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Simple math can help scheming politicians manipulate district maps and cruise to victory. But it can also help identify and fix the problem.
Imagine fighting a war on 10 battlefields. You and your opponent each have 200 soldiers, and your aim is to win as many battles as possible. How would you deploy your troops? If you spread them out evenly, sending 20 to each battlefield, your opponent could concentrate their own troops and easily win a majority of the fights. You could try to overwhelm several locations yourself, but there's no guarantee you'll win, and you'll leave the remaining battlefields poorly defended. Devising a winning strategy isn't easy, but as long as neither side knows the other's plan in advance, it's a fair fight.
Now imagine your opponent has the power to deploy your troops as well as their own. Even if you get more troops, you can't win.
In the war of politics, this power to deploy forces comes from gerrymandering, the age-old practice of manipulating voting districts for partisan gain. By determining who votes where, politicians can tilt the odds in their favor and defeat their opponents before the battle even begins.
Anyone for a game of RISK?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @10:57PM (1 child)
If the R team were interested in shrinking the size of government, which means getting rid of the drug war and wars abroad to protect the interests of the oligarchs...
Oh screw it. I think you know damned well why the R team is in evil territory these days.
Stop worrying about distractions like identity politics and start worrying about things that matter, like the things that caused N-day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @02:53AM
Who cares about identity politics? We're talking about gerrymandering, and a case about getting rid of it.
Let me spell it out for you clearly: if gerrymandering is OK because voting bloc A gets concentrated in location B, and that's somehow a good thing, then you have quite a hill to climb to explain how voting bloc C in location D should not be concentrated to get a few representatives, however much it screws up their ability to elect representatives elsewhere.
Get it? If it's sometimes OK, then it's tough to explain why and how it's bad at other times. And I doubt that the supremes are going to fabricate a rule that somehow allows both sides.
Now, just in case you think that gerrymandering is OK if it means that black people get their candidates in, in places like Atlanta, but not when urban hipsters get a lock on their choice in San Francisco, please observe that in both cases votes get "wasted" in bucketloads because it's not a proportional representation system, and the relevant voting blocs aren't herded together, but cluster by choice. Short of proportional representation, what formula do you propose that the supremes should use to decide what's OK and what's not?