YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to determine election outcomes by changing electoral maps. In most western countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34012702
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Not a defense of gerymandering but it's fundamentaly impossible to draw electoral maps that represent people perfectly. Someone has to draw the maps at some point and bias is going to have an effect on that.
And that's assuming people are well represented by their candidate of choice.
This is true if you are drawing maps. But you can mitigate it. Right now in the us it is just wholly unmitigated corruption. My state passed an amendment to have an independent nonpartisan board draw the maps but the republicans ignored the amendment and continued their bullshit of drawing maps purely for their gain.
I've been campaigning against gerrymandering in my state since 2016:
You're right that no map will be perfect. The best practice in cases where you're limited to electing a single candidate per district is to have people who don't have a conflict of interest draw it - an independent redistricting commission.
In our state's proposed bill members of the commission can't be politicians, lobbyists or families of those groups. 4 members are selected from the largest political party, 4 from the next largest political party, and 3 from independents/smaller parties.
Then you have a variety of conditions on the way they draw - not allowed to consider partisan advantage, must hold x number of public hearings, versions of maps must be published in advance of final selection and more.
Final approved map must receive at least two votes from each of the three blocks.
Lastly there's a fail-over process where if a winning map cannot be selected, then any member of the commission can propose a map, and they hold an elimination vote until one remains.
All that said, I think the best long term solution is single transferrable vote. Way fewer wasted votes, pretty much everyone has someone who represents them, encourages third parties.
I'm for direct democracy and I was trying to push in that direction but I'm all for fighting against gerymandering !
Props to you for fighting it since 2016, the plan bill look very nice !
When you say direct democracy what do you envision?
I'm all for that where practical, but the complexity of the necessary tasks and knowledge of issues quickly exceeds what people can realistically keep track of. Governing and legislating needs to be a full time job I think.
It's hard to conceive a perfect system but to paint broad stokes :
Direct democracy mean that the final say is always in the hand of people rather than elected politicians. That doesn't mean they aren't people whose job is to draft up and propose legislation ! But thoose people can't decide instead of everyone and have to listen to specialist and concerned people. To vote a law they have to convince and prove to everyone that it will be a net positive.
Think about it, how many time did you see senators that don't know what a computer is vote laws that reshape internet for the worse. Or think about how leftist in the US are stuck with a center-right party ( Democrats ) that only listen to their donors.
Having direct democracy doesn't mean that everyone has to be politicaly litterate or that legislation specialist stop existing. Ideally it's a system that reward people solving problems and discourage self interested politicians.
Of course they are a lot of obvious flaw in what I said ( the first being how to decide what people mean ), it's an ideal after all and I'm sure that there is a better way to define it. But that's the neat thing about direct democracy, we can all find something better together. ( rather than beg a politicians whose only skill is being elected ).
Thanks for your reply. I'm still having a hard time understanding how it would work. Say for example that there needs to be a new law. How would it get written, and then how is it passed?
The same way public petition work, if a law is needed people will campain around the issue and among thoose people some will draft legislation that could be made into law.
So in this system, would all citizens have to vote on a bill in order for it to become law? How would it be determined that a law is valid/good enough to be brought up for a vote? You could imagine thousands of proposed bills each year. And certainly most citizens wouldn't pay the kind of attention you'd hope would be given to legislation affecting the entire nation, even if it was only a hundred bills.
I do like the idea of a referendum, where if you get enough signatures then it goes up for vote to the entire electorate. But I think that needs to be in tandem with professional legislators.
Sorry, things happened in my life and I'm not able to dedicate energy to talk about direct democracy.
I know it's in french but it's a really good ressource : https://ddirecte.org/
Thank you, talk to you about democracy was fun ^^
but when a party or candidate want to change it, you should pay attention
Yes ! I totally agree !
I was pushing for direct democracy rather than telling people go give up fighting gerymandering, guess I failled to make my point ><