As Texas Republicans try to muscle a rare mid-decade redistricting bill through the Legislature to help Republicans gain seats in Congress – at President Donald Trump’s request – residents in Austin, the state capital, could find themselves sharing a district with rural Texans more than 300 miles away.
The proposed map chops up Central Texas’ 37th Congressional District, which is currently represented by Democrat Rep. Lloyd Doggett, will be consumed by four neighboring districts, three of which Republicans now hold.
One of those portions of the Austin-area district was drawn to be part of the 11th District that Republican Rep. August Pfluger represents, which stretches into rural Ector County, about 20 miles away from the New Mexico border.
I will never understand how this obvious manipulation has been legal for decades.
Money. Every American politician is corrupt as fuck.
The pretense is gone now though, which is fascinating. And scary.
It’s literally just partisan warfare with legal exploitation, and voter bases apparently think it’s justified. I mean, what are they gonna do, side with the other party over it?
when lawmakers break the law and nobody enforces the law, it stops being the law.
And so many things were just ‘common sense,’ and not enshrined in laws because the thought was that anyone breaking them would be held accountable by the populace. We now have a critical mass of stupid, self absorbed, or malicious people that laws don’t matter, much less norms.
centuries*
Federal government won’t do anything about it. States control their own elections and therein lies the conundrum. Texas is proving very willingly that it doesn’t care about the rules as long as they win.
GOP, not all of Texas.
Won’t matter unless the progressives of the state get organized.
And you pretend that the Democrats haven’t been doing this since they were the Democratic Republican Party.
The Democrats proposed a bill last congress to ban gerrymandering and every single Republican voted against it.
It was also full of Democrat shenanigans that they knew the Republicans would not vote for, so they tossed in jerrymandering, knowing the bill would never pass to make it look like they were for it.
Without jerrymandering, the Democrats would lose many seats because they’d no longer be able to take large swaths of rural and suburban areas, then make a wonky looking maps to link them to cities to ensure the suburban and rural voters get outvoted by the urban voters. They’d also no longer be able to carve out mostly black districts that they have no chance of ever losing.
Without their jerrymandering, they wouldn’t have single party control of Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
You can’t spell “gerrymander” even after replying to people who spelled it correctly… and even being that wrong, it’s the most accurate thing you’ve written.
Republicans have gerrymandered Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, N. Carolina, S. Carolina, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Ohio and Mississippi.
Democrats have gerrymandered New Mexico, Nevada, Illinois, and Oregon.
What’s even more hilarious is that you named Vermont as being gerrymandered… it has ONE congressional district, LOL… ONE! That’s some big-brain analysis, my friend.
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Over a century. It all started with the Democratic Republican Party that eventually became the Democratic Party.
It started in 1812. Although the Democratic-Republican party did evolve into the current Democratic party over the course of two centuries, it’s hardly fair to call them the same party. That’s eight generations between then and now and the political landscape has changed dramatically.
As for the “both sides do it” whataboutism, like so many “both sides” issues the current Republican Party benefits far more from gerrymandering than the current Democratic Party, and this is before this especially egregious Texas mid-census redistricting.
It’s such a silly and disingenuous argument. The most recent version of gerrymandering arguably began with REDMAP in 2010, which was in response to Obama winning. Before that, it was used almost exclusively to disenfranchise black voters before the voting rights act in 1965. Before that, it was used by both parties in unison to maintain the supremacy of incumbents.
If you think that the Democrats are the only ones to gerrymander until now you’re not intelligent enough to be weighing in
They both do it. Democrats are just the ones who invented it, then like everything they do, they cry victim when the Republicans also do it and try to act like they’re filled with righteous indignation knowing that they also jerrymander.
The American system adopted it from across the pond. Rotten and pocket burroughs were frequent in the 18th century and actually started getting outlawed in the 19th century right when the Jeffersonian republicans went hard with it.
The Jeffersonian republican/democratic republican is the father of both major parties, it split into the northern republicans (anti- slavery) and southern democrats (mostly pro-slavery).
Neither of those parties resemble the modern parties, which flipped ideologies during the Civil Rights Movement, among their most recent changes.
So, it would be safer to say that American gerrymandering was created by the precursor to both modern parties.
Reminds me of Kansas…
This repub regime is really showing us how much our system of government depends on having good-faith actors in (elected) positions of power. There truly are not sufficient checks in place to protect against one election’s worth of bad actors.
Kind of amazing that this all worked for about 250 years, and heartbreaking that it could crumble in the next 2.5.
worked for about 250 years for a select group of people only
didn’t work for the native americans, slaves, poor people, etcetera
Things have improved for those groups over time, notably. We took a shit system and tried to make it represent all of us.
Apologies if I misunderstood the american election system, but the fact that for the past 100+ years you’ve had a bipartisan system in which both parties pander to the wealthy tell me it hasn’t really worked. Or rather only worked for the ruling elite.
The system has basically always been two-party. It’s the only stable arrangement for FPtP voting anyway. So, yes, it has been status quo for 250 years.
First fast the post
2 Fast 2 Postious
Thank you for the correction.
Even strong checks can’t hold back bad faith actors indefinitely
Sure does help, though.
Any system that ultimately doesn’t work for the greater good is bound to fail, because someone will come along promising to deliver the people from their woes.
It’s happened very many times throughout history, and yet many “checks” are perpetuated on convention alone, in many systems around the world.
You’re just asking for it, at that point.
Letting politicians draw their own electoral boundaries, and “certify” their own elections is beyond ridiculous.
Git gud, USA, yikes.
Brought to you by the independent electoral commission gang.
No, it depends on a population that actually cares about democracy and will punish those “bad faith actors” at the polls. Unfortunately, we’re dealing with Americans here.
Yes if you elect people that agree to the majority of the house, senate, president, state houses, and governors, they tend to get their way.
The worst part is that democrats will fight back by gerrymandering harder, and it just won’t be as effective because gerrymandering always benefits the person behind. If democrats had an ounce of intelligence, they would be fighting for standard algorithms to manage redistricting. If it was federal law to minimize district perimeters, this whole nonsense would end.
Lol except democrats have been using bipartisan/non-partisan commissions to do it in blue states, so it means the house will forever be favoring republicans, unless democrats actually have the spine to play dirty.
If democrats had an ounce of intelligence, they would be fighting for standard algorithms to manage redistricting.
The problem with that is they would need to regain power to be able to fix anything. But that would also assume they did, in fact, have the intelligence to fix problems while in power. Unfortunately, the reason the fascists are fighting so hard to dismantle democracy is to ensure that they can never lose power again despite their growing unpopularity.
Except we’re talking about Texas, where Democrats have never held enough power to do any significant gerrymandering. Assuming you’re acting in good faith and not just a bot, is it possible that you’re failing into the trap of assuming that because one of the most heavily gerrymandered districts (Texas 35th) is blue that Democrats did the gerrymandering?
They didn’t. Republicans did, to pack as many blue votes into a single district as possible so multiple others around it could be red. If the districts were drawn fairly, the thin corridor connecting Austin and San Antonio would be red, and multiple districts above and below that corridor would be blue.
It’s a bit more complex than that—if you create districts on a purely geographic basis (like minimizing district perimeters), you usually amplify slight majorities into disproportionately large ones (e.g., a 55% demographic majority translating to a 90% legislative majority). An algorithm that tries to create districts that proportionally translate demographics to representation usually ends up with district boundaries that superficially resemble gerrymandered ones.
I think this is an important point that https://bdistricting.com/2020/ glosses over. Some of the representation “guarantees” that were part of the VRA are actually defeated by doing purely geographic districting. Oft-times there’s enough BIPOC population that’s widely distributed, but needs to be “packed” (to use the gerrymandering terminology) in order to given even a chance of proportional representation.
My state of Arkansas is a good example https://bdistricting.com/2020/AR_Congress/ BIPOC is >= 25% of the population, but to get a distract that was 50% BIPOC it would have to snake across the state in a way that would be very visually similar to a gerrymandered district.
Multi-member districts can help, but they cause a loss of representation locality.
It may be that it’s impossible to produce an algorithm that satisfies all our (collective) fairness constraints.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq-Y7crQo44
This is a really neat video about algorithmic redistricting. It doesn’t really make any claims about the politics around drawing maps but it does a great job of showing how easily the maps can be manipulated to give set results. It’s really neat to see how the different things we can optimize for may or may not produce “fair” results.
Really worth a watch imo!
Oh? Then why are repubs gerrymandering so hard? Because they’ll pick up 5 seats in Texas by doing it. And they’re going to do the same in all the red states they can and pick up an extra one here and an extra one there and get a nice, cushy permanent House majority by blatantly violating district-drawing “norms” to a mind-boggling degree like this. Because now they can.
But don’t worry about Dems fighting back by doing a damn thing, let alone gerrymandering harder.
Here in the best country on earth we just count the votes of our people and decide based on that. No district bullshit whatsoever. And that is how we ended with a backwards blackrock cocksucker and a corrupt von der leyen… But seriously just count the votes in general, the us has such a fucked up system…
I don’t think Democrats can Jerrymander much harder than they have been since 1812.
Democrats won’t fight for standard anything because they would lose many, MANY seats in their own states because they’ve been Jerrymandered all to hell to ensure that non Democrat voters are always the minority in their districts.
S.2747 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Freedom to Vote Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress https://share.google/eRglTkE8X7S8e1oPZ
Ranked choice
Popular vote
All this goes away.
Implement an actual independent electoral commission, proper scrutiny, paper ballots only (seriously, the US are fucking brain-dead for using voting machines, it’s caused issues at elections dozens of times), and all this goes away.
But yeah, ranked choice voting is definitely high on the list also
Which is why they pump the uninformed majority of voters full of the idea that the current system will always save them. My father in law has a degree in political science and still thinks that we’ll vote Trump out in 2028 to fix everything. Decades of things generally continuing to function for the middle class white demographic has brainwashed every democratic voter over 50 I know to believe we’re still well within the acceptable bounds of politics.
Gerrymandering can still be effective with ranked choice. It’s harder, but you can still do both cracking and packing, you just have to model top-2 or top-3 preferences.
Popular vote is already the norm for gerrymandered areas.
I mean we should definitely implement Ranked Choice up and down the ticket, and implement Popular Vote for President, but neither actually solves Gerrymandering.
I’d like to say “independent” redistricting organizations are the solution, but the practical success of those is mixed. The incumbents just pack those with cronies, or ignore them, sometimes with the assistance of the judiciary.
In Australia it’s kinda 4 different things that stops gerrymandering from being a problem:
- independent electoral commissions (federally) draw the boundaries
- the commissions take public input and complaints
- very strict criteria for changing boundaries (geographically sensible, community - be it economic, local interest, etc -, population equality)
- and, the final one which is imo super important but I don’t think would ever happen in the US: compulsory voting (we get fined if we don’t vote)… this largely eliminates voter disenfranchisement and manipulation
We have RCV, but you’re completely right: that’s a solution to a whole different problem… and independent commissions are only part of the solution - you need to ensure their independence with rules that make it infeasible for them to be anything but non-biased
On the last bullet point, we probably need to federalize voter qualification and registration, first. Whether you can vote or not depends on what state you are in (felony disenfranchisement, e.g.). Some states let you register on voting day; others close registration weeks before voting day (and some incumbents try to purge voters as close to the deadline as possible). It’s really quite a mess. :(
I think if we made it easier to vote, we wouldn’t have to make it mandatory – federal holiday on voting day, open/unrestricted early voting for a least a week before voting day. I’m against mandatory voting unless there’s a “[X] Democracy is dead / a sham in $District” protest vote option or something similar. Incumbents already claim my support when I’m just trying harm-reduction and I actually support someone that never made it into the primary for wanting to tax the rich.
I’m against mandatory voting
Yeah I think that’s the general consensus outside of Australia, but we fucking love it here… there have been a few very unpopular suggestions to repeal it, and we keep proving that it’s near universal that we love it
Nope, that would only help with state-wide and national elections, not for district-level ones. If they’re gerrymandered to be a majority republican district, the winner will be a republican even if there is ranked choice and popular vote. Or vice-versa if gerrymandered to be a Dem-majority district.
These assholes are going to make violent revolution inevitable. Why they think they will survive that revolution is a mystery.
Because they think they have the vast majority of those institutions with the ability to inflict violence on their side.
And from where I’m sitting, it looks like they’re right
Oh there is no doubt they have a monopoly on violence, but America has more guns than people and virtually no mental health care so…
So…those with a monopoly on violence will use it ruthlessly against any disorganised violence. Have a look at Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
The only way individual citizens with small arms will have any impact on organised groups with automatic weapons, armoured vehicles artillery and air support is if they one get seriously organised in an underground fashion and two convert some of the military groups to their side.
If they don’t do both those it’ll just be massacres and wholesale internment in concentration camps. The MSM have already shown they’re happy to whitewash whats going on, so you’ll never hear about the majority of extra-judicial killings until years later if ever.
The US has about 3 months left to raise a serious resistance, otherwise the show is over and the fat lady is singing.
Organization is a weakness. Attack the leadership and it’s less effective.
How do you attack a large number of individuals engaging in stochastic violence unconnected from each other?
How do you attack a large number of individuals engaging in stochastic violence unconnected from each other?
The same way every oppressive regime has.
Look to history and there have been some succesful insurgencies, there’s also been a LOT of oppressed populations ground down into compliance. Random individuals operating on their own have never to the best of my knowledge achieved significant change. Groups of people working in cells to minimise infiltration and quisling risks however have.
I am glad you are optimistic, and I wish you luck in your endeavours. I certainly would like to see your fascist regime fall.
Because it worked for people like them in China and Russia.
it’s all I cling to, to make it through every day
“Why should I have to pay taxes for roads and schools in Austin when I live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere by choice?”
-Desired Outcome
If you can’t win, cheat. It’s the official slogan of conservatives worldwide.
Republicans are cheating scum.
Aportionment voting. As close to possible make sure the voting for a party gets appropriate representation then vote in who by primary. If this is a 100 seat senate and the state goes 48%red 51% blue and 1 % green each color holds a primary after the election to choose who will represent this platform that got them elected. This creates unity inside a party on issues in which everyone should campaign on and if you aren’t striving to enact the platform it is more seen and you are less likely to be voted in in the primary next time. This creates more parties as if you have a different platform what is the point being in the same party. You still have to play smart like the green party should work green if they have the same agenda that way people don’t get upended but generally this is better
Oh no. anyway, here’s a map of Illinois’ congressional districts.
What’s funny is if you did split up 12 and 15, the GOP would likely lose a seat. 15 is mostly empty land and 12 includes east St lewis and Springfield. Give any of those cities to the empty land and suddenly we’d have a lot of upset corn being represented by a Democrat.
Oh no! Just cause Illinois district is fucky doesn’t mean Texas’ should be even more fucky. It’s not a god damned contest.
Sounds like you’re just upset that the Republicans are following the Democrats’ lead. It’s like watching a kid cheat in a game, then watch the kid get upset when the other kid also starts cheating.
Are you genuinely that obtuse?
I live in CD4, and it’s already just as ridiculous. A massive swath of rural voters to drown out relatively diverse parts of Plano, TX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas's_4th_congressional_district
Texas 13th is horrible too. They cut the city of Denton out of Denton County and stretched it all the way to the top of the pan handle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas's_13th_congressional_district
Yep. It totally makes sense for Denton and Amarillo to have the same representative. /s
Texas has always been a lost cause. If you’re left and in Texas your choice is to leave.
But they used to have to draw their districts in a way that wouldn’t get thrown out by the courts. Now they can do whatever they want. There are still a few judges left that will rule against them, but not for long as more and more are replaced by MAGAts. In the meantime, they can still go ahead and do it now because by the time the issue works its way through the legal system the 2026 midterms will have happened and they’ll have cemented control.
Texas is a lost cause.
I think you missed my point. Their being a lost cause doesn’t mean we don’t have to care about what they do. Their illegal gerrymandering affects all of us by cementing a republican majority in the US Congress.
I get your point. But it’s not illegal. The only way it would be illegal is if it was racially motivated, and that won’t ever be proven.
Texas won’t be stopped. The right wing has all but won. No one is doing anything about it and they’ll keep taking until we push back—which at this point I think is never.
Thanks for the info that it’s totally legal, I didn’t realize that. So I guess the cases I’ve heard about where district boundaries were found illegal by a court must have been based solely on the racial discrimination aspect for violating a civil rights law or something (maybe the voting rights law that SCOTUS has been gutting step by step?)
I know there has always been plenty of gerrymandering, but there always seemed to be a limit to how far they went with it, so I stupidly thought there was some actual law limiting it in some way.
The only reason this story is getting as much national attention is because of the Texas State House members literally doing something about it. And newsom and hochul and pritzker, all doing something about it
We should stop celebrating “doing something” and only celebrate “successfully preventing”
what fucking idiotic ideas. why, I am curious, are districts not drawn by immutable things like latitude and longitude?
Because you have to take into account population numbers. The same number of people represented per representative(in the house) in a given state is one of the points of census.
that’s just a ratio - population / max ppl in cohort.
On a basic level the stuff rural populations need/care about is different than urban populations and suburban is again different. Whether thats farming subsidies, car pollution/traffic, etc.
Dividing simply by lat x long gives all the power to the urban areas. Like a 3rd of NY lives in NYC. However you slice rural areas on the west or north of the state hundreds of miles away with very different concerns would end up getting represented by people from the city while people on the outskirts of the city get represented by rural area interests again hundreds of miles away. And you’d still have arguments about whether to slice longitude or latitude for whatever possible advantage that could give one side or another.
Then you say OK we’ll just sorta cube the city and make a big rural area and thats basically how things started in the first place. Then you have people argue they are better fit for the district next to them try and squiggly the lines et viola you’re just back to where we are now.
Really what is needed is an open-source algorithm that we agree is fair and apolitical. But fat chance of that right now.
Really what is needed is an open-source algorithm that we agree is fair and apolitical. But fat chance of that right now.
I had hopes for this at one point, but I think we might be in a Arrow-like situation, where there actually is no algorithm that satisfies all the fairness constraints we want to apply.
i agree re an open source algo! but also - if things are so vastly different then maybe a solution is county based or make new states, etc.
not easy or simple.
but gerrymandering is so freaking evil.
Physical landmarks like rivers and mountains would be best, but even county lines would be good.
why have districts at all?
Assigning a politician who is accountable to a specific group of people is important. The people can petition one person with requests.
In the Netherlands we have proportional representation, everyone’s vote is equal, you can vote for more than two parties, the votes are divvied out to fill an amount of seats in a parliament, that parliament needs to create coalitions that enact laws from 51% of the seats.
Gerrymandering is not normal and is illegal in most more functioning democracies.
Proportional representation would require ranked choice voting, which is another reform the US sorely needs. If the US had ranked choice voting then each state could be its own district and you would find the candidate that most resonates with your values. Then township seats would be used for local representation. State legislature could also be ranked similarly to National elections.
Local representation is valuable. In the Netherlands it is practically automatic since it is only 41,850 km^2. My state is 134,771 km^2 so you’d need to split it into about 4 pieces/districts to get as local representation. Oddly enough we get 4 congressional districts: https://bdistricting.com/2020/AR/ but we still have issues with Gerrymandering has the largely R government applies cracking approaches to any D voting localities.
Texas is much larger, with more population density variance, so the problems are magnified.
I do agree that instead of a lot of small, geographically compact districts, proportional representation in a larger, but still compact multi-member district is preferable, but that’s not quite the problem we are having with districts.
Local representation is still possible with proportional voting, when voting I get an A2 paper with all the possible people sorted per party per rank of importance
I can choose to vote for my local politician, if their party doesn’t get enough votes to get my voted person in, it gets counted to the person above them in the party rank
I can choose to vote for my local politician […] it gets counted to the person above them in the party
That doesn’t sound like local representation to me. And, honestly, I’d like parties to have less influence on our elections, not more, but I guess that’s a pipe dream.
What happens if you prefer a local politician that is an independent / has no permanent party affiliation? Bernie Sanders and Joseph Lieberman have held federal office without a party affiliation.
This is the only sensible way to do it. Arbitrarily-drawn districts are silly, proportional representation serves all those needs but far better.
I get that. Makes me think though … that’s what states and counties are for. Then again my state is smaller than some counties in other states!
Ranked choice voting and proportional representation in National and state government, then townships are the local representation. Even then voters could rank councilors and petition as their ideology aligns.
That doesn’t change much, it’s possible to define this district that way.
Yes
