Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Politics
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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @04:46AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @04:46AM (#516301)

    The rural area is getting screwed. Politicians find it easy to ignore the needs of the rural population. Going by area fixes it.

    If you are in an urban area and want more say, you can move. Now, you might say rural people should move, but this is harmful. Cities are unable to support themselves for food and water. It all has to be trucked in. This adds pollution that usually isn't even counted toward the city causing it. (the least-polluting is smallish cities with short commutes, not urban or true rural) Having people in urban areas is a disadvantage in war; they make easy targets.

    Anyway, you can't measure population well. It is estimated that California unjustly has an extra 5 seats in the house due to non-citizens being counted; this is a motivation to support crime. There is always a fight over counting the homeless.

    It's no good to have people drawing the lines either. If you use county lines, people will redraw the counties.

    A specified algorithm is decent, yet hard to get right. An easier solution is to make a contest out of it, specifying only a way to judge the contest entries.

  • (Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Saturday May 27 2017, @02:48PM

    by FakeBeldin (3360) on Saturday May 27 2017, @02:48PM (#516426) Journal

    I'm just going to focus on one part of your reply that flummoxed me:

    Anyway, you can't measure population well. It is estimated that California unjustly has an extra 5 seats in the house due to non-citizens being counted;

    What? That's impossible. They must know who is allowed to vote. If they know this, then they can infer the total number of eligible voters.
    Now I'll grant that that's a lower bound for the total number of inhabitants of the state, but:
    1. does that matter? I.e.: is the number of seats in the house dependent on total number of voters or that of inhabitants?
    2. If the latter: there are surely ways to extrapolate from total number of voters to total number of inhabitants in a better way.
    (2a. If the latter: why don't you abolish that and use the total number of voters instead?
                  Since using inhabitants should basically be scaling the number of voters, it doesn't matter so much, so you can use that unfudged
                  number officially, and use an official scaling factor which will apply equally to all. )