How did all this "gerrymandering" happen to us?

The problem with this is that the Voting Rights Act makes it very hard to break up minority majority districts. This combined with the heavy concentration of Democrats in urban areas makes it very had to draw up districts that reflect the partisan divide of a state.

There’s a danger in gerrymandering. For a minority party to do it successfully, they have to create strongholds which are dominated by the majority party. Then they have to create districts where the minority party holds a slim lead over the majority party. The ideal is to create as many districts as you can where you have 51% of the votes (and your opponents have 49%) and then dump your remaining opponents in districts where they have 100% of the votes.

The danger of this is that your lead is paper thin. A shift in public opinion of just a few percentage points can turn your 51% districts into 49% districts. You could lose not only your control of the legislature but almost your entire presence.

Do you know which district you live in (both state & federal)? Who your representatives are on both levels?

Most people don’t. (Due to the level of civics education in this country, a number of them might not even know they have state legislators - but that’s another rant) So yes, they’re ok with it - they don’t even notice that it happened (too busy opera-ing or nascar-ing, depending on which stereotype they fit into.)
Also, districts are going to change every 10 years no matter what - so even the ones who do notice know that in 2020 the districts will be redrawn and it is possible that they might end up on the other side of the boundary. Depending on the state you’re in, though, there may not be a whole lot you can do about it other than voting for someone who may be more likely to draw the districts in a way that will be more beneficial the party that is closer to your beliefs.
This is a reason why voting for a person rather than a party utterly fails some of the time.

Why not a ballot initiative to set up a independent/nonpartisan redistricting system?

Only about half of the states allow ballot initiatives.

An independent system sounds good on paper, but how does it work in practice? If the legislature or the governor set the districts, it’s obviously going to be political. If some appointed officials like judges or some special committee pick the boundaries, then the appointments will be political. If the boundaries are set by a popular election, that’s political.

Do you just select a random group of people like a jury? Or have a computer draw lines on a map?

Besides this, a lot of people disagree on what an impartial result would look like. Suppose you have a state which has 60% Republicans and 40% Democrats with ten congressional districts. Should there be six Republican districts and four Democratic districts? Or ten districts each with 60% Republicans and 40% Democrats (which effectively means ten Republican districts)?

There is also the fact that gerrymandering capability has advanced recently due to computers. What used to be mere art has become exact science.

In the places where ballot initiatives are allowed, non-partisan redistricting commissions have had breath-taking results.

Presumably, since they elected the people responsible. They could have not done that.

I dislike the outcome as much as you do, but there’s nothing undemocratic about it.

I would assume you just hire some pros to do it. This wouldn’t be inventing the wheel -Canada has nonpartisan boundary commissions. Part of Elections Canada I believe.

So hiring someone with zero input from the electorate is okay, but asking the people we voted for specifically to do this job is not? That sounds like the opposite of democracy, to me.

And the issue becomes thornier when you’re discussing whites and blacks instead of D’s and R’s. If our fictional state is 30% black, does that mean there should be 3 majority-minority districts slated for black people? Well … to get majority-minority districts, you usually have to make fairly extensive use of techniques we’d typically call “gerrymandering”. Is it evil and wrong in these cases, or a righteous attempt to right past wrongs?

That’s just silly. Boundary commisions can and do take input from the electorate. And nobody votes a guy into office because they think he’ll be an awesome district map maker.

I know, right? Looks like it’s fairly recent…1788. That damned Patrick Henry and his anti-Federalists trying to keep Madison down! :eek:

That could be more a function of the way the Roosevelt coalition knit together a broad ideological spectrum of Democrats on one hand, while on the other hand voters responded to Presidential candidates as individuals, not as partisans. I’m not saying there wasn’t gerrymandering, but gerrymandering wasn’t necessary to that outcome. Certainly, a national policy of extreme gerrymandering wasn’t necessary to that outcome the way it is to the post-2010 landscape.

That alone is not evidence of gerrymandering…It could be evidence of ticket-splitting, i.e., that voters at that time tended to vote more Republican for President than for Congress. If you have evidence of a significant difference in the percentage of the total popular vote for Congress and the percentage of Congressional seats won by each party, then that could be more compelling evidence. (Still could be accounted for by other explanations, including the fact that winner-take-all elections tend to exaggerate popular vote split, but it eliminates some of them.)

Boundary commissions take input from the electorate, sure, but they weren’t chosen by the electorate. They were hired. That’s an unelected position. The decision to hire them was not made by the voters. That’s what I mean by “no input”. The input is after the fact. Not during the selection of the commission members.

And presumably, that’s at least part of why state legislators – in the 32 states which have the legislature in charge of redistricting – were elected. We know what their jobs are, and that’s one of them. Just like appointing a conservative Supreme Court Justice was one of the big reasons people voted for Trump. You wouldn’t say “nobody votes a President into office because they think he’ll pick a swell judge”, so why would you say that about a state rep? That’s their job. Sure, some people are ignorant of that aspect of their jobs, but it certainly isn’t a secret.

If you asked for[ul]
[li]Feminism;[/li][li]Rights for homosexuals;[/li][li]Voting rights for non-whites;[/li][li]A living wage;[/li][li]Prosecution of fraud;[/li][li]Someone to do something about organized crime elements in power;[/li][li]Medicare;[/li][li]Endangered species protection;[/li][li]Clean air;[/li][li]Clean water;[/li][li]Governement accountablity agencies;[/li][li]So much as a hot pulled-pork sandwich[/li][/ul]
You clearly are “asking for it,” and to stop you “asking for it,” the ability to have your votes override the network of power brokers & influence peddlers has to be taken away.

At least, that’s how it’s been explained to me, and not always this sardonically.

Politicians should be chosen by their constituency.

Politicians should not be the ones choosing the constituency.

Here in ohio we recently passed an amendment that created a bipartisan commission to draw the lines. This is just for state reps, not fed, but since this worked out, there may be one for fed here soon.

Around here the procedure for local districts is a three member board, made up of one appointed member from each major party plus the Commonwealth Chief Justice. It forces the sides to horsetrade and keep things balanced. Our legislature alternates majorities well enough (longest stretch since 1968 has been 12 yrs) though there still are some “safe” seats where the same guy has sat for 20+ years.