That alternative would replace Ohio’s current system for drawing congressional and legislative maps, which relies on elected officials, with a 15-member panel of Ohioans without close ties to politics.
Honestly, I feel like if districts are gonna be drawn, it’d make more sense to just choose some algorithm and have a computer do it.
Like, if you want to have non-partisan oversight of the algorithm selection, great, but I’m not at all sold that partitioning up the election map requires anything beyond a simple, mechanical process.
reads further
Fed up with politicians manipulating maps to ensure reelection, a crowd of Ohio voters took a key step toward offering a redistricting alternative on the November ballot.
The commission would draw maps that “correspond closely to statewide partisan preferences of the voters of Ohio.” Unlike redistricting proposals approved in 2015 and 2018, this requirement is explicit and mandatory.
If you divide up electoral districts to try to clump similar voters, you kind of guarantee that you’re ensuring re-election. In fact, from past reading, that’s what gerrymandering tends to do. It isn’t primarily that politicians try to get an edge for their party overall. It’s that they try to ensure that they have safe seats without serious competition, even if that ensures that politicians from the other party also enjoy the same situation. Think of an oligopoly, where companies divide up territory or something like that, and each has a monopoly. Like, if you’re going to mandate that under this district-drawing system, what you’re functionally doing is minimizing the power of the public in elections relative to that of incumbent politicians.
Researchers found tactic, widely used in 2020, made little difference in partisan numbers but yielded safe seats, less-responsive representatives
Basically, what gerrymanderers principally aim to do is to reduce how much a politician in an electoral district tends to need to care about what their electorate wants, by eliminating realistic challengers.
One of the most consequential outcomes of this redistricting cycle has been the continuing decrease in the number of competitive congressional districts. Under new maps, there are just 30 districts that Joe Biden won by less than eight percentage points in 2020 and, likewise, just 30 districts that Donald Trump won by less than eight points.
All told, there are now fewer competitive districts than at any point in the last 52 years. If the good news is that both parties emerged with reasonable opportunities in coming years to win control of a closely divided House, the bad news is that they will fight that battle on the narrowest of terrains under maps artificially engineered to reduce competition.
In the end, a closely divided House remains up for grabs, with reasonable opportunities for both parties to win control in coming years. However, barring unforeseen political shifts, most voters will watch that fight from the sidelines due to maps that artificially reduce competition. If Americans hope to reverse the long-term decline of competitive districts, reforms to create fairer, more independent map-drawing processes will be essential.
That’s a good deal if you’re an incumbent politician who wants to be in a position to make use of political influence without being at political risk. But it’s the worst deal you could get in terms of your own influence if you’re a member of the voting public.
Ted Linscott, the retired bricklayer from Athens, said Appalachians tell it like it is: “When we see BS, we call BS and the way our districts are drawn is BS.”
I’m not saying you’re wrong there, dude. But being happy about this proposal is kinda, well…I’m gonna need Gary Larson to help me out on this one.
Honestly, I feel like if districts are gonna be drawn, it'd make more sense to just choose some algorithm and have a computer do it.
Like, if you want to have non-partisan oversight of the algorithm selection, great, but I'm not at all sold that partitioning up the election map requires anything beyond a simple, mechanical process.
Agreeing on the algo, its params, etc. is going to just be another never-ending fight. It now also requires teaching any oversight committee about all of this. Even if it were left to some "non-partisan" (I'll believe it when I see it) engineer, each successive government would just replace the algo and/or engineer.
In my opinion, an algo should be legislated with its implementation forced, but I'm not holding my breath.
I feel like a big part of how districts are drawn should involve asking the people which areas are important to them.
It would definitely have to involve some algorithms to sort out and keep the populations roughly equal.
But in general, I kind of envision a system where maybe every 5 or 10 years or so you’d sit down in front of a computer, maybe on election day, or when you renew your driver’s license, or something like that, and you’re presented with a map of your county and the ones that surround it. You select all of the places you live, work, shop, drive through regularly, or otherwise spend most of your time or have particular interests in or concerns about
The computer then draws a district around as many of those points as possible, keeping the population fas even as possible even, and snapping the borders to obvious places- city and county borders, rivers, school districts, major roads, etc.
Then it averages them together into maps that more accurately reflect where the people in those districts actually spend their time.
Pretty big undertaking on the software side, we’d run into the same kinds of issues we do with voting of how to get people to actually show up and fill in their maps, but if we could implement it, to me that seems like the best way to actually draw districts that make sense.
Because I know when I look at the district map where I live, I see a lot of areas included that I have absolutely no connection with, I don’t live there, work there, drive through there, go shopping there, know anyone who lives there, and in general if they burned to the ground today I probably wouldn’t notice for a year or longer, and then there’s other areas where I do spend a lot of time and have other connections to that are not part of my district.
Honestly, I feel like if districts are gonna be drawn, it’d make more sense to just choose some algorithm and have a computer do it.
I’ve thought about this exactly. Here’s my idea.
Crowd source the algorithm every X years. Anybody with basic skills in map making and programming can submit a candidate algorithm. Candidates are scored by…
A) how well they evenly distribute the population across districts (eg +X points for every extra person a district has above a perfectly even distribution), and…
B) how simple the districts are (eg. +Y points for every corner each district boundary has.), which would prevent any kind of gerrymandering.
Lowest score with above example points system wins. Winner gets to have their name on any ballots used while the districts chosen by the algorithm are used. Or something. 🤷
Ok… sooooo… has anyone ELSE seen the photo of the most blood thirsty terrorist group in history? Had uh, the Clintons, the Bush Family, the Obamas, etc in a nice snug family portrait. Was missing a certain orange baboon & his ilk however :| they’re clowns not terrorists though
Feel there is too much pressure on researchers to produce results that are profitable vs what scientists are passionate about doing science on. As always, ALWAYS GOTTA THINK ABOUT THEM QUARTERLY PROFITS @_
That is not even it. It is about finding that novel thing that will lead research direction of a certain topic for years to come. To be THE expert that found THAT thing that could finally cure Alzheimer’s. Not denying for some it is not also about money.
Sounds like some peace keepers need to come in and get these looters in order. I doubt they’re going to be as economically productive as the people whose stuff they stole and drove away.
President Joe Biden warned Monday that a Supreme Court ruling granting presidents broad immunity from prosecutionwould make an unchecked Republican Donald Trump “more emboldened to do whatever he wants” if he regains the White House in November’s election.
And the justices kind of looked around quizzically and said “Yeah…no shit, that’s the whole idea. Did you just get that?”
He’s spelling it out for voters to get them off their asses. People said “yeah right” in 2016 when the ones who were paying attention said that the scotus was on the ballot, and it turns out we were right. It’s probably good to hear the calm warnings straight from him rather than just from “alarmist” friends, relatives, and coworkers this time.
It makes him look even more out of touch with the moment though and incompetent.
If he’s still unwilling to back a campaign to court pack and still unwilling to remove the biggest obstacle to a possible Democratic win in November (himself), his words mean very little. It’s just more too little too late by Biden.
“I know I will respect the limits of presidential power as I have for the three-and-a-half years, but any president, including Donald Trump, will now be free to ignore the law,”
“Yes we may be in a steel cage wrestling match. But I’m still going to follow gentlemens rules. Those tables, chairs and ladders are off-limits to me; My moral superiority will win the day.”
Fuck that. Biden should make them regret this decision. If his candidacy is as DOA as everyone is pretending it is, then there’s no incentive to play by the rules. Move fast and break stuff and get some shit done for a change.
Also,
Biden, under intense pressure after his disastrous debate performance against Trump last week
They just had to get it in there. Not a mention of Trump making shit up the whole time, or the raving lunatic shit he’s saying on the campaign trail. 90 minutes of Biden being low energy and it’s all over. “The other guy is too old, maybe we can do a little fascism. That will be OK, right?”
It’s crazy that this is the kind of shit we’re counting on now. It used to be the Guardrails and then it was the Wheels of Justice grinding exceedingly fine and now it’s Maybe Something Good Will Happen at the Last Minute
I’m just saying with this ruling Biden could do something really weird in the transitional period and it probably would take the rest of his life to go to court for it.
At this point, I’m hoping for an Iranian-style helicopter crash for Trump, Bannon and a few others, Harlan and Thomas get killed in a hurricane wile vacationing abroad, and the other conservative supreme court justices all get get incapacitated by some disease or something.
If the entirety of the heritage foundation could get hit by a fridge-sized meteorite, that would be great.
Almost every article I saw posted following the debate touched on Trump’s falsehoods.
But also, Trump lying is not news. He lied all the way to his 2016 win, and lied decades before that, and still lies now. Absolutely no one new is going to be convinced that he’s bad because he lies. If absolutely anyone is thinking of voting of Trump at this point, him lying is not going to be the deciding factor.
I think it should be hammered to death because a person in power should not ever be allowed to get away with lying. I know morality isn’t in law, but it should be, IMO. The world is so fucked up in so many ways because no one puts morals in law.
Because Trump lies. It’s old news. There was no way that debate was going to play well for Biden. He had nothing to gain. People voting for Trump are voting for Trump, people not voting for Trump are either Voting for Biden or staying home. Biden has to convince people not to stay home, not convince people not to vote for Trump.
The people that vote for Trump are people so sick of the current state of politics they want to burn it all down. Very few actually think he’s a great president. He’s a troll vote. Biden’s performance made more people want to watch the world burn.
No, not insane. 100% expected. This is the danger of electing an obligate serial liar. We have all been accustomed to his bullshitting. About the size of crowds, about how much money he has, about how fucking oppressed he is, about stolen this and unfair that, etc. No one has the energy to give a fuck anymore. It’s all old news.
Sorry, are you suggesting that the media is against Biden? Cause they’ve been for him for months. Any apprehension about his future prospects have nothing to do with Trump being a lying sack of shit. I won’t apologize for Biden sucking. I do like the idea of him turning the scotus ruling on them.
What media have you been looking at? The only thing I’ve seen about Biden for months has been about how he’s too old. And occasionally a bit about him supporting Israel, whether that’s presented in a positive or negative light.
Every time Biden had that “confused” look on his face during the debate, he was reacting to some absolute bullshit tRump had just said and the media turned it into “Biden confused”. Biden WAS low energy, what was trump on? It is also easier to spew bullshit, when there is ABSOLUTELY NO PUSH BACK, then it is to remember ACTUAL facts. Watching the follow up I felt like I was being gaslit on what I actually watched
Kuhbander’s mom, Jane, posted on social media days after her son was last seen. She claimed that Kuhbander was ‘coerced’ by Anderson and that she was a danger to herself. She also claimed that Kuhbander did not go with her willingly.
Family had said the two were romantically involved but had broken up before they went missing.
For as few details as this article has, they certainly do let you paint a pretty disturbing picture of what happened.
news
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.