On 8/15/2025 4:39 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Aug 14, 2025 at 6:19 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]>
wrote:
//
/> There is no good way to draw up Congressional Districts. /
*True but some ways are less bad than others.The least bad way would
be every four years a computer program would use data from the census
(but ignore party affiliation) drew districts that had shapesthat took
advantage of natural dividing lines like rivers and lakes but were as
close as possible to regular polygons (not ridiculous fractals as they
are now) and contained an equal number of registered voters. *
/> Suppose your state is entitled to 7 Congress critturs. And
it's 40% Republican. So you should create a map with 3 majority R
and 4 majority D. But that means if you're a D and live in an R
district your vote means nothing and vice versa. /
*That's just a consequence of the fact that in a democracy with a
diverse population not everyone is going to get their way. However
there is an easy way to minimize that problem, let people vote for
more than one person in presidential elections(or any election for
that matter), *
Just as I wrote, " So to make it good we should create districts that
elect at least three or four representatives */using rank-choice/* (when
a state elects more that 3 say)," except applied to Presidential
elections. The difference is that changing the way Presidents are
elected takes a Constitutional Amendment, which will be opposed by that
majority of states the Electoral College advantages, but election of
Congressmen can be changed at the state level.
Brent
*and whoever gets the most votes generated by 161,000,000 registered
voters gets to be president. In today's system only 538 people get to
vote for the presidency, members of the elite Electoral College. Many
people think they're voting for a presidential candidate but they're
not, they are voting for somebody who is allowed to vote for the
president. That's nuts. *
*
*
***Suppose there were 3 people running for president, X, Y, and Z. In
your opinion X would be a wonderful president but you realize his
chances of winning are vanishingly small. You think Y would be an OK
average president, he's nothing to get excited about but has about a
50% chance of winning. And in your opinion Z would be an
apocalyptically dreadful president but also has about a 50% chance of
winning. So, who do you vote for? *
*
*
*In today's system I would vote for Y without hesitation, but for
reasons I've never understood millions of people would vote for the
hopeless cause X. But if they were allowed to vote for more than one
person then they could vote for X _AND_ Y. Such a system would
discourage the election of radical left wing or radical right wing
candidates and I think that would be a good thing because there is a
top to good but there is no bottom to bad. *
/> The problem is having one representative=one district. /
*The original idea was that if there is a local problem then there is
one guy from the same locality and is familiar with the situation that
you can complain about it to. That would be nice but I think it works
better in theory than in practice and is an advantage we can afford to
sacrifice. *
/> The usual measure of how much gerrymandering is bad, is how the
mix of the representatives differs from the mix in the
Presidential votes; which would go away if the representatives
were elected at large, like Senators. /
*If we're going to fantasize about solutions that are never going to
happen .... A better idea would be to eliminate the Senate entirely
and just have the House of Representatives. That way you wouldn't have
the ridiculous situation where Dakota has 4 senators but California
only has two even though California has 23.7 Times as many people in
it than the population of North and South Dakota _combined_. And of
course we should eliminate the ridiculous electoral college and
whoever got the largest popular vote should be president, if that had
been the case we would've never had George W. Bush and the Iraq war,
and we would've not had Donald Trump, at least not in 2016. *
*
*
***John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>*
t5.
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