Broder's Right
David Broder's column today in the Washington Post does a good job of tying together the redistricting effort in California with the efforts continually being made to erode the power of campaign-finance laws. Key quote: "If there is one cause that motivates the politicians more than the pursuit of pork, it is the protection of their own custom-made districts, shaped by computers and backroom negotiations to spare them the inconvenience of competition on Election Day."
posted by JBD @ 7:50 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Any thoughts on how to balance redistricting to reduce competition versus redistricting to allow representation? My first experience with gerimandered districts was in Louisiana where one district is designed to run through all of the mostly Black parts of the state in order to give some representation to the hundreds of thousands of Black citizens of Louisiana. One would hope it wouldn't be necessary, but in fact it was at least in the mid 80s as people largely voted racially. You would end up with 40% of the population being black, but not a single representative being black or, more importantly perhaps, caring much about the places that black people lived. It seems like the long range solution is to change our Winner Take All strategy in voting. Or fix the housing defacto segregation....
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