Gerrymandering is why the house of representatives does not represent the actual population. The congressional districts are redrawn once every 10 years based on the census. The new districts are mostly drawn by the state legislatures. The next time this happens is in 2020, with the new districts drawn in time for the 2022 congressional races.
That seems like a long time to wait.
The basic fix is this: If you can’t move the lines, move the people.
Like-minded voters tend to cluster together. Gerrymandering exploits this. The worst cases define districts demographically in order to put a solid core of ‘blue’ voters into a single bucket with a huge majority. Neighboring ‘red’ districts scoop up as many ‘blue’ voters as they can without losing the ‘red’ majority. So for example in a sate that is 60% blue, you might have one 99% blue district and four 55% red districts. Congressional representation in this fictional state is 80% red even though the state’s population votes 60% blue.
We can and should explore ways to get people moving between districts. In some cases that may just mean moving across the street or a little further from the freeway.
Conduct outreach to let people know they live in gerrymandered districts. Canvassing, roadside signs, community forums, etc.
Make district maps an integrated part of a normal housing search in gerrymandered areas. Maybe the districts are superimposed on the Zillow map. Inform people.
Look for opportunities where adding services (day care etc.) in some area would make people likely to move from one district to another.
Get Daddy Warbucks to offer financial incentives to people moving from one district to another.
The key to this actually making a difference is to target the right location.
District 1 with a narrow R majority borders a district 2 with a massive D majority
Migrating from d1 to d2 is not necessarily a radical move
That should not be too difficult to satisfy. Since the ‘red’ districts already scoop up a decent chunk of ‘blue’ voters, there will already be blue/purple neighborhoods in red districts.
Submitting to the forum. Why not?
Does anyone here live in or know of an area that fits?
This is nuts. Most people probably don’t know who their Congressperson is, or care. You’ve got basically no chance of convincing enough people to move to the “right” Congressional districts just to counteract gerrymandering in the next 21 months. Even if you could achieve it, that Herculean effort will just be undone by state legislatures that gerrymander districts in 2020, and you’ll be right back to begging people to pick up and move for an issue most of them don’t care about.
TL;DR: I can think of 100 more effective ways to spend your activist time and energy besides this.
ETA: but if Michael Bloomberg decides he wants to send me a check to upgrade my house across town, I won’t turn him down.
That’s completely ridiculous. No one, no matter how political they are, is going to select a residence based on the congressional district. Even someone like me, who reads multiple political blogs per day, wasn’t aware that I was changing congressional districts by moving a few blocks.
You might be right about that. But look, people move every single day. Hundreds of them. They look at lots of criteria when searching. Near a bus stop? What’s the walkable score? Good Italian food nearby? All things equal, district rebalancing karma could tip the scale. You’re right that the information is hidden. Put it where people will see it, and maybe they’ll give it a second thought.
For those who don’t care about politics, figure out what they do care about. If it’s bus stops, make sure there are bus stops in the right places. Then when they move, they’ll look in those places.
Friend of mine hasn’t lived in North Carolina for about twenty years now. This election convinced her to move back home from California: she figures if she’s gonna fight, she’s gotta be where the fighting’s good.
Create a federal agency with the purposes of drawing up electoral districts and maintaining electoral rolls with the goal being maximum efficiency, accuracy and convenience to citizens.
It’s frankly surprising to me that you let elected officials control the electorate to the extent they do.
There are surely some cases where moving a few blocks would accomplish this, but get real: for most people we’re talking about moving tens of miles at least. Especially since Republican districts tend to be on the more rural side, you’re likely asking people to commute, say, an hour longer each day in order to add one vote to a Democratic candidate’s total.
Well, actually, that was on my mind, last time I moved. I looked up who my new Congressmen and women would be, and that was part of my decision.
Of course, one problem is that the lines change every so often, and you might find yourself redistricted into the home district of some bozo you don’t like.
A gerrymandered border between a blue and a red district has to be well into blue ‘territory’. The red district has to be say 40% blue to sufficiently spread the red around. Sometimes the ‘blue’ district is just a narrow corridor along a freeway. Changing districts does not even mean changing neighborhoods in the case of Okrahoma and dalej42.
What I’m looking for is one R district that could be flipped by a reasonable number of people moving there from somewhere else.
Eric Holder is leading an effort to counter gerrymandering through legal challenges and such. There was a NYTimes article about that recently. I hope he is successful.
Bipartisan, or better yet, nonpartisan commissions following objective criteria. Such as following, where possible existing city/county boundaries, border length, etc. Allow the parties, or anybody for that matter, to submit plans. The plan coming closet to meeting the objective criteria is chosen.
With today’s computer algorithms gerrymandering has become more science than art. The same computer algorithms that make partisan gerrymandering possible could also be used to make non-partisan redistricting work. Ideally if 60% of the voters in a state voted D, for example, the best district scheme would send a Congressional delegation to Washington that was 60% Democratic.
I know how gerrymandering works. I’m trying to tell you that the human cost of this plan isn’t remotely realistic.
Your average congressional district has somewhere around a quarter million voters. To move the needle, you’re talking about at least 5,000 to 10,000 (or more!) families moving. Sure, let’s say there are 10,000 houses or apartments available in the same neighborhood. (Yeah, right.)
Each one of those families will be dealing with headaches like maybe moving schools for kids, maybe paying ten grand or more in moving costs (such as the costs of buying and selling homes), the hassle of boxing up everything they own, and so on. And the payback is that if several thousand other families agree to disrupt their lives in a similar fashion, there will be an outside chance that one district flips blue, while roughy 25 more would have to flip to have D’s take over the House?
And then in four years, when Republican-controlled state legislatures redraw the boundaries to account for this very slight population shift, what then? Suggest thousands of families move a couple miles more?
You want to fuck with the public transit systems, which already struggle to attract riders and not be huge sinkholes of taxpayer money anyways, just to try and entice “the right” voters to move to “the right” locations? Count me out of this plan.
Move to wear your vote won’t count, where people probably won’t like you and you won’t like them, and hope a bunch of other people follow so things will change. Genius!
Purely by chance – that is, by receiving a particular job offer – I moved my family to a congressional district where both our votes (wife’s and mine) are quite valuable indeed. At least, for the foreseeable future: “value” (that is, purpleness) shifts over time (Missouri, for example, was very high value until just ten years ago).
The only scenario I can imagine where maximizing national election voter value would have influenced my choosing a place to live, would have been the proverbial “all other things being equal” … weather, schools (we have a kid), salary, etc. … and that already presumes more than one simultaneous job offer, which is rare in my line of work (wasn’t so rare 20 or 30 years ago, but that’s a different story).
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