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ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23hr ago
We had a guy arguing that, I remember ControlsFreak getting into a rather long fight with him over this. I believe the argument is something like "the number is fake anyway, so you don't need to see it".
SkoomaDentist
23hr ago
They went full retard. Never go full retard.
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
This is your regular reminder that gerrymandering is just a symptom. Your underlying problem is that your voting system sucks.
Now, on a theoretical level, all voting systems suck. But in practice, some do suck a lot harder than others.
The main appeal of first past the post (FPTP) is that you can tie every representative to one voting district. This used to matter a lot more than it matters today. In 1800, having a representative who would visit their district and talk with people was certainly useful. Today, nobody has to ride to DC to talk to their congresscritter any more, they can just use video calls (if they are interested). And for most stuff congress passes, regional considerations are not important. If congress declared war on Mexico, I suppose that Texas might feel different about that than Washington. But if they declare war on Afghanistan or pass Obamacare, the impact will be similar for every state. Most of the federal decisions where some areas are disproportionally impacted is probably federal funding spend on particular contractors located in a particular town. Senators trying to redirect the gravy train to their state seems a bad thing to me.
On the other hand, FPTP effectively means you have a two-party system. This is terrible for political discourse. Basically, you split the electorate in the middle, and everyone to the left -- from Marxists to centrists leaning slightly left -- votes for the D party while everyone to the right -- from right-leaning centrists to Klansmen -- is represented by the R party.
One lens to compare FPTP with proportional representation is through the lens of information content in a single vote. If you pick between two alternatives which are roughly 50-50, then the information content of a ballot is one bit. (Of course, if the outcome in your state is a foregone conclusion, there is a point to be made that your vote has a probability close to zero to change the election outcome.) By contrast, the Shannon entropy of a vote in the 2025 German federal election (if you voted for a party which ended up in the Bundestag) was 2.2 bits. Even if counting the 14% of votes for parties which stayed below the 5% threshold as devoid of information, this gives you 1.9 bit -- almost twice as much as in a US presidential election. In the US system, half of the relevant information -- which two candidates will appear on the ballot -- are decided in the primaries and party conventions.
I think that this is a big reason why US politics became so toxic when social media rose. Both in FPTP and PR, candidates and parties will attack other parties before the election. The difference is that in PR, parties can rarely hope for an absolute majority by themselves, they typically need a coalition. If you have called all the other candidates shitfaces, then it is unlikely that you will be part of a coalition.
With FPTP, once a controversial position is adopted by one party, the other party is bound to adopt the opposite position. If you like both abortion and gun rights, or are concerned about both climate change and immigration, you will just have to prioritize. (Even with a PR system, you are unlikely to find a party which will share all your priorities.
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The fact that FPTP also allows you to rule with slightly over a quarter of the votes is just the cherry on the top.
I am wondering if any US state had thought to introduce multiple layers of gerrymandering. For example, in a presidential election, rather than awarding your electoral college votes to whom got most votes in your state, you could introduce a state-wide electoral-college-like abomination. Say each neighborhood will award their electors to whomever got the majority in that neighborhood, then the town's electors get awarded to whomever has the most neighborhood electors, then you repeat the same process for a few more layers. With each layer of winner takes all, you introduce another factor of 0.5 to the number of votes required to win.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
23hr ago
When have people argued that customers don't want to see price in healthcare? Seems insane to me. I also have no clue why you wouldn't want to price things out up front. Does it benefit the medical industry?
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
Yes, if the judge is high enough in the food chain. This is called case law.
For example, Roe v. Wade was case law made by the SCOTUS which made abortion legal in the US on a flimsy interpretation of the 14th amendment, and that stood for 50 years.
it's an interesting question that's surprisingly hard to answer.
At first glance, you're right. Those majority-minority districts produce huge majorities for democrats that waste a lot of their votes. For example, look at Georgia's 4th district: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_4th_congressional_district#Election_results where the Democrats have been winning by 50+ points in almost every election.
On the other hand, those districts are very effective. It leads to way more black congressmen than they would probably have without them. For example the Congressional Black Caucus has 55 members while the Hispanic Caucus only has 37, despite the US having a larger overall Hispanic population. And since many of those are very safe seats, it leads to those congressmen sticking around a long time, giving them much greater influence in congress than the ones from swing districts who haveo spent all their time campaigning and usually don't last more than a few cycles.
That in turn leads to black voters being very loyal to the Democrats. Democrats typically get something like 90% of the black vote, compared to 40% of whites and 50-60% of other racial groups. It's actually really hard to find any other demographic that's nearly so loyal to one party. Black voters also have higher voter turnout than most other non-white racial groups. Going from this: https://edition.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results the only similar effect is if you group people by "do you self-identify as a liberal/conservative." Most demographic effects are waaaay smaller. And the Democrats really need that voting block. Playing with https://www.cookpolitical.com/swingometer/2024 shows how ugly the electoral map gets for them without it... changing their share of black voters down from 90% to just around 75% means they suddenly lose all the swing states they won in 2020, without changing anything else.
Or to put it another way: bringing in 10 extra black voters with one voting Republican gives the Democrats around +9 votes overall. Bringing in 10 extra Asian or Hispanic voters with 4 of them voting Republican gives the Democrats just +2 votes. So they'd need 5 times as many Asian or Hispanic voters to get the same effect they get from Black voters.
So, maybe it costs the Democrats a few congressional districts, but pays off for them overall in statewide elections. But then you also have to ask... why are Democrats doing so (relatively) badly among every other demographic? Probably a lot of reasons, but some of it might be that they're giving black voters too much control of the party. They take on positions like Reparations and Defund the Police which are popular with black voters, but unpopular with moderate voters. They choose Kamala Harris in large part just because they needed someone who was black enough to appease their base, not because she was a good candidate.
Overall it's hard to say. In a different world where they weren't required to have those majority-minority districts (mostly meaning black districts because of how the population maps play out), all of politics would be so different that we really can't say with any certainty. It's amazing how redrawing a few lines on the map, which aren't even state boundaries, can have such a drastic effect on everything.
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