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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25989 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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i've always wondered instead of a commission you could just agree ahead of time on some rules on how redistricting would be performed and then just have the rules execute at a fixed time period.

It's relatively straightforward to figure out how any given rule would alter the existing electoral chances. Announce your commission, and people will figure out what ruleset gives them the best advantage, and then insist that this ruleset is clearly the "unbiased, optimal" rule and that the commission should adopt it.

Agreed that this makes districting quite the tough nut to crack.

I had a thought that I should learn more about the history behind the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, which was ratified by the very people that it took power away from. I did a little bit of reading, but there are competing historical perspectives that I'll have to ruminate on further.

There are definitely parallels in terms of national/state-level dynamics, impinging on one another. It also seems unlikely to me to propose that people at that time were simply naive to the possibility that such a rule change would be likely to advantage/disadvantage them. Some explanations try to argue that some of the main implications had already effectively come about via other means, so it wasn't a terribly sharp break. I don't know.

In any event, perhaps worth ruminating on and reading more history. It seems not entirely impossible to come up with something, but perhaps it is the case that nationalized interests are too entrenched and 'smart' to the scene that even minor steps will be more effectively blocked. In that case, we'd probably need to be more clever to messy up the predictive capabilities.

I haven't totally given up on toying with various schemes, but it is a difficult problem that is seriously resistant to most flippant proposals.

Obviously we should give each party a bull's hide, and they may claim any land it encloses as their own.

The party which won the last popular vote must provide two bulls between four and six years of age, white and without blemish, sharing a sire. The party which lost the last popular vote must pick their bull first; the party which won will then get to slaughter, eat, and enclose their lands to offset this advantage of picking the slightly larger bull.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

I've always favored assigning voters to districts by valid dice roll. Nothing up my sleeves there, must be fair.

Is statistical joke, if unclear: each individual district becomes a random sample of the whole and converges to such, such that this is the worst possible gerrymander. But I didn't do anything obviously against the rules like taking race into account.

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