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Gerrymandering has a long and unpopular history in the United States. It is the main reason that the country ranked 55th of 158 nations — last among Western democracies — in a 2017 index of voting fairness run by the Electoral Integrity Project
[...] Lawsuits fighting partisan gerrymandering are pending around the country, and a census planned for 2020 is expected to trigger nationwide redistricting. If the mathematicians succeed in laying out their case, it could influence how those maps are drawn.
[...] States such as Arizona and Iowa, which have independent or bipartisan commissions that oversee the creation of voting districts, fared much better. In a separate analysis, Daniel McGlone, a geographic-information-system data analyst at the technology firm Azavea in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ranked each state’s voting districts for compactness as a measure of gerrymandering, and found that Maryland had the most-gerrymandered districts. North Carolina came second. Nevada, Nebraska and Indiana were the least gerrymandered.
[...] In the summer of 2016, a bipartisan panel of retired judges met to see whether they could create a more representative set of voting districts for North Carolina. Their maps gave Mattingly a chance to test his index. The judges’ districts, he found, were less gerrymandered than in 75% of the computer-generated models — a sign of a well-drawn, representative map. By comparison, every one of the 24,000 computer-drawn districts was less gerrymandered than either the 2012 or 2016 voting districts drawn by state legislators
[...] Political scientist Nicholas Stephanopoulos at the University of Chicago, Illinois, takes a much simpler approach to measuring gerrymandering. He has developed what he calls an “efficiency gap”, which measures a state’s wasted votes: all those cast for a losing candidate in each district, and all those for the victor in excess of the proportion needed to win. If one party has lots of landslide victories and crushing losses compared with its rivals, this can be a sign of gerrymandering.
Note: Please try to keep the discussion on the topic of gerrymandering.
http://www.nature.com/news/the-mathematicians-who-want-to-save-democracy-1.22113
https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8796
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday June 09 2017, @01:09PM (3 children)
The factor that distinguishes a democracy is the distribution of power towards the majority of the people. And whether by manipulation or force, neither the US nor NK are democracies in the sense of the majority having power to prioritize their own interests over the wealthy or the powerful.
Voting is just a means to an end; To represent the majority. And whether using targeted criminalization or electoral thresholds, misinformation & propaganda aided by wealth or just direct brute force, if you actually count how many people have a real say about anything, most European countries as well as the US might actually rank similarly or even worse then NK.
That is, when it comes down to numerating just how many people hold meaningful power and just how much power is left distributed outside that small circle, both the US and NK are run by very small groups of very wealthy & powerful people that are widely recognized as acting without the public's interests at heart.
Overall, putting the quality-of-life issues aside, I'd wager the average American is about as politically powerful as the average North Korean.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @02:34PM (2 children)
"Overall, putting the quality-of-life issues aside, I'd wager the average American is about as politically powerful as the average North Korean."
Unfortunately, quality-of-life includes politically meaningful action, so your statement is essentially null.
Moving from one place to another is something americans do all the time - and it has political significance. Making purchase choices and lifestyle choices is politically significant, and one way in which americans have more options at their disposal than do north koreans.
And so on and so forth; fill in the blanks yourself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @03:16PM (1 child)
> quality-of-life includes politically meaningful action
If an individual decides to move to another state or buy a foreign car, the political map stays the same. Meaning, it's exactly like voting where the average American['s right of mobility and choice] is about as politically powerful as the average North Korean['s whatever].
More importantly, mobility and economic prosperity are tied to employment options which are derived from skill sets which are further derived from your genetics. That's not a right for all Americans. That's a right for some Americans. Unless of course, you believe average Joe can get rich enough to be economically mobile in a way that sways politics through hard work... Personally, I think A. Joe is more likely to win the lottery.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @03:57PM
You're missing the point.
Voting with your feet (by moving from, say, South Dakota to, say, California) isn't very significant for one individual, but in aggregate is a meaningful element of changing the political landscape, and one that has been measured. The same option is not open to people in the DPRK.
As for the discussion of what a right is, you're confusing the concept of a right, with a prerogative, privilege, obligation and so on.
A right is something that you are legally in the right to do. You have a right to freedom of speech, but you have an obligation to perform jury duty. You may be afforded the privilege of driving, but the prerogative to travel or not. The fact that you may be congenitally unable to get a driving licence does not invalidate the rest of the analysis.
Given that things like voting are pretty much aggregated political activities, making the case that an individual's actions have minimal nationwide effects is irrelevant.