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Re:Gerrymandering and a cure for it – the shortest splitline... by dragonwriter on Wednesday September 30, 2015 @01:27AM (#10301971)
No line drawing method on single member districts does that, and the best way to get laws which represents e people effectively is by assuring better proportionality. This had, in fact, been studied quite a bit, see, e.g., Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy. Mucking around with variations on how our by whom lines are drawn for single-member, plurality or majority runoff districts and thinking that that had some how of meaningful improvement is self-delusion. It doesn't work, it can't work, we know why it can't work, and we know what does work, all from actual experience in real representative democracies.

Playing around with how district lives are drawn isn't democratic reform, it's democracy theater, a means of diverting attention without changing anything meaningful.

Re:Gerrymandering and a cure for it – the shortest splitline... by BurningFrog on Wednesday September 30, 2015 @10:48AM (#10304340)
"Perfect enemy of the good" fallacy, if that's a thing.

Gerrymandering can add ~30% of representatives for the party controlling it, so changing it to a party method does improve things a lot, even if it is arguably very far from perfect.

Re:Gerrymandering and a cure for it – the shortest splitline... by dragonwriter on Wednesday September 30, 2015 @12:58PM (#10305331)
> "Perfect enemy of the good" fallacy, if that's a thing.

Its only a thing when the "perfect" is not a real alternative.

Systems that produce more proportional representation than any means of line drawing in single-member winner-take-all districts are real alternatives that are well-established in the real world.

Re:Gerrymandering and a cure for it – the shortest splitline... by BurningFrog on Thursday October 01, 2015 @01:57AM (#10309479)
Well, proportional representation is mathematically and theoretically possible in the US, but culturally and politically as likely as adopting Chinese as official language. That won't change for decades at least.

But changing how districts are drawn actually does happen in this country. California degerrymanderified their process a few years ago.