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.
It’s amazing the system has held together for as long as it has.
I will never understand how this obvious manipulation has been legal for decades.
Money. Every American politician is corrupt as fuck.
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?
when lawmakers break the law and nobody enforces the law, it stops being the law.
Laws still apply, just not to the people in power.
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.
We’ve lived in a fascist country for a long time.
centuries*
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.
Won’t matter unless the progressives of the state get organized.
And you pretend that the Democrats haven’t been doing this since they were the Democratic Republican Party.
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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.
It’s such a silly and disingenuous argument. The most recent version of gerrymandering arguably began with REDMAP in 2010, which was in response to Obama winning. Before that, it was used almost exclusively to disenfranchise black voters before the voting rights act in 1965. Before that, it was used by both parties in unison to maintain the supremacy of incumbents.
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.
Arguable that things have improved for poor people in the last 50 years. In relative terms they are objectively far worse off. And native Americans were arguably better off in the early colonial days pre-manifest destiny. I know US liberalism loves the myth of linear progress. But I think it isn’t necessarily accurate.
Oooh that liberalism! Promoting human rights! Ruining all of my evil schemes to catch the smurfs!
Liberalism promotes capitalism. Which isn’t great for human rights.
So no, criticising liberalism as an ideology, built upon capitalist and statist-nationalist ideals does not make me an evil person trying to “catch the smurfs”.
We’re going to have to end all human rights to defeat capitalism, guys. It’s the only way, trust me.
I have a hard time believing your good faith. Are you seriously arguing there’s no pro-human rights ideology except liberalism?
Liberalism ≠ Human Rights
If so please please learn about political philosophy. There’s a lot more than “liberals” and “conservatives”.
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.
First fast the post
2 Fast 2 Postious
Thank you for the correction.
For about 200 years, a candidates morality was an important factor, now we apparently don’t care, especially the MAGAs.
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.
No, it depends on a population that actually cares about democracy and will punish those “bad faith actors” at the polls. Unfortunately, we’re dealing with Americans here.
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.
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.
Just just copy the German 2 vote system.
If we do that, they will be all Republicans
I’m not sure you understood any of the words you are replying to.
Reality has a left leaning bias, this is why the US has a gerymandering issue in the first place. If the right could get into power without rigging things, they would, but they can’t, so gerrymander it up.
Edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment, but I can’t for the life of me figure out which one it was meant to be a reply to. Perhaps the one that the one I’m replying to is replying to.
There’s a quote about that. “If conservatives can’t win in a democratic system, they won’t abandon conservatism, they will abandon democracy.”
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.
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…
These assholes are going to make violent revolution inevitable. Why they think they will survive that revolution is a mystery.
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.
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
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.
Good to hear!
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 cocksucker 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.
we also have states but when we vote for our national government every vote is counted on it’s own whereas in the us the votes win districts which decide on the election outcome and can be manipulated through gerrymandering
Here, the only office not directly elected by popular vote is the US Presidential/Vice Presidential ticket, where it is determined by the infamous Electoral College, where each state has a different number of votes to cast, one for each senator and representative seat they have. Most states award all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in their state, but a couple of them (Maine and Nebraska) do it differently, so sometimes the other candidate winds up getting one of their electoral votes.
All other elected offices are determined by popular vote for the seat being elected. So,
For a US Senate seat (where each Senator represents the entire state), every voter in the state votes in that race and the winner is determined by popular vote [1].
For the US House of Representatives, each state is divided into a number of districts, with the number based on the population of that state relative to the US population as a whole. So a state with a large population gets many districts and a state with a lower population gets only a few (in some cases, only one!). The voters in each district elect their representative for their own district and the winner is determined by the popular vote in that district.
[1] Before 1913, people didn’t directly elect their Senators, the state legislatures did! So we’ve at least made progress there.
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.
If you can’t win, cheat. It’s the official slogan of conservatives worldwide.
“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
Republicans are cheating scum.
Reminds me of Kansas…
Just enough farmer jokels in there to neutralize democratic city dwellers.
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.
This is nothing new or unique. As much as it sucks when it’s blatantly obvious like this, there isn’t a true and objective way to draw perfect districts. If you cut the state into perfect squares then you group completely unrelated communities on either side of a large river that have nothing in common and one overwhelms the other. Sometimes one niche population is one county over from another one that’s twice the size. A lot of times a certain state does have a serious political bias. Independent districting committees with members from both sides still come up with wildly gerrymandered maps. A lot of times they aim for “highly competitive” elections where both sides have a real chance at winning any given election, but if the state is genuinely deep blue or red, that’s gerrymandered as well even if it “feels” democratic. 538 had an awesome map where you could visualize unfair advantages for each, highly competitive districts, compact districts (no absurd shapes like this one) and compact but follows existing county lines, but when ABC bought them they gutted everything good about 538 and just used the name for their existing garbage election reporting hoping to lure in a few more viewers so it’s now wiped off the face of the internet.
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's_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's_13th_congressional_district
Yep. It totally makes sense for Denton and Amarillo to have the same representative. /s
