The battle for redistricting has arisen yet again many years before it should Texas and now California are playing the game using gerrymandering as the weapon in a the ideological battle.

This whole system is so screwed up….it allows a party to pick its voters not the voters to pick the party….time to flush this crap down the toilet where it belongs.

But how do we fix this cancerous practice?

Partisan gerrymandering makes it harder for voters to hold their representatives accountable. Congressional district elections become uncompetitive. With reelection in the general assured, candidates are focused on catering to their own party base, which tends to be a more extreme subset of their constituents. Through this process, partisan gerrymandering often reduces effective representation in Congress and can play a role in crowding out moderate and independent voters.

But here’s a twist: President Trump’s new wave of extreme gerrymandering may actually backfire, paving the way for electoral reform. Partisan gerrymandering is unpopular with voters, as we’ve seen repeatedly in recent years. Voters in states such as Michigan, Arizona, Colorado, and New Jersey, have supported nonpartisan redistricting commissions.

In 2021, Democrats tried and failed to pass the For the People Act, a bill that would have limited partisan gerrymandering nationwide and implemented non-partisan redistricting commissions in every state. But Republican senators blocked the bill.

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One proposed solution is bipartisan redistricting commissions. These can fail when the parties cannot agree on a map. For instance, the Virginia commission deadlocked in 2022, leaving the courts to draw the maps. Then there are more radical solutions that effectively blow up the current electoral system as we know it, such as multi-member districts or aproportional representation. But we think it is unrealistic to get rid of a system that has been in place for two hundred and fifty years.

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Our approach, which we call the “Define-Combine Procedure,” splits the map drawing process into two simple stages. First, one party divides the state into twice the number of needed districts—for example, 20 sub-districts for a state that needs 10 congressional seats. Then, the second party pairs those sub-districts into the final 10 districts. The result is a fairer map than either party would have drawn on its own. Instead of mutually assured gerrymandering, this approach leads to mutually assured representation.

https://time.com/7309565/americas-gerrymandering-problem-fix/

I disagree.

The only way to fix this problem is to get rid of it altogether…..and one way would be to do away with political parties (will cover this at a later post) then there is no need to go in search of party loyalists.

I think their solution will just morph into more problems if enacted.

Any thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”