• 5 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I’ve got to say, having been involved in campaigns to end gerrymandering, there is a subset of people who can be bothered to learn/care about how it works, and many others who don’t. Your process sounds even more complex and time consuming, and I don’t see it being effective because the general public won’t be invested in it. Like voting for traffic court judges but even more confusing.

    More importantly I also think you’re underestimating the complexity of reconciling hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods per state, each a ranked choice list of different variants. One person will pick a boundary, and then some other person will pick a boundary that conflicts with it, multiply that by a dozen million and then what, some algorithm will decide which lines are correct? And then the resulting districts still won’t have an equal number of constituents? That violates the one person one vote principle, which is part of the issue with gerrymandering and the electoral college.


  • Well that’s the challenge, is that in order to have a vote on what the district lines are, you’ve already chosen a group of voters eligible for the election, so you’ve drawn a district. (Unless we’re having the entire country or entire state vote on districts) I also think district boundaries are exactly the sort of thing that voters aren’t inclined to research or show up to vote for, even though it makes a huge difference in election outcomes. For that reason I like STV/proportional voting for legislative bodies.


  • The sustainability of a monarchy is the problem. Even if you have a great king, they’re smart, they’re competent, they care about the good of the people, what about their successor? And what’s more, every person is fallible, susceptible to blind spots or maladjusted thinking. With a monarch there’s not a true means to address that sort of problem. Democracy has all sorts of problems, it’s true. But as the quote goes, it’s the worst form of government after all other forms of government.


  • Other comments have mentioned ranked choice voting, proportional representation and single transferable vote - these are all voting systems which encourage having more than two parties. The reason we don’t have them in the u.s. now is because people know they’re throwing their vote away or even helping the candidate they don’t like by voting third party.


  • I like this concept. Do you have thoughts on how you would address gerrymandering? One reason I like proportional representation is it addresses that challenge, but wouldn’t have the same intimacy in the concept you’re describing.

    I could also see challenges with too many steps meaning that officials in the upper tier of representatives don’t actually know the tier below them and so may not have that sense of interpersonal obligation.