2/ First, progressives love to complain about gerrymandering (not claiming that OP in this thread is a progressive; I have no idea, and I'm not attacking him, regardless), but a lot of gerrymandering is REQUIRED by various progressive legislative and court victories.
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3/ e.g Voting Rights Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 … Bartlett v. Strickland (2009), and other court cases (it's been a while since I dug into this, so I don't have it all in memory).
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4/ But the point is that nasty evil white majority might theoretically decide to dilute and thereby discard a minority demographic by carving it up and putting small pieces of it into a cluster of other districts, ensuring that there is no critical mass in any one district >
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5/ and thus not only does the minority group not get a representative of their own, but they don't even have any noticeable impact on any of the races that they get to vote in. (Something that Blacks and libertarians have in common!)
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6/ So, anyway, if we want to comply w the Voting Rights Act and related court cases, sometimes we have to gerrymander. But let's imagine a world without that Act. >>>
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7/ What's so great about geographic proximity (or whatever metric that's equivalent, like minimizing the perimeter) ? Serious questions. Why are squat small districts good, and long skinny ones bad?
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8/ One thing I've been yammering on about for a decade or so is that we are (perhaps) in the birth pangs of a new geographically distributed post-Westphalian world. The ideal of representative democracy is that people in similar situations can share a representative who >
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9/ argues for and votes on behalf of the populace that they represent. I guarantee you that the senators from CA and the representatives from the Hollywood area do a great job of representing the actors, directors, and studio employees who vote in their districts.
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10/ And as these people all have very very similar interests, when the Hollywood rep (CA 28? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California%27s_28th_congressional_district … ) votes on on a topic that touches on the film industry, he or she is actually doing a great job of representing those common interests.
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11/ The movie industry is geographically centralized, as is the financial industry. This means that a squat, compact district actually does a job job of grouping a demographic, and aligning represented with representatives.
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12/ 200 years ago geography likely had a lot more bearing on demographics and indeed psychographics, as marketers like to say. New Englanders tended to agree on taxing the shipping industry. Southerners tended to agree on cotton tariffs. etc.
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13/ And, besides, when information traveled only as fast as the envelope in a courier bag under the armpit of a dispatch rider, there was really no other way to set up districts. Likewise when voting meant walking 2-5 miles to the nearest church or 5-10 miles to a courthouse.
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14/ But in 2020, will mail-in ballots (or even without, if you consider our ability to marshal and ship data around), there's no logistic reason that districts need to have minimized perimeters ... or even be contiguous! Here's an illustrative map of my demographicpic.twitter.com/8jLTLQhkTN
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15/ Why NOT make this a congressional district? Who CARES if they're contiguous? Why not seek to minimize some information distance when creating districts, not geographical distance?
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16/ I mean, I'm still mostly an ancap. I'd prefer no government at all, and competing polycentric legal system. ...but if we're going to have government, why seek to make the representative units geographically compact? Gerrymandering is Good; Q.E.D.
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