The Geeks Who Put a Stop to Pennsylvania's Partisan Gerrymandering | Hacker News Reader

The Geeks Who Put a Stop to Pennsylvania's Partisan Gerrymandering

wired.com

30 pointsiaw9 comments

What about the possibility of "self-gerrymandering" at the national scale? By this I mean people's tendency to congregate with people who are politically likeminded. So for every liberal Democrat who moves to Oregon, their vote is now "waste" respecting the presidential election. And every conservative Republican who moves to Utah is likewise wasting their vote.

Republican presidential candidate wins for the first time since 1988 in critical swing state. Time to redraw the districts!

Gerrymandering indeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Pennsylvania

Other than Maine and Nebraska, congressional districting is irrelevant to the Presidential election, and even in those states, its irrelevant to determining the statewide winner, though it can control whether the loser gets one out of four (in Maine) or up to two out of five (in Nebraska) electoral votes as a consolation prize.

- Gerrymandering (and this lawsuit) have nothing to do with presidential elections: A state's Electoral College delegation is the result of a state-wide vote[0], and the number is based on the Census.

- You've completely ignored the in-depth reporting of the article. Just consider the headline numbers: In the 2016 House election, Democratic candidates got 52% of the vote in PA, but only 5 of 18 seats (28%).

[0]: Only exception: Nebraska (edit: and Maine, see below (thx!))

> [0]: Only exception: Nebraska

Nebraska and Maine both give two EVs to the statewide winner and one EV to the winner of each Congressional district.

Many more exceptions are forthcoming, thanks to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact[1]. If enough states agree, these states will cast all of their electoral college votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

[1]: https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/

> Many more exceptions are forthcoming, thanks to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact[1].

Maybe, though there is substantial reason to doubt that will meet the require threshold for activation. Still, those would make even per-state votes irrelevant, not make Congressional districts relevant.

Bad idea. How quickly we forget that party in Boston.

The issue at hand has nothing to do with the Presidential election, but rather Congressional representation. Even the new map would (likely) not have influenced the Presidential election in any meaningful way, but it would have impacted Pennsylvanians' ability to have their interests represented fairly in their state legislature and in Congress.

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