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Originally Posted by Think4Yourself
You have to be able to translate wingnut rantings into English.
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More saintly and well-reasoned behavior from the party of compassion
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Originally Posted by alphamale
Some also think that only the GOP has the power to do this. |
The Democrats have done their fair share of gerrymandering, to be sure. Also, the Republican advantage in 2012 was not significantly different than it was in previous years (
source). It should be noted that a similar result to 2012 occurred in 1996, in that after a Republican wave election Democrats narrowly won the popular vote but narrowly fell short of a majority in the House. Also, Democrats like to brag that they should control the House because they won the popular vote, implying that they desire proportional representation. Well, what would have been the result if it was proportional to the popular vote?
Although Democrats did indeed win more votes than Republicans in 2012, if seats in the House were allocated proportionally, Democrats would have won 212 seats, Republicans 208, Libertarians 5, Greens 1, and 9 for other parties. You need 218 seats to control the House, and Democrats would have fallen 6 short. This is because they actually won a plurality rather than a majority. Thus, if the results were proportional to the popular vote, a coalition of parties would have to control the House, rather than the Democrats alone as is implied by people who write about "the Great Gerrymander".
As a matter of fact, if House seats were allocated in proportion to the popular vote, a hung House would have been the norm in recent decades. Borrowing parliamentary terminology here, until 1995 Democrats would have enjoyed 24 consecutive years of majority government (1971-95), followed by 2 years of Republican majority government (1995-97), followed by 10 years of hung parliaments (1997-2007), followed by 4 years of Democratic majority government (2007-11), 2 years of Republican majority government (2011-13), followed by a hung parliament from 2013 to the present day. In addition, third parties would have held at least two seats in every Congress for at least the last 70 years.
Of course, if we had had proportional representation as our election system, the structure of our parties and the choices voters made would have been different than what they were under our present system. Still, it is interesting to note what the composition of a proportional House would be.
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Originally Posted by hoffdano
Districts should be drawn by a computer. As long as a better team than the one that built the healthcare.gov website writes the software we should end up with population driven districts.
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Algorithms to draw districts have already been devised, and only need minor adjustments (if any) to be put into practice. I fully support redistricting by a compactness algorithm; this completely eliminates the possibility of bias. While independent commissions are a vast improvement over the current system, the commissioners still have their biases, and thus an algorithm would be an improvement over the commissions.
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Originally Posted by skoro
Because most people aren't all that interested in or informed on political maneuvers. They have jobs and families that concern them much more than partisan trivia.
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It greatly impacts their representation in Congress, which in turn greatly affects how the country (including them) is governed, so they should be very interested. It's just that it
appears to be a partisan, down-in-the-weeds, inconsequential subject. To some extent it is, but it really isn't. Although this is probably too much to hope for, Americans would do well if they heeded this ideal from Athenian democracy:
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Originally Posted by Pericles
We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.
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Originally Posted by Glitch
Not true. State forced open primaries violates the rights of the members of a given political party to freely assemble. Only those political parties in each State that want an open primary may have one. All other primaries are closed and cannot be forced to be open by the State. See California Democratic Party v. Jones, 530 US 567 (2000).
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Originally Posted by Think4Yourself
You're so full of bs. Several states already have open primaries and they've all passed constitutional muster in the courts. Further more all of the primary costs, and I do mean all of them, are paid by taxpayers so taxpayers are free to dictate how the primaries they pay for get run. That's not my opinion but the SCotUS's ruling.  |
In my view open primaries* are essentially a nonpartisan runoff election system, only the general election is called a "primary" and party labels appear on the ballot. This has the practical effect of denying the general electorate (who vote in November) any choices other than a Democrat and Republican at the "general election", and sometimes just two Democrats or two Republicans. That sort of deception is why I don't support it. However, I do like the idea of nonpartisan elections with a runoff requirement*, which would have the same advantages as the top two system does. Indeed, I actually think nonpartisan elections and a nonpartisan legislature would carry more advantages, since committee assignments and chairmanships in the legislature would be based on merit rather than caucus, leaving legislators freer to affiliate with other parties without punishment. Something similar to this is being used right now in the Nebraska Legislature. Another advantage would be getting around the need to have "party preference" in lieu of "party affiliation" or party nominations, which if I recall correctly is what was mandated by the courts relating to freedom of assembly.
*I'm assuming you're referring to the "top two" election system, not the practice of opening up party primaries to independents, both of which are referred to as "open primaries". I don't care much either way about the latter.
*The idea is that there would be a nonpartisan general election in early November, followed by a runoff election between the top two if no candidate received a majority. This runoff would probably be held in early December (or one month after whenever the election is).
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