Continuing with this series, we get to ways to end Gerrymandering.
What Gerrymandering is, for those who do not know, is when politicians
divide up electoral districts to make them have an overwhelming majority of
people from one political party to ensure that that particular party gets
elected into office. Basically it makes it easier for one politician from
one party to get elected over the other. However, this is a form of
corrupting influence upon our nation and it must be stopped.
Fixing it: Obviously this is a bad practice as
it ensures little to no compromise with respect to politicians as they have to
appeal to only their political party and the voters in that group. Also
it causes the politicians to become more extreme as without the need to appeal
to the other side, the views of their ideologically pure constituents can
become more and more radical. As such, they become more radical too so as to
not be replaced by more ideologically pure politicians. So a better method must
be developed and enforced by law to prevent gerrymandering and its influence on
the nation.
One method already in use is a committee
of non-elected/non electable officials which are selected in the same way a
courtroom chooses a jury. This committee then distributes the districts
up as equally in population size as possible without looking at things like
race, ideology or other factors. California already does this (note:
States make the congressional districts, not the federal government).
However, this has a weakness. It does not account for regional
needs such as urban, to suburban to rural. It only takes into account
population density. As such there is an additional alternative people may
or may not like.
The alternative is to have the States,
when making electoral districts, divided into regions. In this case, a
city will be its own electoral district and rural areas, wilderness areas and
the like will have each their own districts as well. In the case that there is
only two representatives for a particular State, then one representative will
represent all the urban areas and some suburban areas, and the other will
represent all the rural, wilderness and other sparsely populated areas.
Now the reason why this is controversial even if the representatives are
actually representing regional needs is that the size of the populations in
those districts will be vastly different. Cities can have thousands of
people living in them, but rural areas can have less than a thousand
distributed throughout the entire State. So people see this as unfair
that a few hundred have the same voting power as potentially one million.
The Supreme Court has already ruled on this matter once in favor of
having districts with population sizes that are almost equal irrespective of
the fact of people's needs. To overcome this the Supreme Court ruling
would either have to be overturned or electoral districts would need to stop
being constrained by State borders. This would mean a total loss of power
to the States which would in effect reduce lobbying as well to a degree as
power becomes more distributed. But this may also mean that Congress may
need to be reworked as well. Additional houses of representatives may be
needed so that rural areas and urban areas do not overwhelm each other’s votes.
Even then, Suburban and wilderness areas would need representation.
Basically it gets really complicated and thus making sure cities,
suburban areas, transitional areas, rural, and wilderness all have an equal
number of representatives if we end up not having to rework the very government
itself that is. Again, none of this respects population size and thus will
be seen as unfair.
Conclusion: I wanted to make it clear to you my
reader that there is alternatives out there, but our current system is the
fairest. As such, to reduce the corruption of gerrymandering the committee idea
is the best one with respect to reducing corruption and preventing politicians
from becoming too radical (let alone the districts themselves). In that
respect the committees insure that districts potentially have people who will
disagree and thus play devil's advocate to ensure no ideas get out of hand.
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