Fair voting systems need to be both fair theoretically, but also "obviously fair" to those voting. The vast majority of the electorate is poorly educated on how election system game theory works. (Which should not be surprising.)

I plan to start rolling out fair systems locally (my water district) so that people can familiar with both how easy they're to use; and, more importantly, how they're obviously fair. Right now, we're looking at proportional random selection.

The problem isn't global representation; it's local fairness. (The 538 analysis is correct in that sense.) The problem is that for any given district, the probability of overturning the gerrymander is, in practice, impossible.

In states with legislatively controlled redistricting (the bulk of them) without controls on the redistricting process, the disenfranchisement is global to everyone — even if you're a blue voter in a blue district, or a red voter in a red district. The person who wins is the incumbent.

For instance, based on ACS and latest CVAP, my district is ~65/35. More importantly, my representative explicitly drew several GOP contenders out of his district to seal his re-election chances. I know he did this, because he had this conversation with Abbot (Governor of Tx) while I was standing a few feet away from them.

The point of a gerrymander is to maintain power, not to have some sort of ideological, or political stance.

Worth noting that this is the filibuster rule and it can be changed/eliminated with a 50% vote. We're only deadlocked by choice.

There is no legal requirement for a 60% supermajority to pass anything in the Senate; it’s just a Senate rule. The filibuster has been modified before, and could be modified at any point in the future. I personally am a fan of leaving it, but you HAVE TO TALK. If you stop talking, you yield. If you want to grind up the gears of Congress, you have to actually do something.

The biggest issue, IMHO, is the fact the senate holds all this power, yet Vermont and Texas have the same level of representation in it.

The House, for all it's flaws in being capped so low, at least has the advantage of being more representative of the population, having a clearer majority, and being large enough to support factions within the parties.

This is also why we're drifting towards an "Imperial Presidency", where the president, as the only power center that can come to a decision, unilaterally dictates more and more of US policy.

That's a very expensive solution, most likely, in terms of harm to the economy & international competitiveness. And we already have a huge problem with race-to-the-bottom dynamics when states or cities race to see who can bend over fastest in hopes of to receiving a few scraps from megacorporations. Start putting things the federal government controls in the hands of states and cities, and corporations will definitely gain more power to dictate things like environmental laws, corporate taxation, consumer protection, et c.

I don't think this idea is compatible with a decent-to-live-in, modern economy and state, as nice as it may seem in the abstract.

This is the reason California has a housing crisis. Hyper local power just leads to people in desirable areas voting themselves a handout at the expense of people who move there.

I second this. Progressives wouldn't fight. Some small radical groups people would, but they aren't large enough or organised enough, who/what can they do other than spot violence/terrorism?

I don't think the US can have a proper "civil war" there are too many disparate groups.

But then again, Germany was very divided before WW2, so maybe one of these charismatic cult leaders could to come along.

Neither.

If you think that Democrats don't own guns, you'd be dangerously mistaken. As for owning most of the land, shrug. Who cares. In a war, property deeds aren't worth the paper they're written on.

There are 120% the number of guns in the US as there are people. Only a great fool would believe they are all in the hands of a group that can't even muster up a popular vote win in a presidential election.

It doesn't have to align with state borders, but a lack of alignment with state borders make the organizational start of a civil war complicated because it can't utilize any existing governmental structures. Thus the conflict is much less likely to be one between armies, but between vigilante terrorist groups.

It hinges entirely on who the military and police decide to listen to. Hanging Pence wasn't the only, or first, option that day—getting him to maybe, kinda, technically, if you tilt your head and squint legally overturn the election was one attempted strategy. That's far more dangerous, and there sure seem to be chess pieces lining up to take similar sorta-maybe-technically-legal shots at the principles of democracy in the next election or two.

How the military and cops will react to orders coming from someone who plainly stole an election according to every norm we have about how our government is supposed to work, and who sure looks like they're sending us toward single-party dictatorship on fast-forward, but maybe is kinda, sorta, technically doing all this legally, or at least has sown enough confusion that you're not sure whether they're legitimate or not, is anyone's guess.

Yes I think it's pretty obvious that the 99% are on the side of "no civil war" but there are accelerationist groups who are trying to start one.

In the past month, women in large swaths of the United States have lost their right to bodily autonomy, health, and even life. A woman in Wisconsin was forced to carry her dead fetus inside her for ten days because the hospital was afraid to perform an abortion to remove the fetal tissue due to the law from 1849 being unclear about when exceptions are allowed to its complete and total ban even in the case of rape and incest. A ten-year-old girl in Ohio had to cross state lines to get an abortion after being impregnated via rape since their state's 6-week ban does not have an exception for rape. Some hospitals and pharmacists are refusing to fulfill methotrexate prescriptions for lupus because it could be used to abort an ectopic pregnancy (which is definitionally not viable). Women are being denied mifepristone and misoprostol prescriptions to evacuate miscarriages because they could be used to induce an abortion and are instead being forced to carry necrotizing flesh inside their wombs until they hopefully expel it. Cancer patients are being denied chemotherapy because no oncologist will give chemo to a pregnant woman and the doctors in their area are afraid to give these women abortions until their vital signs literally start falling because the so-called exceptions for the life of the mother are so narrow as to open them up to prosecution by a zealous force-birth DA.

And this hasn't even touched on the ground-shaking effect this is going to have on women's ability to participate fully and equally in society.

> I just don't see a similar situation right now

The flight of capital to the most productive and/or cosmopolitan locations (domestically and globally) and the increase in immigrant representation in positions of influence threatens the cultural centrality of the part of society that has traditionally occupied it, and they would like to have that status restored any way possible.

Does that outweigh the tremendous destruction (and loss to everyone) that would ensue? Perhaps not. Depends what enough people think they have to lose.

I reject this notion. The civil war happened because the North didn't accept the peaceful right to secession. I do not think there would have been a war at all had the nation simply allowed the south to secede.

The current situation with abortion will pose a threat similar to the slavery divide. There's a clear division of states which allow it and those with bans. Some of the states with bans are threatening prosecution of women who cross state lines for the procedure.

There's a similar situation coming up regarding gay and trans rights. Some states will continue having equal rights. Other states may not. This situation will get even worse if the Supreme Court overturns gay marriage and sodomy law precedents.

All of this will create even further division. One of the harbingers of a coming civil war will be internal refugees and increased internal migration. If people start fleeing the red states in noticeable numbers, then that's the time to start getting worried. Especially if some of those fleeing make their moves suddenly. If you start seeing hundreds, or even thousands, who leave their homes in the middle of the night to escape, then you know something bad is coming.

There's already a trickle of such people. A few in Texas did just that. Parents of trans kids who wanted to get away from a situation where the state posed a threat. And they felt like they had to leave immediately with no notice to anyone. We'll start to see more of this if some states decide to ramp up prosecutions of women and investigations into miscarriages.

I didn't make a partisan distinction, only described the thought process for how someone justifies the use of political violence instead of the legal and democratic process.