Oh please vote... just remember that we can make your congressional distracts meaningless by overloading it with one side. Oh and ya the electoral college will overwrite the vote of the majority. Democracy?
A regression to Jim Crow era practices is a serious setback.
Ignoring all of that history, and taking your statement in good faith, it still is reductive to pretend that we're in the same state as the 18th century. Voters are much more diverse, and the technology exists to precisely draw districts to achieve very precise outcomes. The increased precision and ability to do things at scale is a differentiating factor, as well as the increased consequences; a voting population that's just "land owning white males" might see gerrymandering as less extreme that the much more diverse distribution of beliefs we have in the current voting population.
The current problems with gerrymandering are huge. Issues that have super majority support among the population (reproductive rights, immigration reform, drug reform, gun control) are controlled by an increasingly small population of voters. You can (and even may be correct) claim that this represents the wills of the founders; it's a much harder sell to claim that this is a "good thing" that the people shouldn't be able to push back against.
Partisan gerrymandering has not.
Also, remember that this is the same court in which three justices (Gorsuch/Thomas/Kavanaugh in Kisor and Thomas again in Gamble) have openly called for ignoring stare decisis when it doesn't suit their political objectives. For them to cite precedent and/or judicial humility in any decision at this point is dishonest.
That's exactly the issue I was getting at. Equal representation is clearly a constitutional issue, which it is the court's duty to rule on, and yet the constitution does not explicitly address districting issues. Would defining a standard to determine whether a districting plan meets the constitutional requirement be within the court's purview? Clearly yes, because that kind of standard-setting is a significant part of what they have always done. It's right in the introduction to the Wikipedia list of landmark decisions.
"establishing a "test" or a measurable standard that can be applied by courts in future decisions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landmark_court_decisio...
Declining to set such a standard because such things are delegated to the states would have been reasonable. Declining to set such a standard because it's a "political" - i.e. legislative - responsibility is also reasonable. But "because the constitution" doesn't work because the constitution is mute on the specifics on which the court was asked to rule. They can't overturn what doesn't exist.
>"Gerrymandering," the practice of drawing legislative district boundaries so as to maximize partisan advantage, is far from new. Elbridge Gerry, the Massachusetts governor whose name literally became synonymous with the practice, worked his magic to create a salamander-shaped district over two hundred years ago.
https://origins.osu.edu/article/re-mapping-american-politics...
When you can't vote out your representatives through electoral means, what means remain?
Overloaded districts just shift the debate from generals to primaries. I live in Manhattan. It will pretty much always vote blue. That doesn't mean there isn't political competition.
Perhaps candidates should start appealing to more people and winning elections instead of pandering to particular blocks of people.
For that singular district the answer might mean color yourself purple, but if done correctly this allows for a party that represents a minority of voters to control things on a state or national level. It's the same problem people have with the electoral collage. You can win a majority of the votes (either by being a partisan or by being a centrist) and lose because maps.
Yes, the rules of the game suck and should be changed. As a citizen, there are many ways you can work towards that end. Regardless, the game is still being played and not voting is a move in the game that almost never benefits your own interests.
Do you know who got the most votes in the 2016 presidential election? It wasn't Trump. It wasn't Hillary, either. It was no one. The number of people who could have voted outnumbers the votes either candidate got.
People who stayed home chose to affect that election more than any other group of people.
Claiming that "people that choose to stay at home" are all independent of the system that effectively disenfranchises them is problematic.
Sadly, we probably will not do so because those barriers (and the resulting suppression of votes) is politically beneficial to some.
People like to claim both parties are the same, but look at how often Democratic politicians try to increase voting access and how often Republicans try to limit it. Their actions are telling you something.
It does not. Like I said, work to fix the systemic problems.
Also, go vote. These are not mutually exclusive actions.
There is a pernicious idea that not voting is a viable strategy to register your discontent or stick it to the man. This a nonsense belief perpetrated by people in power — especially Republicans — who want you to not vote. The fewer people who vote, the cheaper it is to influence enough people to swing an election.
Anyone who suggests its OK to not vote doesn't have your best interests at heart. That doesn't mean there aren't legitimate things making it difficult to vote. Those are problems that should be fixed. In the meantime, vote.
In North Carolina, the GOP used their ability to draw the districts in ways that allowed them to get a veto-proof super-majority in the state General Assembly. Then, they passed law after law restricting people's ability to get out and vote. Closing polling stations, requiring ID that many disadvantaged people don't have easy access to, restricting early voting. They even tried to make the state Election Board a completely partisan office by making it appointed solely by the General Assembly (which they controlled) rather than the Governor's office (who is a Democrat.)
All of that stopped once they lost their veto-proof majority, and they only lost it because the courts determined they had illegally drawn the districts. It wasn't people finally deciding to get out and vote. It was that people who had always been eligible to vote had their districts redrawn in a way that allowed their vote to actually count (albeit, barely.)