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Virginia is voting on redrawing their congressional districts today. Here is the Wikipedia entry.
The main highlight is that it would change Virginia from 6-5 democrat-republican split to a 10-1 split. It is being sold by Democrats as an effort to counter Republican gerrymandering in other states. It is being panned by Republicans as unfair representation, and an election map that looks like Fairfax county (rich county in northern Virginia) gets to elect about half of the state's representatives.
I'm a Virginia resident. So I've been getting lots of mailers about the issue and simple vote "yes" or "no" signs are everywhere.
I'm very frustrated with the whole thing. First for Trump kicking off this fight. Second with the Democrats in Virginia that have made a ridiculously bullshit map. I still have yet to hear anyone from the "yes" side explain how this is good for Virginia other than "fight Trump". I even read one article that had a title implying it would be about voters not feeling represented, and it turns out the content of the article was about democratic leaders addressing the democrat voters in the now single solitary red district. No content about how Republican voters might feel in the 10 other districts.
If this level of bullshit is on the table I feel like other proposals that get shot down for being "crazy" in normal times might end up back on the table. Like a bunch of Virginia counties seceding and joining West Virginia. Or the right to giant congress
The federal election system is already biased heavily towards Republicans to begin with what with the electoral college (both Dubya and Trump 1 benefited from that) and congress apportionments. A state like California has 20 million people per senator, Mississippi is almost 1.5 million. A citizen in Mississippi has more than 10x the influence in the Senate than one in California, entirely based on state lines.
I had ChatGPT find some information on this and due to this blue states even on lower estimates have twice the people per senator than red ones. In the strongly partisan states, it's almost 4x!
While the house of reps doesn't have such a bias (or at least a very very minimal one), even if the Dems could manage to lean the house countrywide towards themselves it still leaves them 1v2 in biased institutions. (Argubly 1v2.5 or something given that the bias in the Senate and presidency also means more likely to get SC picks through). And that's a big if.
Well, no, you didn't.
You had an probabilistic compiler assemble what would be the most probable completion to a prompt you wrote. There was no real data outside of what you offered in your own prompt.
Feature, not a bug. Federalist 10 does a better job of laying out the argument than I can, but my best attempt is that factions are inevitable and factions look out for themselves. Factions will often try to pass laws that are bad not only for their opponents, but for the polity at large and that infringe upon the rights of individuals.
If you're after a "pure" majority rule democracy with no checks and balances, you're going to have a bad time. It's just a matter of when it is your turn in the barrel, not if.
Yeah and it turns out what would be the most probable completion to a question asking for information with accompanying sources to a question is information with sources, which I can then go to and read and link. It got me a writeup from an associate professor at George Mason University.
Taiwan is the 14th highest GDP per capita and they elect their leaders through simple FPTP. But we don't even have to go to foreign nations, we have proof it's ok right at home.
State governorships all around the country don't use their own internal versions of the electoral college, and yet they seem to be generally fine. Same with many cities and their mayoral elections. 50 State elections + god knows how many city elections don't seem to have some unique glaring issues that implementing an electoral college system in them would fix.
It's quite telling that even the most ardent supporters of the federal electoral college don't seem to be calling for it in their own states. Do they hate their state having a healthier democracy?
I wouldn't refer to Taiwan as any sort of a bastion of popular democracy. It's better than it was but a lot of fucking around there.
No country or system will ever be perfect, especially not for one right next door to an actively hostile country 60x bigger constantly trying to interfere behind the scenes. But by the metrics the Taiwanese system doesn't seem to be much worse. Things like approval ratings are at somewhat similar levels to other democracies for example.
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