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Comment by jaredklewis | Hacker News Reader

> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.

No? I wasn't upset about it for the past decade, not only because I didn't know about it, but because I wasn't even concerned about it. Ten years ago US democratic institutions and norms were not being challenged and neither party seemed particularly intent on transitioning the country to one-man rule. During the second term of Obama, Biden, and even the first term of Trump (until he lost) democracy was not under attack.

Well those things that were true 10 years ago are no longer true now, so I can change what I get upset about. Jan 6 changed this country, unfortunately.

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I hate to be the one to point this out, but Republicans have been aggressively gerrymandering districts for multiple decades. While the goal of doing so may have not been to have a dictator, as it appears to be now, I can assure you that their intent in doing so was not to promote representative democracy.

I’m already aware of that. I don’t love gerrymandering, but it’s categorically different IMHO. Gerrymandering is an abuse of the system, but it is still working within the system.

That’s in stark contrast to the current, mainstream Republican ideology which dictates that if Republicans lose, then the election must have been “rigged,” which is more like burning the whole system to the ground.

Once you’re comfortable openly and actively disenfranchising voters, and you get away with it, it is a small step to start whining all the time about how the system is rigged against you to try to ramp up your efforts to further disenfranchise voters. Burning the system down doesn’t just happen overnight. It happens slowly and starts with ‘working within the system.’

I disagree with your analysis for a variety of conceptual reasons, but the proof is in the pudding: we’ve been gerrymandering districts for a couple hundred years and I don’t think it ever threatened a peaceful transition of power. So what, it’s like a hundred years per “small step?”

The fact that gerrymandering isn't prohibited by law is just astonishing.

It's not at all astonishing, since those who write the laws benefit from the gerrymandering. Even if a legislature passed a law forbidding gerrymandering, future legislatures could reverse it. If the party in control of the legislature is corrupt, then that is exactly what we should expect.

Gerrymandering should be prohibited by the courts, but the current SCOTUS in its great wisdom ruled that courts must remain silent on the subject.

Well it’s easy to understand why legislatures elected by a Gerrymandered map are not motivated to fix it.

Also not trivial to design a law against it. Most common solution seems to be use of independent commissions, but commissions can also be “independent” in name only.

Are State elections also badly affected by gerrymandering?

I have only ever seen examples of it at the Federal Election level, so wondering if your first point is actually completely accurate. (I believe the States themselves control the "maps" but forgive my ignorance if not)

The states control both maps, the district map which determines the population eligible to elect the US Rep for a given district, and a separate district map (with more and smaller districts) that determines the population eligible to elect the State Rep for a given district.

Both are a problem. The latter just means that the State Congress can be artificially heavily tilted vs one party or the other.

an independent and officially non-partisan commission is imperfect, but will at least have constraints on it in that it needs to appear independent, unlike the brazenly partisan way things work now.

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