Because your system of government is so fundamentally broken it barely even qualifies as a democracy anymore?

All the systems built into the US government were designed for a country with 1% the number of people it has now, when the fastest method of communication was a horse and the majority of it's populace were farmers.

There are a few simple things that could be done right now to fix the US government (abolish the EC and gerrymandering to start with), but no one has the political will to do it.

I hate gerrymandering too. More competitive elections, in my view, makes politicians less partisan and incentivizes them more to deliver for their districts.

But who should determine who draws electoral lines? Right now, it's in the hands of elected officials, so you can at least vote them out if they gerrymander.

If electoral lines are drawn by a nonpartisan commission, who appoints the commission? How do you ensure the members of the commission stay nonpartisan? Can the public hold members of this commission accountable?

Definitely our current system is broken; what are some alternatives to elected officials drawing electoral lines that are promising?

Oh - districts should be drawn to guarantee mathematical fairness and a few relatively good measures exist[1] including one that was used in court in connection to a particularly egregious Wisconsin district (the efficiency-gap measure).

This is really less of an unsolvable problem than people make it out to be - it's just that most of the discussion you hear about it is from the political parties both of which benefit from its existence and, especially, the incumbents who have a much more secure seat with careful district drawing to make sure you don't get too many progressives that might vote out a centrist (or ditto on the other side)

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mathematician...

Why are we shifting to fancy math for this? Just mandate districts have to be simple geometric shapes; good luck isolating 16 individual neighborhoods in a city when all you have are four corners. I mean I know some mathematician will show that you can still tile them in such a way to benefit some candidate by 1.6% or whatever, but it would be the simplest way to get rid of the most egregious of district abuses.

Remember, you also have to sell the idea to the public, and which is easier to sell: "Trust this complex algorithm built by mathematicians and their fancy computer models who most certainly aren't secretly biased toward the candidate you dislike", or "RECTANGLES! :D"

Got it, so you're proposing electoral lines by drawn by algorithms?

I don't see any problems with this myself, as long as the algorithms are fair -- what are some downsides of this, though?

A pretty common downside is a lack of adherence to historical boundaries and groupings - some neighborhoods that legitimately formed a district and a unified block due to strange geographic features could be broken up.

But actually - there are two classes of algorithms out there: one can determine how to fairly divide up a state and another measures how unfairly a state is divided up - instead of going full into computers-determine-everything it might be nice to just have a requirement that the result of the election in the state is relatively statistically probable given the proportions of votes for each party. So people could still draw districts we would just have a manner to prove their districts are acceptably fair.

People actually will have to tune into politics since the differences will be diminished and you can't simply push the red or blue button and be done with it. 'aint nobody got time for that!

The two downsides I see are:

1. There would be a lot of sudden changes, without any real explanation about those particular changes.

2. Unlike now there would be little on-the-ground reasoning to these changes. Districts would be split on random-seeming streets, with no respect at all about residents felt. Now at least you have someone to blame, and we like to have someone to blame rather than "the computer".

> But who should determine who draws electoral lines? Right now, it's in the hands of elected officials, so you can at least vote them out if they gerrymander.

No you (practically) cannot, that's kinda the point

Who says we have to draw electoral lines at all?

Proportional representation of house members per state is one option. Which would be completely constitutional, btw.

We already have that. Each state gets allocated a number of representatives in proportion to its population, which, in turn, determines the number of congressional districts in that state.

I believe they meant to have only a single congressional district per state, with multiple representatives allocated to parties proportionally according to election result.

Proportional representation is the most common electoral system for national legislatures (and is also used by e.g. EU parliament).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation

Seven US states have "at large" congressional districts, and a few states have one at large district. This seems easier and maybe more sensible for a state's representatives in the US Congress. [0]

Apparently, there used to be more at large states, except states were using it to dilute minority votes. (The white majority was large enough to elect all-white representatives.) In 1986, this was ruled to violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-large

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornburg_v._Gingles

Yes, exactly.

Hard to rely on voting when the voting is rigged re: gerrymandering...

As for how to fix it, I'm no expert but off the top of my head

1. Allow public submissions for districts to prevent rigging choices

2. Create an objective set of measurements for scoring districts with the , e.g. maximize compactness, minimize perimeter, other measures that would help combat gerrymandering

3. Highest score wins? Top N finalists are voted on by legislature?

Hardly perfect, and I'm sure someone's thought about this harder and could do better. But nearly anything has got to be better than "the party in power every 10 years is given a carte blanche opportunity to further solidify their power"

You shouldn't have electoral lines at all. Proportional representation has a couple of advantages: all opinions, and not merely the majority opinion, gets represented; you're likely to get more than two parties, which means parties have to compromise with each other; and the system isn't nearly as easy to game.

> so you can at least vote them out if they gerrymander.

Aren't voting them out and gerrymandering somewhat mutually exclusive?

I don't know if you're intending those questions about independent commissions to be figurative. People have thought about this and, in Michigan, we voted such a commission in:

https://votersnotpoliticians.com/redistricting/

We'll see how well it works after this census.

One approach is to shift to multi seat constituencies under a proportional representation system. These are effectively impossible to usefully gerrymander.

Algorithmically...

Algorithms can be gamed, unfortunately. You'd have to carefully limit the free parameters: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/06/21/how-to-fit-an-elep...

The court system has already determined gerrymandering to be unconstitutional, how would you go about abolishing it?

Which court? The supreme court rules that gerrymandering is 100% AOK by them so long as it isn't done for the express purpose of racial disenfranchisement.

Gerrymandering to warp democracy and give the members of your party more power than members of the other party are OK, according to our current supreme court.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/27/politics/partisan-gerrymander...

Even the racial disenfranchisement line has been significantly weakened - there have been cases going up with clearly racially biased districts but so long as there is some other property the districts could have been gerrymandered based on (i.e. "Urbaness") then the courts have let it through.

Right now, anything goes (and the fact that gerrymandering with the explicit intention of entrenching a political party isn't illegal is bonkers).

That's just not right. The courts have largely held to "non-justiciable political question".

The courts have held that gerrymandering based on race is unconstitutional.

Gerrymandering based on political advantage has yet to be ruled unconstitutional and continues unabated.

Districts drawn via a published, mathematically derived method would be a hell of a start.

Alternatively district abolishment and proportional distribution of delegates would also pretty much resolve it - even with a mixed geographic and proportional system where some delegates do have specific areas and others are floating delegates that are used to balance out proportions while allowing local districts to chose an advocate specifically for them.

Man, tell us how you really feel. :-) That was beautiful.

That's not entirely true, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rucho_v._Common_Cause

I support abolition of the EC, but only if there is some form of geographic weighting (ideally a smart one) that doesn't allow a handful of cities to dominate the Federal gov't.

I understand that this sounds crazy to people, but as a resident of Colorado who occasionally enjoys marijuana, a substance that my state allows but the Federal gov't has long outlawed, I like the fact that the current system puts a higher emphasis on winning over broader regions of the country without just focusing on cities.

Obviously, I want it to be more of a sane weighting. My concern with not having some form of geographic weighting is that it sets up the USA not for some dramatic Civil War 2 that some people envision, but instead for a peaceful secession of certain regions who would end up going decades without having a voice in the Federal gov't.

Most Americans don't have a strong grasp of WHY the Senate was made the more powerful chamber of Congress. It was done over the objections of the two largest, most powerful states at the time (Virginia and Pennsylvania) at the demand of Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Mass, etc.

They explicitly stated that they were worried that Philadelphia, New York City, etc would dominate the Federal Gov't and permanently ignore the smaller states who were irrelevant to the power process. It's an odd situation, because the Federal Gov't of the US was a creation of the state governments, not vice versa like many Europeans seem to think.

Obviously, the current EC is pretty silly and feels arbitrary and unjust. But I don't foresee there being a single US nation without some mechanism to prevent a massive, contiguous chunk of the country from being permanently alienated from the legislative process. The history books are pretty clear on the longevity of empires whose governments ignore citizens outside of their urban centers. You can drive from Mexico to Canada in the US without driving through a single state that Hillary won in 2016. I don't see those people putting up with 6 elections in a row of defeat for their candidate. They frankly are already combative as it is.

Ironically, many states in the US already have this issue within their own governments. The citizens of upstate New York are pretty much ignored at the expense of the citizens of New York City. Property taxes reflect this. My home state of Colorado is so dominated by Denver that a minimum wage law was enacted that ignores the vast differences in cost of living across the state, forcing small businesses in tiny towns with extremely low rents to pay as if their employees live in the relatively expensive Denver metro area. The Denver Post, which is absolutely not a conservative rag, opposed the minimum wage law's implementation due to this fact.

legalization in several states like Nevada, Maine, and Oregon would have been threatened if they'd had models of representation like the EC. instead, it was the population centers of those states, i.e. the people, that got those laws passed.

You are correct, and that was the case in Colorado as well. I think that the difference here is that a state in the USA is ideally small enough for this to still kind of work.

On the scale and regional cultural variation in the US, I'm not sure it works at that level. But I really don't know.

There's one big problem with this line of thinking: states don't vote. At least, not once you get rid of the electoral college. Once the EC is gone, it's people that vote. So cities don't dominate, people do.

And that's not just semantics; at the moment there are millions of conservatives in California whose vote gets ignored. There's millions of liberals in Texas whose vote gets ignored. Cities are not a homogenous voting bloc.

But that is exactly the problem. City dwellers know about city problems. If it's up to city dwellers, they may vote to fund things like public art in lieu of critical infrastructure like irrigation or government weather infrastructure because those things don't seem necessary when you're living in a metropolis, but are vital when you're a farmer.

Or, what if city dwellers choose to do things like burn fossil fuels for convenience and pay no attention to changing weather patterns, etc?

We shouldn't require our required rural brethren to become activists and lobbyists in the city just so the interests of the land can be surfaced.

But that's true for literally every issue. Rural voters are equally less aware of city issues. White voters are less aware of issues faced specifically by minorities. Men are less aware of female health issues. Skewing votes in favour of one group or another is never going to fix that.

The only way to fix it is to ensure that all opinions are represented. A multi-party system with proportional representation will accomplish that much better than a skewed and polarised two-party system.

agriculture lobbying is a $140 million industry[1].

public art and infrastructure might be nominal priorities for a presidential candidate, but these decisions are generally going to be made by representatives in Congress, so whether or not the EC exists doesn't really change how these issues are addressed.

1: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/sectors/summary...

The U.S. Federal government is not a direct democracy, it is a federal republic directed by representatives of states. If you have a fine idea for a law at this scale, and you want democracy, you have it within your state.

For example, California passes all sorts of interesting environmental regulations; and the states regularly weigh on their neighbours and tributaries to have similar laws.

> abolish the EC ... to start with

No, abolishing the Electoral College will not fix anything unless you think average urban Americans care even one bit about the natural wonder of the country, or have any restraint toward the rural minority.

>> you think average urban Americans care even one bit about the natural wonder of the country

Why would you think they don't? I'll admit this is a massive sweeping generalisation, but as a rule, urban voters tend to swing left and that mostly correlates with environmental advocacy.

But more generally... >> abolishing the Electoral College will not fix anything

Yeah, it will. For a start, it will fix the problem of the Electoral College existing.

It's an inherently undemocratic institution that is completely unnecessary in the 21st century.

And that's not a partisan position (I live in NZ so I really don't have skin in the game here). If you're a democrat living in Texas or a republican living in California, you may as well not vote in presidential elections.

You could move the presidential election to a Single Transferable Vote system and then you might actually get viable 3rd party candidates as people wouldn't have to worry about "wasting their vote".

The EC exists for a reason and has functioned quite well.

Getting 38 states to approve eliminating it is highly unlikely.

> Why would you think they don't? I'll admit this is a massive sweeping generalisation, but as a rule, urban voters tend to swing left and that mostly correlates with environmental advocacy.

This is ridiculous. The correlation of left-leaning and environmental advocacy is relatively new. Or rather, conservatives ignoring conservation is a rather new thing. Many of the first conservationists, and the reason we have things like national parks, and such were rural conservatives.

Would you please stop posting to HN in the flamewar style and stop using this site for ideological battle? You've been doing these things a lot and they're against the site guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sure... will you please delete my account? I'm no longer interested in being around here much anyway.

> > abolish the EC ... to start with

> No, abolishing the Electoral College will not fix anything <random rant>

Fix? What does that even mean? It would start to bring it back to a direct democracy, expanding the franchise beyond the state, as _you_ pointed out.

The rural minority already receives disproportionate representation in the legislative. There is -no- part of the government that provides urban voters with disproportionate representation.

That's true for the federal government, unless you abolish the EC (the thing I was responding to).

Gerrymandering isn't really a thing IMO (see the Big Sort by Bill Bishop). It ends up hurting each party in reality.

I think the most important thing is getting rid of first past the post voting, and moving the EC (which should not be abolished IMO) into electing actual electors by district.

Gerrymandering is definitely manipulation, it is defined and has a wikipedia article that states "gerrymandering is when a party or group manipulates district boundaries"

Sure, but data shows that after gerry mandering, the incumbent party in a district is more likely to lose. Please read the source cited or at least be familiar before arguing in bad faith. I'm open to criticism of the work cited

Wouldn’t incumbents losing suggest that gerrymandering makes elections less competitive and favors incumbents?

Well, after redistricting by supposedly partisan committees one would expect the redistricting process to further entrench incumbents because either party would be unwilling to yield established seats. In fact, the opposite happens.

Wouldn’t incumbents losing after partisan gerrymandering suggest that current gerrymandering favors parties so much that they can’t improve the system in ways that benefit them specifically, and that even a partisan committee led redistricting would be more representative of the voters more will than the current districts?

> ...moving the EC (which should not be abolished IMO) into electing actual electors by district.

It’s honestly surprising that only two states are winner-takes-all by district. The other 48 are winner-takes-all for the whole state.

That's neglecting this, though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

It deserves to be neglected, it is an extremely foolish idea. It literally can only hurt the Democrats advocating for it in the solid blue states that are signatories.

It only comes into force when a majority of EC delegate-states agree, not before.

This is illegal. The constitution mandates that each state must offer its residents representative democracy. If a state apportions electors based on the results of another state that is basing their election on the votes of residents of another state, which means the voters of the state in question are being disenfranchised.

According to the wiki article above that doesn't seem to be the case:

> The Constitution reserves the choice of the precise manner for creating electors to the will of the state legislatures. It does not define or delimit what process a state legislature may use to create its state college of electors.

I would really suggest reading the Constitution. It's like 5 pages long, and really not difficult. It's so simple that really one ought to expect every American to be able to repeat all its clauses, even if they can't remember what goes where.

Nevertheless, Article IV, Section 4:

> The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

If a state is choosing electors based on voters not in the state, then the citizens of the state no longer have a republican form of government. The state cannot simply arbitrarily choose who to force their electors to vote for. The process must be a republican one somehow.

> see the Big Sort by Bill Bishop

Set it in this font: https://uglygerry.com

>> see the Big Sort by Bill Bishop

Can you elaborate on why that’s relevant? Sorry, I’m not going to buy and read an entire book on this.

There's a one eyed Congressman in Texas near Houston whose district is shaped like a freaking C because it's the only way to get a Republican elected in the area, but okay.

The legislature has already long since punted regulation of most things to the executive. The Code of Federal Regulations is a lot larger and lengthier than the United States Code. That includes environmental regulations: the EPA is an executive agency.

If your response is that the above is a bad idea, I agree; I think the legislature should be prevented (by Constitutional amendment, if necessary) from punting regulation to the executive. Anything that has the force of law--and regulations issued by executive agencies do--should have to go through the Constitutional process to create a law. But that's not how things are currently done.

It took a lifetime of effort from Reagan Republicans to get where we are now. Working tirelessly for decades to make sure government is ineffective and doesn’t work.

"The Contract On America"

Yeah, it would be great if congress did its job as intended, and passed laws and stuff.

Since it hasn't for decades, the Imperial Presidency rises to fill the vacuum.

You can't post like this here, no matter how strongly you feel. Perhaps you don't owe "Donny" better but you owe this community much better if you're participating in it. No more of this, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I would prefer to see all familial wealth that was at all tainted by conflicts of interest during the course of the administration be seized and the proceeds going to fund national voting by mail.

It's civil forfeiture - if they can definitively prove there was no crime they can have it back. And it's an easy bar to overcome just ask anyone who's ever had their property confiscated under that style of law.