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posted by on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the careful-plotting dept.

The Washington Post reports Supreme Court rules race improperly dominated N.C. redistricting efforts

The Supreme Court ruled [May 22] that North Carolina's Republican-controlled legislature relied on racial gerrymandering when drawing the state's congressional districts, a decision that could make it easier to challenge other state redistricting plans.

The decision continued a trend at the court, where justices have found that racial considerations improperly tainted redistricting decisions by GOP-led legislatures in Virginia, Alabama, and North Carolina. Some cases involved congressional districts, others legislative districts.

[...] [The justices] were unanimous in rejecting one of the districts and split 5 to 3 on the other.

AlterNet reports

Republican legislators used surgical precision to pack black voters into just two districts, the tentacular 1st and the snake-like 12th. The lower court found that these districts targeted voters on the basis of race in violation of the constitution, a move that effectively prevented black voters from electing their preferred candidates in neighboring seats. map

[...] This now-invalidated congressional map was one of, if not the very most, aggressive partisan gerrymanders in modern history. North Carolina is a relatively evenly divided swing state--Donald Trump won it by just 3 points last year--yet these lines offered Republicans 10 safe districts while creating three lopsidedly Democratic seats. Amazingly, all 10 Republican districts hit a perfect sweet spot with GOP support between 55 and 60 percent, a level that is high enough to be secure yet spreads around Republican voters just carefully enough to ensure the maximum number of GOP seats possible.


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  • (Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday May 26 2017, @02:02PM

    by FakeBeldin (3360) on Friday May 26 2017, @02:02PM (#515958) Journal

    Or you could just go for state-wide proportional representation. I.e.: a party with x% of the vote gets x% of the seats in the house.
    - No districts so no gerrymandering (no arguing about those)
    - No arguing about population-to-vote ratio: every vote counts equally throughout the state.
    - voting for third parties actually makes sense (if 1% of the voters vote for party C, they get 1% of the seats)

    The major downside compared to the current voting system is the lack of compartmentalisation: shenanigans in one polling station may affect the whole outcome.
    The typical solution is to count each polling station locally and publicly, and (publicly) aggregate the results to an intermediate level, which is then publicly aggregated to a next level, until the results are aggregated at the state level.
    Problems then still have to be pointed to geographically (something went wrong *there*).

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