Also non-american but subject to a bunch of us-centricn news anyway 😅
Good question you need to be able to re-draw boundaries, but re-drawing boundaries shouldn’t have a material effect on election results (assuming the same people vote the same way.
I have heard a few proposals like “districts must be regular polygons” or avoiding moving people from contested seats into safe seats.
Neither of them are perfect for a number of reasons (reliance on perdictive models, ways to work around etc.) so the common approach is to appoint an independent redistricting commission to handle it and have them look at a bunch of metrics to figure out if it’s fair.
The main problem is that a few states passed ballot initiatives to combat gerrymandering, the politicians then undermined or straight up ignored them and then in 2019 the supreme court decided that it wasn’t within the jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear cases around gerrymandering. Funnily enough every single one of the justices who decided they were fine with republicans germandering efforts were appointed by republican presidents who could have guessed?
So now it’s de-facto legal; states run by the democrats are doing similar things and the clearly-acting-in-good-faith pundits on the right are screaming “look both parties are the same see! See!”
Err… I may have strayed from my point a little, but yes IRCs are the way to do this provided they have sufficient legal backing to see that their decisions are enforced.
Also non-american but subject to a bunch of us-centricn news anyway 😅
Good question you need to be able to re-draw boundaries, but re-drawing boundaries shouldn’t have a material effect on election results (assuming the same people vote the same way.
I have heard a few proposals like “districts must be regular polygons” or avoiding moving people from contested seats into safe seats.
Neither of them are perfect for a number of reasons (reliance on perdictive models, ways to work around etc.) so the common approach is to appoint an independent redistricting commission to handle it and have them look at a bunch of metrics to figure out if it’s fair.
The nice thing is a perfect solution isn’t even necassary for improvement, just preventing horrorshows like Texas’s 33rd (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas’s_33rd_congressional_district) would help.
The main problem is that a few states passed ballot initiatives to combat gerrymandering, the politicians then undermined or straight up ignored them and then in 2019 the supreme court decided that it wasn’t within the jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear cases around gerrymandering. Funnily enough every single one of the justices who decided they were fine with republicans germandering efforts were appointed by republican presidents who could have guessed?
So now it’s de-facto legal; states run by the democrats are doing similar things and the clearly-acting-in-good-faith pundits on the right are screaming “look both parties are the same see! See!”
Err… I may have strayed from my point a little, but yes IRCs are the way to do this provided they have sufficient legal backing to see that their decisions are enforced.