[blorsh]

The only real solution to gerrymandering is to use a minimally-complicated algorithm.

The algorithm need not actually determine the districts. It can instead simply rate proposals, allowing a contest to be held. The highest scoring proposal submitted at least 400 days prior to the election is the winner, with earlier submissions winning any ties.

Another improvement would be to let districts spill over state borders. One could exempt Alaska and Hawaii of course.

[Feniks]

Or you could just do away with it all and go for a one man one vote system. Why a vote in Kansas needs to be tallied differently from a vote in New York in the 2020 elections is beyond me.

[Anon1096]

Districts don't matter for the presidential election. They only affect apportionment in the House of Representatives, which is region based and is 1 man 1 vote (within state boundaries. Even across states the differences in voting power isn't as aggregious as the Senate or overall electoral college).

[dragonwriter]

> Districts don't matter for the presidential election.

Except in Maine and Nebraska (selection of Presidential electors is largely a matter of state law, and most but not all states are winner take all.)

[dragonwriter]

Like many features of the original constitution, protecting slavery (the slave states were modtly low population states, with even smaller voting populations, and were particularly concerned that equal representation would eventually turn against them—abolitionism was already a thing at the time of the Constitution, and they were very concerned about it taking hold) was a major concern. The representation structure (and it's special protection against revision by amendment) plus the 3/5 compromise plus the explicit, limit term, protection of the slave trade, among other provisions of the Constitution, were protection against that eventuality.

[rukittenme]

Because presidential elections are not popular elections. Kansas has proportional representation in the House but is absurdly over-represented in the Senate and slightly over-represented in the Presidency.

This is of course by design. The founder's obviously knew about proportional representation and they deliberately chose to disregard it. Shouldn't that give you pause to figure out why?

[philwelch]

> The founder's obviously knew about proportional representation and they deliberately chose to disregard it. Shouldn't that give you pause to figure out why?

Turns out the reason was slavery. A huge proportion of the Southern population was enslaved, and slaves didn't vote. The free staters didn't want slaves to even count toward state population for the purposes of congressional apportionment, while the slave staters did, so they compromised on counting the slave population at 3/5 of the free population. As a result, prior to the abolition of slavery, the votes of free men in slave states were always represented at a higher proportion than the votes of free men in free states.

Many of the founders were wise and educated men who thought carefully and critically about how to establish a sustainable republic. But to do so, they had to win the votes of a cross-section of the American establishment of the time, many of whom thought that owning human beings, using them as farm labor, and whipping them if they disobeyed were morally acceptable things to do. And upon making a series of political compromises with these people, they had to rationalize those compromises in such a way to make them palatable to the general public.

[s2g]

Most of them were perfectly fine with owning people.

[slededit]

A lot them even owned their own slaves.

[dbcurtis]

Indeed. With our current system, rural voices are at least marginally relevant. With a purely proportional system, rural voices would not even be heard.

[mikeash]

The major reason is that smaller states wouldn't have joined any proposed Union that made them irrelevant, so the founders had to have things like the Senate to get them to join at all.

This is, of course, no longer relevant.

[twoodfin]

If it’s no longer relevant, it should be possible to convince small states both red & blue to accept an obviously superior system.

But it is still relevant for just about all the reasons it was relevant then.

[philwelch]

I think if you had some way of forcing the issue, and telling states like Kansas and Mississippi that they didn't get to have disproportional control over the federal government anymore, and if they didn't like it, they could just stop being subsidized by California and New York, either they would go along with it, or they would secede from the union and deteriorate into third world countries.

[rukittenme]

Why would states persist in a union that made them irrelevant? The politics are still as relevant today as it was then.

[mikeash]

It’s way harder to leave than it was to refrain from joining.

Another major factor is that Americans mostly see themselves as citizens of the USA first, and citizens of their state a distant second.

[s2g]

Because the alternative is worse.

[s2g]

They also didn't choose to tie electors to the per state popular vote and chose the electoral college in part to prevent the election of terrible candidates.

[krapp]

>Why a vote in Kansas needs to be tallied differently from a vote in New York in the 2020 elections is beyond me.

    population of Kansas (state):  2.9 million
    population of New York (city): 8.5 million

Without some sort of balancing mechanism, you wind up with a single populous city's votes mattering more than the votes from every city in a less populous state.

[mikeash]

What is wrong with that, exactly? If the city is substantially larger than the state, it seems reasonable to me that its votes would matter more.

[barsonme]

This is something our founders debated. It's never good to let the whims of the majority trample on the minority. It's why we have both the house of representatives (based on population) and the senate (flat number per state).

If little states have no say in our government, what point is there for them to remain?

It's a pity some folks devalue others simply because they don't wish to live in NYC or LA.

[s2g]

> It's never good to let the whims of the majority trample on the minority

You are arguing for the minority to trample on the majority.

[barsonme]

That’s not what I’m arguing.

It needs to be competitive. The majority shouldn’t be able to have its way without the help of the minority.

[mikeash]

Why is the rural minority so special? We don’t give other minorities this sort of treatment.

For example, the percentage of rural Americans is similar to the percentage of black Americans. Yet somehow nobody ever argues that black Americans need power disproportionate to their numbers to avoid being trampled.

[bzbarsky]

> Why is the rural minority so special?

It's not about rural vs urban. It's about the assumption that the US is a union of separate _states_ with separate legal structures, cultures, etc, etc. So it's not the "rural minority" that's special; it's states that are special.

Now you may disagree with the premises there, of course. But if one accepts the premises, then one needs a way to prevent "big" states from just imposing their will on "small" ones.

(There are in fact people who argue that black Americans need disproportionate power, and some voting districts are set up to effectively produce that, but that has nothing to do with the setup of the US constitution per se.)

[krapp]

I can see an argument either way. More populated areas to legitimately represent commercial and cultural centers, but also, the needs of the entire system have to be considered.

[mikeash]

What is it about rural voters that make them more important to the entire system?

[rukittenme]

Resources.

[s2g]

Yes, which is how it should be.

States have senators to prevent tyranny of the majority. NYC should be worth more house seats than all of Kansas.

[shouldgowork]

Without some sort of rebalancing mechanism, you wind up with a singe empty state's votes mattering more than every voter in a city.

[rukittenme]

The mechanism you're talking about is the federal government.