• spongebue@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I mean… People live in regions. Those regions have representatives. How are those regions defined? Maps. Nothing uniquely American about it as far as I can tell.

    • remotelove@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      Maps generally aren’t strange. District maps are fucked. “Regions” takes on a whole different meaning in the US.

      • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        This and absolutely this. We’ve completely ignored the idea of geographical regions having a common interest and bastardized the concept of districts into

        1. shoving all of your opponents into one district that only gets one vote

        2. slicing up areas that are dominated by friendlies into as many districts as possible

        3. in competitive areas, try to shove your opponents into districts that are already lost to you and create narrow bridges through opposing districts linking friendly districts. Essentially, go on a walkabout through the state collecting votes.

        There’s even a game you can play where you control redistricting for a hypothetical area. Given the same population, you can draw the maps such that election winners roughly match the proportions of voters, then to give full control to one side, then to give full control to the other side. The idea is to show you how the people who draw the maps can make voting irrelevant.

      • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        Anything to keep power out of the hands of black people and/or poor people who are “woke”.

    • wildcardology@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      So does my country, but we don’t change how the regions are distributed every election to benefit one party. Once the region/district is set we leave it alone.

      • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        The redistricting every 10 years is because there is a (Constitutionally-mandated) census, and regions/districts change their population, so you have to adjust the representation they get or people will not be fairly represented. You can’t keep the same borders of a city that has grown 30% or the people will be getting less representation per person.

        States used to do some dumb stuff like the Nevada State Senate had a district with less than 600 people and a different district with 120k+ and they counted the same. We got rid of that thanks to a Supreme Court ruling in 1964 (Reynolds v Sims).

    • L3mmyW1nks@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      The unique thing is that, depending on the layout, votes matter differently. I don’t know of any other democratic country that makes it possible to change election results by changing districts.

      • spongebue@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Yes, we bastardize the districts, but when the upstream comment said “Election maps seems wild to me” (not any map in particular, just the idea of a map) I brought up my point.