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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

In a two party system like the US, the parties are normally self balancing.

Ie. Whichever party isn't currently in power finds it easier to find supporters, because they can pick up anyone who doesn't like what the currently in power guys are doing.

That balancing effect means that even if you artificially gave one party 10% extra votes in each election, then after 1000 years you'd probably have equal numbers of terms won by each party.

Therefore, in my view gerrymandering doesn't really have a negative effect on democracy. Sure - one party might use it to win one election, but they can't get ahead in the long term using it.

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> Therefore, in my view gerrymandering doesn't really have a negative effect on democracy. Sure - one party might use it to win one election, but they can't get ahead in the long term using it.

Read up on “cracking and packing”, it’s pretty obvious that gerrymandering provides a distinct benefit to the party that controls the map.

Gerrymandering causes another major long-term problem that you’re overlooking: it creates mathematically safe seats that the opposition party can’t reasonably win, even when they gain support. This is a major reason we are seeing more extremists in office, because they no longer need to win by aiming for the center, they win by being as extreme as possible because the party already controls the seat. The election becomes a de facto purity test, and you see this play out over and over again.

That only matters to people who are alive today and for the next several hundred years. On a long enough time line, things will balance out, or humanity will go extinct. Either way, you’re dead way before it happens, so why care about silly things like gerrymandering?

Because democracies aren’t guaranteed to survive if they don’t remain democratic, and this has played out many times in history. E.g. Germany was a parliamentary democracy before it fell to the Third Reich.

There is zero guarantee that just because we have a democracy today means that it will be there forever.

Why care about anything if you're just going to die? Are you suggesting we should all go full on hedonism and give up civilization-building? What if people enjoy civilization-building and caring about things that "don't matter"?

I've never voted, never will (and before anyone starts, I'm very, very proud of that. One of the reasons I don't vote is because of gerrymandering. I don't see it as a 'silly thing' as it affects me, mine, and those around now, because of actions in the past. The dead people left a game for the living to live with.

Painfully bad take. Talking about how gerrymandering doesn’t matter because a millennium from now, it’ll balance out. It can lead to immense suffering in the short-to-reasonably-long-term.

Gerrymandering could lead to a bunch of complete lunatics taking office and doing things so detrimental to the environment that we could never recover, or they could enact policies that stand for several centuries and restrict intellectual and technological advancements (a new dark ages).

But why play with hypotheticals when we can instead talk about real life: recently in the US, gerrymandering led to enough representatives getting elected that they were able to overload the third branch of government with partisan hacks. The partisan hacks then overturned a very important court case, despite reportedly 70% of the country’s population supporting said court case.

I’m with you, though, fuck people who are living today. Stop being so selfish! It’ll balance out in a thousand years or so.

It really doesn't matter how many people support an issue. If that issue isn't in their purview, they can't push it through. From the get go it was on very shakey ground. If you want federal oversight of abortion then add an amendment to the constitution. I'm so tired of hearing "government should do x - it's for the people". The problem today is that the federal government powers, enumerated by the constitution, are continually expanding. If everything happened at a local level there would be an opportunity to correct it. It's much more difficult at the federal level. Comparatively, gerrymandering is minor.

Can you explain how gerrymandering got RvW overturned?

>equal numbers of terms won by each party. Therefore, in my view gerrymandering doesn't really have a negative effect on democracy

The point of democracy is not to deliver an equal number of victories to each of the parties. It is to reflect the will of the people. A 10 percent lean in one direction is a 10 percent negative effect on democracy.

Even if gerrymandering evens out over long times, on short terms it can let a party have control over an/a few elections and use that to enact changes that will affect the future.

Sometimes you don't need 15 years to get something done, just one term.

It’s not football. The parties will balance, sure, but the policy, uh, hyperplane will have shifted.

For this to work I think the assumption is that the benefit of gerrymandering is less than the "anyone who doesn't like the in power guys" effect. e.g. % of disgruntled swing voters.

You realise the boundaries are redrawn every few years? So a party that is in power can redraw them to stay in front of demographic change and rebalancing

But in reality there are tribes and there’s religion.

Also, a small minority that can rule a majority due to gerrymandering has no incentive to give up their power.

What if some of the premises of your thought experiment aren't true?

gerrymandering means that no matter how many people don't like those in power their votes will never matter anyway.

it also means that politicians get to pick their voters instead of the other way around

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