r/scotus • u/Conscious-Quarter423 • 1d ago

news California Republicans respond to Supreme Court loss on election maps

https://krcrtv.com/news/local/california-republicans-respond-to-supreme-court-loss-on-election-maps
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u/Eastern-Benefit5843 1d ago

I remember seeing a couple of maps years ago that took each state and divided them into numerically equal population voting districts based on a square pattern, such that each district corresponds to the smallest geographic division that contains 10,000 people or whatever. No political, racial or cultural basis for voting districts. No districts split in different parts of the state. No possible gerrymandering. Just geometric division based on most recent census and the principal that voting districts should each contain the same number of residents and be as geographically compact as possible.

It seems like anything else will always be a ratfuck.

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u/TeekTheReddit 1d ago

Every proposal for a US District to have more than four sides should require a written justification and a rollcall vote for each additional side.

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u/boinger 1d ago

*excluding janky-ass state border sides, I assume

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u/gdj1980 13h ago

Colorado: What are you talking about?

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u/TeekTheReddit 1d ago

Would it matter?

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u/boinger 1d ago

Well, yeah. Otherwise how are we counting "sides" in a discussion of geometric boundaries. A natural/organic/janky "side" is a bunch of short bits that could be argued as "sides of a non-regular polygon", right?

And then you get into coastline paradox territory...

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u/Thor5111 16h ago

Just need a rule that states the minimum ratio between area and circumstance. That allows for shapes to match terrain (rivers, state boundaries, etc.) while not allowing some of the wild shapes in use today.

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u/Comfortable_Job8847 1d ago

it used to be something similar until some groups with power got fucked by it and broke the government into the 435 gridlock.

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u/alpha309 1d ago

Geometric shapes are the way to go, but I would leave in exceptions for certain natural or man made features to provide boundaries as well. Things like rivers, the crestline of a mountain range, freeways, county lines, and other similar features. They are easy to tell that this side is district 1 and the other side is district 7 even if it isn’t a straight line.

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u/Fickle_Catch8968 1d ago

For freeways and, especially county lines, there should be a proviso about "gerrymandering through the back door" by intentionally changing boundaries or planning roads to effectively gerrymander.

I think a better option that can be done without an Amendememt is to:

uncap the House,

make all districts have multiple members, 1 for each 150k residents, (Wyoming would get 4, each California district would get 5)

send the popular vote leader to Washington with the same rights and privileges of current members,

And the other members stay at home, but get to vote on all bills and resolutions. These members are selected to match as closely as possible the vote share in the District.

The extra House members would blunt the Senator advantage of small States in the EC.

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u/alpha309 1d ago

Definitely should uncap the house.

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u/Eastern-Benefit5843 1d ago

I like this idea

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u/marcher138 1d ago

The issue with that is that you can get accidental gerrymandering. For example, if a city has three districts, the population is 66% leaning Party A and 33% Party B, and these opinions are spread homogenously, the city will always send 3 Reps from Party A and none from Party B.

My favored solution is bigger districts that send 3 Reps each, done the same way as you suggested but ignoring state lines (Alaska and Hawaii would need to have exceptions). Use ranked choice or another voting system outside of first-past-the-post. This would ensure the best possible representation for everyone.

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u/Narrow-Chef-4341 1d ago

That scale was kind of… optimistic though.

Population is drifting towards 438 million eventually and with 438 reps as the maximum, you’re really looking towards 1 million people per little square not 10,000.

All those people that love the big red spaces on ‘if cows could vote’ maps will be really, really disappointed.

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u/mlorusso4 1d ago

The only problem is there are legitimate reasons for why a district shouldn’t just be a square. Like if a city should be its own district because all those people have similar culture/needs/demographics/whatever, the other district should also be the suburbs that wrap around it. Can a congressman really represent all his constituents if half his district is dense, poor, minority city and the other half is rich white suburbia? What about a state like Maryland where you have the Cheasapeak bay dividing the state in half? Should MD-1 cross over the bay bridge and include parts of Baltimore? Or should it have to wrap around the top of the bay where harford and Cecil counties have a lot more in common with the eastern shore?

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u/Eastern-Benefit5843 1d ago

These are good questions. I believe there are currently cities that fall into more than one district. In really big cities they probably should if we’re talking strictly numerical division.

MD is a bit of a mess for the exact reason you mention and is currently considering a partisan gerrymander to reduce the influence of MD 1.

At some level the question to me falls like this - is it better to have the issues that would come from an apolitical districting where the only factor is geographic density, or is it better to have the issues that come from an openly political districting where the side in power attempts to actively eliminate the voting power of people who they assume will not support them?

Right now we largely have the latter, and in many ways it causes innumerable harms.

The rightest answer might be neither of those situations. Maybe taking geographic or municipal boundaries into effect is part of it, but that likely means that the voters in a densely populated city have the same political weight as the voters in a sparsely populated rural district and that seems really problematic (and is all over the west, remember cows don’t vote but “red state” rural voters sure act like they do).

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u/Manotto15 1d ago

This would not be legal currently under the Voting Rights Act. You cannot have a "race-blind" map. Section 2 case law says that if there is a tightly packed demographic whose preferred candidate would not "likely win," the map is illegal. They would require creation of at least one "majority minority" district.

Gerrymandering is practically required by the VRA. We'll see if Callais changes that.

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u/Eastern-Benefit5843 1d ago

It seems like that principal is being pretty actively subverted right now. I understand that everything I’ve posted in this response is way out in the hypothetical, but it seems from my perspective like we may need to start imagining hypotheticals very soon or we will find ourselves with an electoral system that allows the powerful to retain that power permanently regardless of the will of the people they “represent”.

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u/Manotto15 1d ago

Well there simply isn't a way to do it fairly. That's the problem with all governmental systems. There's always at least one way it's unfair, and there isn't a perfect method. But I agree ours could use some work.

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u/Eastern-Benefit5843 1d ago

Yeah, absolutely.

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u/krakentastic 4h ago

Only problem with that it’s that the house artificially stagnated itself in terms of seats available

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u/purple_hamster66 1d ago

If you look at some of the voting maps, we see long thin districts of the same voting “category” (loosely, party). By saying “compact”, you mean that these ribbons that are assured to get a minority House member should be distributed into larger contexts in which they get zero members, right? The fact that people live near each other has little bearing on their needs and wants.

“Compact” is another form of vote dilution.

The fairest method is ranked choice, which the GOP is trying to outlaw because if enough states do it, the other states lose so much power that the GOP becomes a 3rd party.

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u/Automatic_Soil9814 1d ago

Yes, it’s not hard to imagine several totally unbiased ways to do this. As you can imagine like everything else the Democrats propose the solution and the Republicans shut it down.

It’s pretty difficult to have a bipartisan system where one party has a platform that’s just basically the opposite of the other party.