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.
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.
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.
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.
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