* All boundaries of a congressional district must be either a state's boundaries or fixed to a single latitude and/or longitude and meet at an approximate 90deg.
* Exceptions to the prior mentioned rule are acceptable only in the cases of remainder space, which is space remaining for a congressional district only after the prior rule is otherwise fully executed.
* Remainder space districts must not be adjacent.
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An alternative approach:
* Congressional districts must be limited to county borders in the case of low population density districts that may comprise multiple counties or subdivided entirely within a single county for high density districts.
* Subdivision of a county must occur strictly upon either points of latitude or longitude, but not both and cannot exceed the borders of any single county.
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I believe the shape and size of congressional districts should be flexible to account for variances of population density. I happen to live in a state with a huge population and perhaps the most wild fluctuations in population density. For horrid examples of gerrymandering view our current congressional districts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_de...
Also, if you're going to go straight into fantasy land to solve gerrymandering, you can just do party-list proportional representation by state, or STV for smaller states, and then there's no districting at all. There's nothing in the constitution requiring congressional districts at all.
If you cannot expect congress to act in the peoples' interest the only viable solution is through federal court action. In the mean time, since I am in fantasy land (as you call it), I will prefer practical solutions no matter how improbable in the real world over constitutional amendment which is even more imaginary.
Also there is no reason to expect increased seats in congress will have any effect upon gerrymandering and may even make it substantially worse. It certainly won't make law making more efficient.
And while you could try to gerrymander an 11,000 seat House of Representatives, it would be a lot harder.
The algorithm need not actually determine the districts. It can instead simply rate proposals, allowing a contest to be held. The highest scoring proposal submitted at least 400 days prior to the election is the winner, with earlier submissions winning any ties.
Another improvement would be to let districts spill over state borders. One could exempt Alaska and Hawaii of course.
Except in Maine and Nebraska (selection of Presidential electors is largely a matter of state law, and most but not all states are winner take all.)
This is of course by design. The founder's obviously knew about proportional representation and they deliberately chose to disregard it. Shouldn't that give you pause to figure out why?
Turns out the reason was slavery. A huge proportion of the Southern population was enslaved, and slaves didn't vote. The free staters didn't want slaves to even count toward state population for the purposes of congressional apportionment, while the slave staters did, so they compromised on counting the slave population at 3/5 of the free population. As a result, prior to the abolition of slavery, the votes of free men in slave states were always represented at a higher proportion than the votes of free men in free states.
Many of the founders were wise and educated men who thought carefully and critically about how to establish a sustainable republic. But to do so, they had to win the votes of a cross-section of the American establishment of the time, many of whom thought that owning human beings, using them as farm labor, and whipping them if they disobeyed were morally acceptable things to do. And upon making a series of political compromises with these people, they had to rationalize those compromises in such a way to make them palatable to the general public.
This is, of course, no longer relevant.
But it is still relevant for just about all the reasons it was relevant then.
Another major factor is that Americans mostly see themselves as citizens of the USA first, and citizens of their state a distant second.
population of Kansas (state): 2.9 million
population of New York (city): 8.5 million
If little states have no say in our government, what point is there for them to remain?
It's a pity some folks devalue others simply because they don't wish to live in NYC or LA.
You are arguing for the minority to trample on the majority.
It needs to be competitive. The majority shouldn’t be able to have its way without the help of the minority.
For example, the percentage of rural Americans is similar to the percentage of black Americans. Yet somehow nobody ever argues that black Americans need power disproportionate to their numbers to avoid being trampled.
It's not about rural vs urban. It's about the assumption that the US is a union of separate _states_ with separate legal structures, cultures, etc, etc. So it's not the "rural minority" that's special; it's states that are special.
Now you may disagree with the premises there, of course. But if one accepts the premises, then one needs a way to prevent "big" states from just imposing their will on "small" ones.
(There are in fact people who argue that black Americans need disproportionate power, and some voting districts are set up to effectively produce that, but that has nothing to do with the setup of the US constitution per se.)
Of course you need this if one accepts the premise that states are special. You’re basically just assuming the conclusion at that point.
I’m not aware of any voting district that’s set up to give black Americans a disproportionately large amount of power. There are some that are deliberately set up to ensure proportionate power.
My point is this: delegating power to solely the majority is a bad idea, full stop. In a properly functioning society, the majority needs to work cooperatively with the minority, which means the minority needs some sort of functional advantage (like we have in the US Senate, with respect to states).
How individual states set up this power balance internally is up to them. Obviously I think it should follow a similar model to the one we have at the federal level with our collection of states.
It annoys me when people rag on smaller areas like RI or WY because they get “extra privileges” or some such nonsense when it comes to elections or the US congress.
In reality, there’s a different minority for every issue. Giving states with low population a disproportionate amount of power doesn’t necessarily balance the minority with the majority. Depending on the issue it may allow the majority to more easily trample the minority, or it may allow a minority to impose its will on the rest.
The solution to requiring cooperation with the minority is to require more than a simple majority to do things. See for example: removal following impeachment, constitutional amendment, treaty ratification, or the de facto situation in the Senate for most legislation at the moment.
Federal republics _need_ the power balance among _states_, otherwise there's no point in the states participating in the republic, thus no point in even having a federal republic. If that's your point, fine. But you can't have your cake and eat it too.
How states want to balance out things internally is up to them, and that can be used to help the minority on specific issues.
In any case, even if you take the state as the unit that needs to be balanced, my point stands: you can’t balance “the minority” by picking some arbitrary minority and giving them more power.
States have senators to prevent tyranny of the majority. NYC should be worth more house seats than all of Kansas.
See, for example, the tax bill of 2017.
I personally think it would be interesting to have more federal districts scattered throughout the US than just D.C., and representatives would adjourn at the nearest one. In the age of the Internet and video conferencing it seems like a neat idea.
(Tangentially related, but on the matter of residents of D.C. not having a voting member in Congress: I don't think you should be able to take up residency in D.C. in the first place.)