the buck has to stop somewhere in having someone make a decision, a human decision on how these districts are drawn. A human using a digital code to draw it is still a product of human decision making.
the idea that computers and algorithms are immune to bias is dangerous. algorithms are just as fallible to human bias as we are. algorithms are, after all, created by people and trained on data created by people..
however, unlike us, algorithms don't have the ability to address nuanced context unless specifically programmed to do so.
there are certain districts that are gerrymandered in order to preserve specific minority voices in Congress, specifically to keep predominantly black communities to be grouped in their own district instead of spreading them between other districts.(this process, while allowed under the Voters Right Act, has been abused before in order to further dilute black communities' representation. most southern states with large black populations tend to abuse it)
Seems dodgy? It's openly and blatantly treasonous. Redrawing districts with the express purpose of removing political power from the people is betraying democracy, and the people who do it should have to pay for their crimes.
Treason is a monumental crime, because it is destroying the very foundation of our democracy and ruining the lives of hundreds of millions. A crime for which their can be no justice, only a vicious and ugly punishment to dissuade future traitors.
I have been hearing people fighting over gerrymandering my entire life, it's one of the go to examples wer were taught I highschool of how system of government are corrupted.
Yes many states will send it to a court which can say no and make them do it over again. It's one of the reasons Republicans have been packing courts for years.
Dems are more concerned with the appearance of doing something than actually doing something. They're better than the Republicans a huge amount on account of not being fascists, but let's not pretend the highers up in the party give a shit about the working class. Remember Pelosi forbidding us peasants from insider trading, but not herself or her compatriots?
There are undoubtedly plenty of good people in the Democratic party. The problem is, they're not the ones who are running it or controlling it's trajectory.
Oh most definitely. It just really sucks that because of our toxic 2 party system, we have a fascist party, and the party of everybody who is not a fascist. Obviously the latter is the better choice, but since it has to cover such a broad swath of people, it's full of strife and disagreements. There are plenty of Democrats who are ideologically closer to the fascists than they are to the progressives in their own party.
Harm reduction is better than the alternative, but it's ultimately not enough to use a thimble to bail out water from a sinking ship that the other party is drilling more holes into.
It is, but there's been a lot of times where states will just decide to use the maps that have been stricken down by the courts anyway. There's been a major effort in the last few years by dems to combat it (with moderate success) but there was a period in the early 2010s where republicans had a nationwide strategy to gerrymander that was met with very little resistance.
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u/WatchItAllBurn1 May 26 '23
There is also a chance that in bush' second election that there were some genuine problems
54% of votes discarded in Florida were African americans
in the same election, Ohio made it harder and less accessible for African Americans and poor communities to vote too.
While these were ultimately rejected by the republican congress at the time. It does not change the fact that Bush only won the popular vote by 0.7%.