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This is sad that america is being shown how little voting matters when district manipulation occurs. If both dems and repubs do it equally then it might be a wash but it sure exposes a shaky, questionable system.
Exposes? Everybody that pays attention has known about the bullshit that is gerrymandering forever.
It's literally en par with election fraud. Just because it's done beforehand using statistics doesn't make the resulting elections any less of a sham.
It is essentially the highest crime that can be committed against a democracy, and it has been treated as "dirty politics" for decades; with the Supreme court of clowns approval.
This is one of countless examples that already proved America was a failed state, long before Trump appeared.
Yes it's at the top of the list with citizens united and first past the post... Everyone knows it's bullshit.
All these first past the post countries have the same problem, that the only people who could change the broken system are the people who benefit most from its brokenness. This suggests it's a mistake to put the management of electoral systems under the control of elected politicians. The alternative I guess would be some kind of independent, non-partisan body, but then there is always the question of who runs that body and how you prevent its capture by people with a specific political agenda. It's always going to be an ongoing process of review and change, but giving management of the whole thing to the same parties that stand to be elected seems particularly risky.
America isn't really a democracy...
We keep saying it is, but it's not
In order to get the numbers in the current system to replace it with a more democratic system, shit like this needs to happen.
That's the only way to "fix" the current system, to replace it
Last year I heard a story or two of people who didn’t even know that Biden wasn’t running anymore and that was within a week of the election. Informed US citizens are rarer than you’d think.
Too bad the vast majority of the people don't.
Oh it won't be a wash. Republican gerrymandering is basically all in place. gerrymandering becomes less effective/ more risky the more extreme you do it, to when you take it to it's extreme or go past it, it backfires.
Blue states have largely kept their powder dry is what's really going on. So there was little benefit and much to lose with Trump picking this fight.
When you combine gerrymandering with targeted disenfranchisement, it works great. Dems haven't been "keeping their powder dry", they've just been lazy and apathetic in the face of a conservative power grab.
In Texas, we're going to see Abbot crack down hard on liberal leaning corners of Republican staked races. Mass disenfranchisement of students - particularly those in the poorer dorms - plus crackdowns on voting on minority-majority campuses (Texas Southern University in Houston, for instance) go a long way towards strangling Dem turnout. Crackdowns on mail-in voting in liberal leaning elderly suburbs can depress turnout. Deliberate meddling with the certification process for voting machines, harassment of poll workers, and constraints on early voting in big liberal districts can bloat the wait times to vote and discourage participation among liberal voters.
I fully expect to see ICE agents all over polling locations, with a particular eye for anyone who looks illegally colored or otherwise ethnic, in the 2025 municipal cycle
[Citation needed]
Nope. They may not have been anywhere near as blatant about it as the fascist party, but Dem leadership around the country haven't been shy about giving themselves bigger incumbent advantages via redistricting when allowed to either.
Absolutely fair. But first, packing and cracking algorithm. Gerrymandering works by manipulating district lines to maximize one party’s advantage through packing (shoving the other party’s voters into a few districts they win overwhelmingly) and cracking (splitting the rest across many districts so they lose narrowly). In packed districts votes are “wasted”: all votes for losing candidates, plus surplus votes beyond 50% in winning districts.
Here’s a toy example. Suppose there are 100 voters split evenly: 50 Party A, 50 Party B, across 5 districts of 20 voters each. If districts are drawn fairly, each district is about 10-10, so the outcome is 2-3 or 3-2 seats either way depending on swing. Now imagine a gerrymander. Party A packs 18 of Party B’s voters into one district (B wins 18-2) and cracks the remaining 32 B voters across the other four districts (so each of those is A=13, B=8). Party A now wins 4–1 despite an even statewide vote. But notice the fragility: if just 3 voters per cracked district switch or turn out differently (so A=10, B=11), Party B flips all four of those districts at once. That’s the backfire. Create razor-thin margins, and extreme gerrymanders make the system highly sensitive to small shifts.
Slight or moderate gerrymandering wont create this effect necessarily, but extreme gerrymandering in purplish places inherently mean you are spreading the butter over too much bread.
More on the matter: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.09381
I was skeptical of your assertion, so I peppered Copilot with a few prompts and it seems to confirm your point.
—-
States with the Greatest Untapped Gerrymandering Potential
Below are the key one-party trifecta states whose current congressional maps rate as relatively fair (Princeton A or B). These jurisdictions have the structural guardrails of independent or bipartisan commissions in place—but if those were overridden or relaxed, the controlling party could pick up a small handful of extra seats.
State Controlling Party 2021 Map Grade Current House Seats Estimated Additional Seats Source Arizona Republican A 9 +1 A Colorado Democratic A 8 +1 A Washington Democratic A 10 +1 A
Arizona’s independent commission maps gave Republicans a near-proportional 5–4 split on a 50-50 statewide vote; stripping or subverting that commission could flip one more GOP seat. Colorado and Washington delivered Democrats fair shares of 4–4 and 8–2 respectively; each could see one extra Democratic district if guardrails were weakened.
State Controlling Party 2021 Map Grade Current House Seats Estimated Additional Seats Source California Democratic B 52 +5 B New York Democratic B 26 +2–3 C
California Democrats are already eyeing mid-cycle tweaks that would boost their delegation from 82.7% of seats to over 92.3%, a net gain of about five seats relative to a 58.5% vote share. New York’s Democrats hold 25 of 26 seats with roughly 58% of the vote; abandoning the independent commission could net them an additional two or three safe districts.
Each of these states demonstrates that even jurisdictions with top-graded, commission-drawn maps can swing several seats if the party in power decides to scrap or weaken those commissions. Turning a single “fair” seat-voter curve into a heavily tilted map typically yields roughly one extra seat per ten districts—a small change with an outsized impact in a razor-thin U.S. House majority.
Reported as "AI Slop Post"
but a) we don't have a rule against that.
and 2) OP clearly noted the used Co-Pilot to generate it, they aren't trying to pass it off as their own.
I'm actually OK with this. Obviously we'll remove AI generated ARTICLES that get posted, same as we'd remove videos and such, but in a comment? Clearly noted as AI? I think I'm OK with that.
If y'all WANT a rule about it, hit me up. I'll bring it up with the other mods and admins.
Peak
I can't think by myself so let's see what brainrot the "AI" gives mekinda deal. So cooked I can smell it's well-done all the way over here.If you couldn't be bothered to think or write for yourself, why would you think anyone would be bothered to read that?? It's literally just pollution.
Now I know how liberal gun owners feel. Very rarely do I not agree with the left platform, but y’all opting to dismiss one of the most powerful tools ever given to mankind is going to be at your peril.
It has its faults just like humans do, but it is literally the culmination of all human knowledge. It’s Wikipedia for nearly everything at your fingertips.
Perhaps the way y’all use it is wrong. It’s not meant to make the decisions for you, it’s a tool to get you 80% there quickly then you do the last mile of work.
Anywho, the premise stands. Democrats have more leverage to use gerrymandering if they do chose it, though I wish we weren’t in a place where they had to go with a nuclear option that threatens US democracy even more.
The issue is you didn't confirm anything the text prediction machine told you before posting it as a confirmation of someone else's point, and then slid into a victimized, self-righteous position when pushed back upon. One of the worst things about how we treat LLMs is comparing their output to humans -- they are not, figuratively or literally, the culmination of all human knowledge, and the only fault they have comparable to humans is a lack of checking the validity of its answers. In order to use an LLM responsibly, you have to already know the answer to what you're requesting a response to and be able to fact-check it. If you don't do that, then the way you use it is wrong. It's good for programming where correctness is a small set of rules, or discovering patterns where we are limited, but don't treat it like a source of knowledge when it constantly crosses its wires.
Your premise is incorrect - you are inferring that I did not confirm the output.
You have yet to suggest or confirm otherwise, so my point stands that your original post is unhelpful and non-contributive
I read the post and it was not unhelpful. My concern is that we are starting to use the magic 8-ball too much. Pretty soon we won't be able to distinguish good information from bad, regardless of the source.
People just don't like reading slop from lying machines. It's really just that simple.
Polluting a chat thread with slop is just a rude thing to do. Nobody like sloppers.
Please define slop. Please provide examples of LLM generated text that you do not consider as slop.
I mean, I would appreciate not just reposting AI output, but I appreciate the support.
it also extends just as a conclusion from the algorithm for gerrymandering. It's founded in the math used in packing and cracking when you have limited numbers of districts. In republican Gerrymandering you are necessary making red districts closer to a toss up and blue districts safe. If you push it too far and in a wave election it has the potential to fail catastrophically.
The easiest way to find states at the greatest risk for this is to identify states where the presidential margin was close, but almost all the reps are red or blue.
Single representative geographically constrained districts are already a bad system. The fact that these districts have swollen from 15-20k (at the nation's founding) to 600k+ (in the modern day) have only escalated the degree to which politicians (and their donors) get to pick their voters.
If you want to talk about fixing our broken political system, we need to consider uncapping the total number of House Reps (an artificial limit imposed back in the 1920s to benefit incumbents) and shrink district sizes and afford voters the freedom to select representatives outside the constraint of voting districts.
Bemoaning the gamesmanship over district shapes, at this stage, is just arguing over how you want the game to be rigged. But the idea that districts which are more swing-y are somehow "more fair" than ones that are entrenched by a particular party ignores the dynamics that swing a district to begin with (money, media access, internal party politics). People outside the party duopoly are still wholly unrepresented. People on the losing end of an election are also unrepresented. And people who can't access their elected representative (because they can't afford a $2000/plate fund raising lunch) are also unrepresented.
The US came very close to having a first amendment that had a low cap for the number of people one house rep could represent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment