I heard the first anti-Prop 2 ad yesterday and it was an absolute joke. Literally the only thing they could say that was bad about it was that it was too long and too wordy with too much political jargon. Why would anyone give a fuck about how long a proposal is as long as they can't point out major issues with it?
Gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries.
FYI
Edit: Because some people are wondering exactly what it is I've looked it up. I'm not American so you should read other replies to this for more information and opinions on how to stop or influence it.
Basically, you split a state into different districts, and each district votes a representative into congress.
Every so many years (ten, I think), they redraw the boundaries of the districts to reflect the population changes.
This can be manipulated, if you instead try to divide it up into groups so that your party gets into power.
Here's an example using my mad paint skills depicting voters in the state of Nibblystan:
Boundary lines that give 1 Red Seat and 2 Blue Seats
In text, in summary, districts can be any different sizes. If you had 80 people voting red, and 20 voting blue, you could have a district with 62 red voters and no blue voters, and two districts with 10 blue voters and 9 red voters each. And then blue would win 2 seats and red 1 seat.
Districts are not evenly sized and the borders can be all over the place, even blatantly so to avoid poor or ethnic districts.
So you can fiddle around with who goes were to offset strong leads or to say a certain district is definitely going to win so let's just try to put more supporters into that district since their vote will be wasted.
Certain ethnic groups will also vote in certain ways so you can carefully cut them out and put them somewhere their vote won't matter.
Revenge_of_the_Khaki on October 21st, 2018 at 14:06 UTC »
I heard the first anti-Prop 2 ad yesterday and it was an absolute joke. Literally the only thing they could say that was bad about it was that it was too long and too wordy with too much political jargon. Why would anyone give a fuck about how long a proposal is as long as they can't point out major issues with it?
NibblyPig on October 21st, 2018 at 15:49 UTC »
Gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries.
FYI
Edit: Because some people are wondering exactly what it is I've looked it up. I'm not American so you should read other replies to this for more information and opinions on how to stop or influence it.
Basically, you split a state into different districts, and each district votes a representative into congress.
Every so many years (ten, I think), they redraw the boundaries of the districts to reflect the population changes.
This can be manipulated, if you instead try to divide it up into groups so that your party gets into power.
Here's an example using my mad paint skills depicting voters in the state of Nibblystan:
Boundary lines that give 1 Red Seat and 2 Blue Seats
https://imgur.com/unsiVs4
Boundary lines that give 2 Red Seats and 1 Blue Seat
https://imgur.com/duEz1A3
In text, in summary, districts can be any different sizes. If you had 80 people voting red, and 20 voting blue, you could have a district with 62 red voters and no blue voters, and two districts with 10 blue voters and 9 red voters each. And then blue would win 2 seats and red 1 seat.
Districts are not evenly sized and the borders can be all over the place, even blatantly so to avoid poor or ethnic districts.
So you can fiddle around with who goes were to offset strong leads or to say a certain district is definitely going to win so let's just try to put more supporters into that district since their vote will be wasted.
Certain ethnic groups will also vote in certain ways so you can carefully cut them out and put them somewhere their vote won't matter.
So the practice is considered very bad.
Looks_Good_In_Hats on October 21st, 2018 at 15:59 UTC »
I wonder how Gary Mandering feels about this.?