Floriida fifth district

[Plane]

  What American gerrymandering looks like to an Englishman.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2014/oct/29/gerrymander-florida-redistricting-gary-younge-video

[Xavier_Onassis]

He is exactly right about this. We even had a referendum against inequitable gerrymandering that won. But the FL legislature does not care what the people want. They care about staying in power.

[Plane]

How could you avoid Gerrymandering and also obey the civil rights laws he mentioned?

[Xavier_Onassis]

You divide districts where both parties have an equal chance of winning.

[Plane]

 That policy would loose in court, districts in which a black or black favored candidate can dependably win are a requirement.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I do not think that is so.

Most of the people in my district are Black. That was done intentionally.

[Plane]

Yes, to satisfy the law .

Also because it makes one of your neighboring districts more dependable to the other party.

Everyone but the voter wins.

[Plane]

http://www.redistrictingthenation.com/glossary.aspx

................was designed to disenfranchise African-Americans. Legislative district boundaries were drawn with the aim of diluting the electoral power of newly registered voters from ethnic minority groups.

Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, this practice was prohibited; indeed, in many circumstances, the statute in fact requires the creation of majority-minority districts. The practice of drawing districts that would afford racial and ethnic minorities the opportunity for elected representation has come be known as affirmative gerrymandering or—in a somewhat ironic reversal—racial gerrymandering.

Beyond the requirements of the Voting Rights Act, there are legal limits on drawing districts based on race, particularly for smaller populations. A number of recent Supreme...........

[Xavier_Onassis]

The voter is what democracy is all about

[Plane]

Yes .

But it would be truly clumsy to run a nation of 330,000,000 as a pure democracy, so we elect representatives in  a rather complicated process.

I like the idea of simplification, what exactly needs to be different?

I remember the gripes that Republicans used to have with the Gerrymandering that the Democrats used to do here in Georgia.

In theory , the Democrats were getting as much as a 10% advantage by exploiting the 10% error they were allowed .

But some Republicans were quite sanguine about this, the trends at the time were for Republican growth and Democrat shrinkage, and the heads of the party were saying that they didn't need to change a Democrat policy of gerrymandering that was working so well for the Republicans.

Georgia became Republican in the statehouse and has had two censuses since then, they do about the same thing the Democrats had done , in theory gaining a 10%advantage.


I really doubt that 10% figure , when the Georgia Republicans finally overcame the Democrat advantage and claimed the statehouse did they do so by building votes 10% above plurality? If they did  then taking the responsibility for gerrymandering should give them a 20-% better than even vote, and this I do not see happening.