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Comment by fsck--off | Hacker News Reader

Lobbyists aren't the only problem.

The House majority has 33 more seats than the minority, despite losing the popular vote by over a million votes. To me, this is the epitome of how broken Washington is. Pennsylvania has 13 Republican representatives and 5 Democrat reps, even though Democrats won the popular vote, 50.28% to 48.77%.

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I don't know the details but its not necessarily gerrymandering. if urban areas are 100% democrat while rural areas are 60% republican, you'd see this sort of elections naturally, without any foul play. that's just a natural outcomes of having districts.

So who decides the mix of urban-to-rural in each district?

What "popular vote" are you talking about. It's meaningless in this context given every congressional district is a separate race.

Congressional districts are supposed to allow equitable representation. The total popular vote is useful for determining whether the representation is fair. If districts are drawn correctly then the percentage of popular vote a political party wins should be should be close to percentage of representatives elected for that party. The closer the difference between the popular vote split and the representative split, the fairer the election.

If the difference between the two tallies is off by more than 33%, then there is something fundamentally broken. It allows candidates to spew extremist views, because they won't be challenged in their home district.

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