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JadeNB

> You (and everybody else) don't understand what I mean because you haven't thought about it as much as I have.

Even if true, this is surely the least civil way, and one of the least convincing ways, to state the fact.

> My point is, there IS NO RIGHT ANSWER. There is only your preference.

That seems to be a different claim to:

> any creation of voting districts is a Gerrymander

(which you said above). Two reasons why:

1. As slavik points out, a gerrymander is, by definition, intentionally (not incidentally, accidentally, or unavoidably) unfair.

2. More importantly, "all district-drawing schemes are unfair", while probably true, does not mean that they are all equally unfair, or that we should give up on seeking fairness. It seems rather like http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm .

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I've presented a pretty terrible solution before and I'll say it again to illustrate a point.

Let's say we make the whole nation into a single constituent district. Now, every voter will cast one vote for one representative and the top N candidates with the most votes win.

This is a terrible solution but even this is better than what we have today which i hope goes far too show how bad the system we have today is...

Systems design should strive to make it resistant to corruption and try to not rely on the goodness of people making correct/impartial choices.

(I am fully aware of my hypocrisy when I claim to support democracy around the world except obviously {{}} can't be in government. I hope that this just shows that I can't even trust myself to be correct/consistent/impartial.)

Bottom line is that every vote within a jurisdiction should be equally equal regardless of geographical location. It might lead to people we don't like getting elected but that shouldn't dissuade us. However, I have to agree with President Obama in this -- the only way to effect any change here is to get people involved in very large numbers. Get people to move to these safe districts. I can't see how we can accomplish change here with the levels of apathy we have...

The situation with supposed gerrymandering is more subtle than you give it credit for, and you therefore are either hopelessly naive about voting constituencies, or you would soon see on inspection that your "impartial system" would utterly fail.

To try to forge a simple example to illustrate it to you (and yes, this is spoonfeeding to an HN audience who refuses to do the work themselves when downvoting is so much simpler): people interact with their neighbors and they squabble with their neighbors and there are many more factions on a myriad of issues than even a multiparty system can allow for. But neighbors unite over many issues, like "we don't want a sewage treatment plant here", or "we need more parking".

If you have a "system" that does not give local people a loud voice on local issues, your system will be overturned in favor of one that does. For instance, the American Revolution and the Brexit are the same basic issue: people far away should not be deciding our local affairs.

So now that your system's been overturned, we have a system of local districts... but local districts are filled with people who do not agree on all issues...

It's all gerrymandering, there is no such thing as not gerrymandering, including in the mathematically degenerate cases of Athenian (or New England town meeting) democracies. Factorial of 0 has to be 1, because...because... "gerrymander"

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