Quoted for truth, and because it makes a really good point.
When the voting age was 21+, 16- and 18-year-olds were a lot more socially mature than they are now, in the sense of being willing and able to take on adult responsibilities. Physically, of course, their brains were still teen brains. Now, though, cultural adolescence can extend well into one’s 20s. Why is for another thread, but the point is that the voting age has always been a little bit arbitrary, first too old and now perhaps too young.
I wouldn’t mind pushing the age downward, but I don’t think it would actually make much difference, much less solve any problems, particularly as both normal and bad actors seem to be upping their game in terms of influencing votes via social media etc.
However, lots and lots of people say they have different values and want different representatives than Those People living in Those Cities or That Backcountry.
The issue AIUI is less about giving persons still serving their terms the right to vote (though I believe some states do), than about permanently banning people once convicted of felonies from voting, even after they’ve served their terms, finished any probation, and may have gone years without getting into any further trouble. Which AIUI some states do.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:
The history of the USA can be seen as a long, vehement, and sometimes bloody argument over what, exactly, it means to say “All [men] are created equal.”
It mattered a very great deal that we started there; even though the people who first signed on to it didn’t mean by it anything by what we mean by it now.
Have you looked at the shape of New York State?
And your lines are going to run into major problems with significant geographic features, making it difficult for some people to get to the polls; and will chop coherent communities into bits (though I don’t know whether that’s your intention).
I disagree. I consider myself a centrist (although I realize many extremists also consider themselves centrists). I’m a Democrat and I feel the Democrats are a coalition of the center and the left-wing.
This is why the Republicans put so much effort into voter suppression; they know the Democrats represent the majority.
I understand how Canada determines its ridings but what I’m talking about is how population density variations within state borders make it nearly impossible to accurately represent voters in many states.
I think a fitty-fitty state like Wisconsin or North Carolina should have close to a fitty-fitty House delegation and we can’t do that with single member districts because of where the electorate groups itself.
Btw, Canada has its own problems with its electorate being fairly representative.
One obvious point of reform is campaign finance. It’s legally and politically impossible at this point, but ideally I’d do something like publicly-provided campaign funds for anyone who can gather more than a minimum amount of support, and outlaw private campaign funding.
On the contrary, one of our problems is that there’s far too much, the Republicans have been able to drag the Democrats farther and farther right for decades in the name of “centrism”. Resulting in a political system composed the center-right Democrats and the far right Republicans and not much else. We need to recognize that “centrism” is immoral and self-destructive when the fanatics show up.
No. Every slice line would run exactly east-west (in a tall state like CA). Not perpendicular to the border azimuth at the place where a slice line meets the border.
Sure the people of Maine like it because it gives them privilege. But the point was that the Senate gives small states their say, and the House gives big states their say. Yet the Senate, House, AND Electoral College ALL preference states like Maine. How is that fair?
There were probably plenty of white voters who were happy when black people couldn’t vote.
There were probably plenty of men who were happy when women couldn’t vote.
And there are probably plenty of voters in small states like Maine or Wyoming who are happy with having a vote two or three times times the size of a California voter’s. But finding people who are happy with being the beneficiary of an unfair system is not justification for that system.
Gerrymandering is not uniquely an (US) American problem; France in particular has had notable problems with the ruling party redrawing electoral districts. What is unique about the United States is the strong institutional regression to a two party system that exists almost everywhere (even though not explicitly ensconced in law), and the polarization that often allows one party to dominate local and state politics for decades with little effective resistance. Propotional representation through some kind of proportional ranked choice voting system might break the logjam slightly but frankly it isn’t as if there are many areas where even the long standing third parties like Libertarian or Green parties would command more than single digit percentages even if aggregated statewide. And when the issue comes up in surveys, American voters like having direct representation by a specific representative rather than representatives at large because it gives less influential areas like rural districts or downmarket cities dedicated representation where they might otherwise be overlooked. The urban/rural divide is far more pronounced in the United States than almost any other industrialized nation that has fair elections which drives a lot of politics and the current polarization. Which is not to say that a lot of obvious gerrymandering can’t be addressed by statute ‘cures’ (the courts have been generally reluctant, with some cause, to weigh in), but it isn’t as if there is one fully objective standard to what ‘fair’ voting districts have to look like.
But setting that aside, the fact is that when people complain about “gerrymandering” they often have very different views of what that means, or what a ‘fair’ apportion would look like, even when the districts are drawn by nonpartisan (or at least bipartisan) teams following some set of explicit critiera, because what they are really complaining about is not getting the best possible advantage for their “team”. And while gerrymandering on the national scale via a concerted plan by the GOP is a relatively recent phenomenon, historically it has actually been the Democratic party (city ‘political machines’ in the industrialized Northern cities, Dixiecrats in the South) which engaged in gerrymandering, albeit generally being more about maintaining local control than influencing national elections.
Again, take a look at the FiveThirtyEight.com Gerrymandering Project; they did a really good exploration of why it is such a pernecious problem and how difficult it is to come up with a set of objective critiera to prevent gerrymandering that everybody will agree to, even if they aren’t being disingenuous.
No, Maine gets two house votes, exactly right for their population. the only states that might get too many are the few 1 vote states.And even then you’d have to look at their population first.
An yes Maine get privilege- but so doe California.
In a discussion where it’s a given that the gaming forces of first past the post will produce a two party state, I feel like this statement is akin to saying about Philo Farnsworth’s invention, “Sure, the TV seems like a neat idea but, when you think about it, it to him decades to create it, cost him many fortunes, it’s black and white, and the image is all fuzzy and weird. Clearly, that thing will go nowhere and never get better.”
I have no love of the small parties and I would never recommend proportional representation, but it seems strange to think that, after moving to a proportional system, that somehow that would have no effect on the landscape as time moved on.
Of course, yes, five minutes after the Constitutional Amendment was passed, the Green party would be too small to even appear in the Senate. That doesn’t tell us a thing about what it would look like 30 years later.
The problem is that there’s no general agreement on what a fair system should look like.
Consider New York. As a whole the state is roughly 55% Democratic and 45% Republican. We have twenty-six congressional districts. Does that mean that we should have fourteen “Democratic” districts and twelve “Republican” districts? Or does it means we should have twenty-six districts, each of which is 55% Democratic and 45% Republican? Which is the fair standard we should be aiming for?
Third parties have had effects on elections in the past (T. Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose Party”, Ross Perot’s “Reform Party”), and we’ve even had a couple of major shifts in the political landscape (albeit essentially one party morphing into a successor organization with similar underpinnings) ; however, the problem with expanding party influence today is twofold; one is that the standing alternative parties are purpose-designed to appeal to a fringe demographic interested in a narrow set of policy areas, and the second is that the major parties have so courted corporate and ‘dark money’ interests (and serve them very well regardless of which one is in control of the White House or Congress) that alternate parties are at a massive campaign disadvantage by default. If the advantages of campaign war chests were removed or at least attenuated, and the alternative parties could draw enough influence to force coalition governance, then we could see a viable multiparty spectrum that might actually be more representative of general public opinion. But I think that getting money out of politics would be even more difficult than Constitutional reforms.
That’s it in a nutshell, and applying a requirement to “maximize” competitiveness intrinsically creates conflicts. But when you see some of the tortured boundaries of electoral districts with areas connected by conduits tens of feet wide, it is obvious that there is some serious shit-fuckery going on that has nothing to do with any kind of fairness or balance. Frankly, the fairest thing might just to have an algorithm draw a rough grid across a state and psuedo-randomly iterate adjustments to the boundaries until each has approximately the same number of people regardless of political affiliation. You’ll end up with concentrations of mostly liberal urban voters and big swaths of mostly conservative rural voters, but then, that is reflective of the actual demographics. Any decisions made with human judgement, regardless of how “non-partisan” the composition, is always going to be subject to complaints about bias and corruption even if there is no evidence to support those claims.
Yeah; the present third parties are all shaped by the fact that everyone knows they are locked out of power by the two-party system. So no serious politician who wants to actually get elected is likely to actually join one, making them a haven for crazies, extremists and the self-indulgently irrelevant. Anyone who wants actual power will join one of the big two.
In a system where third parties could actually gain real power, their character would change drastically as people who actually expect to get into power and enact their agendas joined them.
