Quote:
|
Originally Posted by kutulu
You cannot change it back to state appointing Sentators. It would be a potential disaster. With creativitiy and the right people placed in power it's possible to draw districts so that one party can dominate the elections. Say you have a state with 1M people where 60% vote party A and 40% vote party B. For simplicity, let's say there are only 5 districts. Each district has 200,000 people. It's easy to see that 3 state reps should be from A and 2 should be from B. However, party B gets the districts drawn in their favor and look what happens:
Code:
District A B Total
1 180,000.00 20,000.00 200,000.00
2 80,000.00 120,000.00 200,000.00
3 80,000.00 120,000.00 200,000.00
4 80,000.00 120,000.00 200,000.00
5 180,000.00 20,000.00 200,000.00
Total 600,000.00 400,000.00 1,000,000.00
Now instead of having 3 from A and 2 from B it is switched. Now the minority party gets to put their sentators in office and the whole system has been fucked.
One of the first things we should do is we should re-draw all congressional districts. Absolutely no voting data should be used during this process. |
I believe what you are saying was in the NorthWest Ordinance of 1789. Government set down and determined how townships were to be drawn up, it was based on amounts of people.
It was also through this that early on was a basis for choosing election districts. All districts were to be the same size and based on numbers of people living in each.
However, once partisan politics became what they are, the power in charge has always looked to gerrymander districts. That's why like in Ohio, we have some very small concise districts and some very large weird shaped districts. They get the numbers they need, they just draw the districts very.... um..... creatively