3d ago

GOP's Texas map has Austin residents sharing district with rural Texans 300 miles away

abcnews.go.com

As Texas Republicans try to muscle a rare mid-decade redistricting bill through the Legislature to help Republicans gain seats in Congress -- at President Donald Trump's request -- residents in Austin, the state capital, could find themselves sharing a district with rural Texans more than 300 miles away.

The proposed map chops up Central Texas' 37th Congressional District, which is currently represented by Democrat Rep. Lloyd Doggett, will be consumed by four neighboring districts, three of which Republicans now hold.

One of those portions of the Austin-area district was drawn to be part of the 11th District that Republican Rep. August Pfluger represents, which stretches into rural Ector County, about 20 miles away from the New Mexico border.

140 comments

This repub regime is really showing us how much our system of government depends on having good-faith actors in (elected) positions of power. There truly are not sufficient checks in place to protect against one election's worth of bad actors.
Kind of amazing that this all worked for about 250 years, and heartbreaking that it could crumble in the next 2.5.
- worked for about 250 years for a select group of people only
  didn't work for the native americans, slaves, poor people, etcetera
  
  Things have improved for those groups over time, notably. We took a shit system and tried to make it represent all of us.
- Apologies if I misunderstood the american election system, but the fact that for the past 100+ years you've had a bipartisan system in which both parties pander to the wealthy tell me it hasn't really worked. Or rather only worked for the ruling elite.
  
  The system has basically always been two-party. It's the only stable arrangement for FPtP voting anyway. So, yes, it has been status quo for 250 years.
- Even strong checks can't hold back bad faith actors indefinitely
  
  Sure does help, though.
  Any system that ultimately doesn't work for the greater good is bound to fail, because someone will come along promising to deliver the people from their woes.
  It's happened very many times throughout history, and yet many "checks" are perpetuated on convention alone, in many systems around the world.
  You're just asking for it, at that point.
  Letting politicians draw their own electoral boundaries, and "certify" their own elections is beyond ridiculous.
  Git gud, USA, yikes.
  Brought to you by the independent electoral commission gang.
- Yes if you elect people that agree to the majority of the house, senate, president, state houses, and governors, they tend to get their way.
- For about 200 years, a candidates morality was an important factor, now we apparently don't care, especially the MAGAs.
I will never understand how this obvious manipulation has been legal for decades.
- The pretense is gone now though, which is fascinating. And scary.
  It’s literally just partisan warfare with legal exploitation, and voter bases apparently think it’s justified. I mean, what are they gonna do, side with the other party over it?
- Money. Every American politician is corrupt as fuck.
- when lawmakers break the law and nobody enforces the law, it stops being the law.
  
  And so many things were just 'common sense,' and not enshrined in laws because the thought was that anyone breaking them would be held accountable by the populace. We now have a critical mass of stupid, self absorbed, or malicious people that laws don't matter, much less norms.
  
  They always forget that the laws they pass to punish their enemies or enrich themselves goes both ways.
  If they start acting like the law is anything they can get away with without going to jail, then the same can apply to the rest of us.
  
  Laws still apply, just not to the people in power.
- Federal government won't do anything about it. States control their own elections and therein lies the conundrum. Texas is proving very willingly that it doesn't care about the rules as long as they win.
  
  GOP, not all of Texas.
  
  And you pretend that the Democrats haven't been doing this since they were the Democratic Republican Party.
- centuries*
- We've lived in a fascist country for a long time.
- Over a century. It all started with the Democratic Republican Party that eventually became the Democratic Party.
  
  It started in 1812. Although the Democratic-Republican party did evolve into the current Democratic party over the course of two centuries, it’s hardly fair to call them the same party. That’s eight generations between then and now and the political landscape has changed dramatically.
  As for the “both sides do it” whataboutism, like so many “both sides” issues the current Republican Party benefits far more from gerrymandering than the current Democratic Party, and this is before this especially egregious Texas mid-census redistricting.
  
  If you think that the Democrats are the only ones to gerrymander until now you're not intelligent enough to be weighing in
These assholes are going to make violent revolution inevitable. Why they think they will survive that revolution is a mystery.
- Because they think they have the vast majority of those institutions with the ability to inflict violence on their side.
  And from where I'm sitting, it looks like they're right
  
  Oh there is no doubt they have a monopoly on violence, but America has more guns than people and virtually no mental health care so..............
- Because it worked for people like them in China and Russia.
- it's all I cling to, to make it through every day
Ranked choice
Popular vote
All this goes away.
- Gerrymandering can still be effective with ranked choice. It's harder, but you can still do both cracking and packing, you just have to model top-2 or top-3 preferences.
  Popular vote is already the norm for gerrymandered areas.
  I mean we should definitely implement Ranked Choice up and down the ticket, and implement Popular Vote for President, but neither actually solves Gerrymandering.
  I'd like to say "independent" redistricting organizations are the solution, but the practical success of those is mixed. The incumbents just pack those with cronies, or ignore them, sometimes with the assistance of the judiciary.
  
  In Australia it’s kinda 4 different things that stops gerrymandering from being a problem:
  independent electoral commissions (federally) draw the boundaries
  the commissions take public input and complaints
  very strict criteria for changing boundaries (geographically sensible, community - be it economic, local interest, etc -, population equality)
  and, the final one which is imo super important but I don’t think would ever happen in the US: compulsory voting (we get fined if we don’t vote)… this largely eliminates voter disenfranchisement and manipulation
  We have RCV, but you’re completely right: that’s a solution to a whole different problem… and independent commissions are only part of the solution - you need to ensure their independence with rules that make it infeasible for them to be anything but non-biased
- Nope, that would only help with state-wide and national elections, not for district-level ones. If they're gerrymandered to be a majority republican district, the winner will be a republican even if there is ranked choice and popular vote. Or vice-versa if gerrymandered to be a Dem-majority district.
- Which is why they pump the uninformed majority of voters full of the idea that the current system will always save them. My father in law has a degree in political science and still thinks that we'll vote Trump out in 2028 to fix everything. Decades of things generally continuing to function for the middle class white demographic has brainwashed every democratic voter over 50 I know to believe we're still well within the acceptable bounds of politics.
- Implement an actual independent electoral commission, proper scrutiny, paper ballots only (seriously, the US are fucking brain-dead for using voting machines, it's caused issues at elections dozens of times), and all this goes away.
  But yeah, ranked choice voting is definitely high on the list also
- I think using a method of proportional representation is the most effective defence against gerrymandering. You cannot have unrepresentative elections when the system has representation built into it.
  However, that would be difficult to do in the US from what I understand. There would need to be several changes to the law to give it a fighting chance.
If you can't win, cheat. It's the official slogan of conservatives worldwide.
The worst part is that democrats will fight back by gerrymandering harder, and it just won't be as effective because gerrymandering always benefits the person behind. If democrats had an ounce of intelligence, they would be fighting for standard algorithms to manage redistricting. If it was federal law to minimize district perimeters, this whole nonsense would end.
- If democrats had an ounce of intelligence, they would be fighting for standard algorithms to manage redistricting.
  The problem with that is they would need to regain power to be able to fix anything. But that would also assume they did, in fact, have the intelligence to fix problems while in power. Unfortunately, the reason the fascists are fighting so hard to dismantle democracy is to ensure that they can never lose power again despite their growing unpopularity.
- It’s a bit more complex than that—if you create districts on a purely geographic basis (like minimizing district perimeters), you usually amplify slight majorities into disproportionately large ones (e.g., a 55% demographic majority translating to a 90% legislative majority). An algorithm that tries to create districts that proportionally translate demographics to representation usually ends up with district boundaries that superficially resemble gerrymandered ones.
  
  I think this is an important point that https://bdistricting.com/2020/ glosses over. Some of the representation "guarantees" that were part of the VRA are actually defeated by doing purely geographic districting. Oft-times there's enough BIPOC population that's widely distributed, but needs to be "packed" (to use the gerrymandering terminology) in order to given even a chance of proportional representation.
  My state of Arkansas is a good example https://bdistricting.com/2020/AR_Congress/ BIPOC is >= 25% of the population, but to get a distract that was 50% BIPOC it would have to snake across the state in a way that would be very visually similar to a gerrymandered district.
  Multi-member districts can help, but they cause a loss of representation locality.
  It may be that it's impossible to produce an algorithm that satisfies all our (collective) fairness constraints.
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq-Y7crQo44
  This is a really neat video about algorithmic redistricting. It doesn't really make any claims about the politics around drawing maps but it does a great job of showing how easily the maps can be manipulated to give set results. It's really neat to see how the different things we can optimize for may or may not produce "fair" results.
  Really worth a watch imo!
- Except we're talking about Texas, where Democrats have never held enough power to do any significant gerrymandering. Assuming you're acting in good faith and not just a bot, is it possible that you're failing into the trap of assuming that because one of the most heavily gerrymandered districts (Texas 35th) is blue that Democrats did the gerrymandering?
  They didn't. Republicans did, to pack as many blue votes into a single district as possible so multiple others around it could be red. If the districts were drawn fairly, the thin corridor connecting Austin and San Antonio would be red, and multiple districts above and below that corridor would be blue.
- Oh? Then why are repubs gerrymandering so hard? Because they'll pick up 5 seats in Texas by doing it. And they're going to do the same in all the red states they can and pick up an extra one here and an extra one there and get a nice, cushy permanent House majority by blatantly violating district-drawing "norms" to a mind-boggling degree like this. Because now they can.
  But don't worry about Dems fighting back by doing a damn thing, let alone gerrymandering harder.
  
  New York and California are already starting the redistricting process. This is a poor move by republicans in the long run since more of their states are already maximally gerrymandered.
- Lol except democrats have been using bipartisan/non-partisan commissions to do it in blue states, so it means the house will forever be favoring republicans, unless democrats actually have the spine to play dirty.
- Here in the best country on earth we just count the votes of our people and decide based on that. No district bullshit whatsoever. And that is how we ended with a backwards blackrock removed and a corrupt von der leyen.... But seriously just count the votes in general, the us has such a fucked up system....
  
  The USA is a union of 50 semi-independent states, not a single homogenous country, which is where most of the complexity comes from.
  But, doesn't your country (you didn't say which it is) have any districts (or geographic subdivisions of some kind) where the inhabitants living within it send a representative to the national level to advocate for their interests and vote on national legislation with their local interests considered? That's what we're talking about here, except with an extra layer in between, where each State (being a semi-independent entity) gets to decide how it draws the boundaries of the districts within it.
- I don't think Democrats can Jerrymander much harder than they have been since 1812.
  Democrats won't fight for standard anything because they would lose many, MANY seats in their own states because they've been Jerrymandered all to hell to ensure that non Democrat voters are always the minority in their districts.
  
  S.2747 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Freedom to Vote Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress https://share.google/eRglTkE8X7S8e1oPZ
"Why should I have to pay taxes for roads and schools in Austin when I live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere by choice?"
-Desired Outcome
Get rid of districts and fill Congress through proportional representation. That solves so many problems.
- We should make it proportionate to economic output. Not number of people. Seems like the capitalist way.
- But it creates others. In the US we vote for people, in proportional representing, you vote for parties.
  You can argue that's better, but it's very different from what we have now.
  
  It is different, and I would indeed argue it's better. And let's face it, you are mostly voting for parties anyway. How many independents are there really?
  But if you want to have district representatives, you could do a hybrid system where half the seats are assigned by district, and the other half are assigned from a national list to fill out the proportionality.
  Republicans would be getting most of their seats from districts, Greens and Libertarians would get them entirely from the national list, but at least they'd get representation.
- If we do that, they will be all Republicans
  
  I'm not sure you understood any of the words you are replying to.
  
  Republicans rarely have a majority of the congressional votes. They get their majority in Congress from uneven representation and gerrymandering. In proportional representation, they'd lose their majority.
Republicans are cheating scum.
A quick reminder that gerrymandering, the unethical process where politicians choose their voters (instead of the other way around), is not legal in any other western democracy. It's runaway corruption, shouldn't exist, and needs to be publishable by jail time...
Reminds me of Kansas..
I live in CD4, and it's already just as ridiculous. A massive swath of rural voters to drown out relatively diverse parts of Plano, TX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_4th_congressional_district
- Texas 13th is horrible too. They cut the city of Denton out of Denton County and stretched it all the way to the top of the pan handle.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_13th_congressional_district
  
  Yep. It totally makes sense for Denton and Amarillo to have the same representative. /s
Aportionment voting. As close to possible make sure the voting for a party gets appropriate representation then vote in who by primary. If this is a 100 seat senate and the state goes 48%red 51% blue and 1 % green each color holds a primary after the election to choose who will represent this platform that got them elected. This creates unity inside a party on issues in which everyone should campaign on and if you aren't striving to enact the platform it is more seen and you are less likely to be voted in in the primary next time. This creates more parties as if you have a different platform what is the point being in the same party. You still have to play smart like the green party should work green if they have the same agenda that way people don't get upended but generally this is better
what fucking idiotic ideas. why, I am curious, are districts not drawn by immutable things like latitude and longitude?
- Because you have to take into account population numbers. The same number of people represented per representative(in the house) in a given state is one of the points of census.
  
  that’s just a ratio - population / max ppl in cohort.
- Physical landmarks like rivers and mountains would be best, but even county lines would be good.
  
  why have districts at all?
- That doesn't change much, it's possible to define this district that way.
Question, does that make it overall blue or red for everyone else? I imagine Austin has more people than that rural area but idk
- It’s only a small portion of Austin. If you take a sliver of a city where 20k people live and add it to a large rural district with 30k people across thousands of square miles you then spread the population of the dense city across the rural districts without overwhelming the ratio.
  
  Utterly ridiculous stuff, how can the US call itself a democracy.
- But they used to have to draw their districts in a way that wouldn't get thrown out by the courts. Now they can do whatever they want. There are still a few judges left that will rule against them, but not for long as more and more are replaced by MAGAts. In the meantime, they can still go ahead and do it now because by the time the issue works its way through the legal system the 2026 midterms will have happened and they'll have cemented control.
Just enough farmer jokels in there to neutralize democratic city dwellers.
Oh no. anyway, here's a map of Illinois' congressional districts.
- Oh no! Just cause Illinois district is fucky doesn't mean Texas' should be even more fucky. It's not a god damned contest.
  
  Sounds like you're just upset that the Republicans are following the Democrats' lead. It's like watching a kid cheat in a game, then watch the kid get upset when the other kid also starts cheating.
Yes
I wonder if an AI system could feasibility generate fair, compact, impartial districts given appropriate prompts - if those prompts were agreed upon by all parties, and the AI and associated data gathering administered by a 3rd party non-profit.
- You don't need "AI", at least not the kind of unpredictable over-hyped bullshit called "AI", whether it's an LLM or something stupider.
  https://bdistricting.com/2020/ applies an predicable algorithm to produce geographically compact, equal-population districts.
  Of course, those are not the only "fairness" constraints we want to impose. The VRA "required" packing to ensure representation for historically disenfranchised populations, e.g.

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