Fifty States, Equal Populations?
- Thread starter Auster
- Start date
FUCK THE POLICE
911 EVERY DAY
This is a really ass-backwards way to one person one vote. Pretty dumb to tear up historic communities and change the laws a person is governed when all you want to accomplish is equal representation. That presents an uncertain business environment, for one thing, if you set up shop in one state with one set of laws and suddenly have to deal with an entirely new and different set of laws due to some redistricting scheme. And each state has different laws concerning localities, in some counties have no power and only really still exist for historical regions, in others there are unitary municipal governments, what if a local government finds itself in a new state with no provision for its existence? And what if, for instance, a local government has a council-manager form of government and finds itself in a state that only allows mayoral forms of government? Do they have to rewrite all of their local bylaws every ten years? I honestly can't think of a single example of a country "redistricting" its sub-federal administrative units to have equal populations. It's just not very federal to allow the top level government to change around lower level governments borders willy nilly. And what about the non-contiguous states? Surely it doesn't make any sense to have them governed from a city thousands of miles away, by a community they have little in common with, just to comply with this equal population scheme. Hawaii and Oregon + North California? Also, I'm sure that Alaska would just love to become an extra-large, particularly insignificant district of Seattle. It must get lonely, having no one to share that massive oil rebate with. While we're at it, we might as well conquer Japan and join it with Alabama. (Japabama! Where most like their Sushi in the traditional fashion of their ancestors, but a significant minority prefer it FRIED, HAR HAR HAR!)
It doesn't solve the distortionary effects of a winner-take-all system, either. It will be less extreme with equal districts, of course, because you won't have the problem that everyone gets ignored besides large swing states (larger states have a signifigant advantage in being able to swing huge numbers of electoral votes one way or the other, as long as they can remain divided; smaller states are largely ignorable either way, it's generally not worth the effort, regardless of those two measly extra votes, unless they can effectively align in some bloc, which they've pretty much never done before). But it will still be open to gerrymandering, and even the best drawn borders can just randomly diverge from the will of the people based on how they were arbitrarily drawn. It doesn't make sense to have an electoral college if you're just going to divide things up by population. An electoral college necessarily reduces the amount of resolution with which the people can express their will; what you get in return is the ability to disproportionally allocate votes to some interests you consider important for some reason. If you allocate the electoral votes proportional, then what the hell are you accomplishing? You're just rounding the popular vote in every district to a single answer and summing the results in all the districts. So, you've basically invented the popular vote with rounding errors. Why not just use the damn popular vote? I mean, usually, when you round some number, it's because it's not important and you want to save time. We're jumping through hoops to introduce rounding errors to the most important number in our nations system of government. The guys at NASA don't calculate the approximate course of their rockets by assigning their measurements to electoral districts and sending the majority winners to a measurement electoral college. No, they take all the measurements into account and get the actual damn course. But surely it'd make more sense and be less damaging to have a few rockets blow up than to have the will of the people ignored because of the way some district was arbitrarily drawn.
As for the senate, I don't think it would be possible to signifigantly reform it at this time. People find the notion of failing to compensate people for having the bad luck of being born in a state who's arbitrarily drawn borders happen to encompass fewer people than someone else's offensive. I'd suggest trying to reduce it's power somewhat, to take away it's power over money bills. As for redrawing the borders of the damn states so that the senate happens to equally represent people, that is, again, just retarded.
It doesn't solve the distortionary effects of a winner-take-all system, either. It will be less extreme with equal districts, of course, because you won't have the problem that everyone gets ignored besides large swing states (larger states have a signifigant advantage in being able to swing huge numbers of electoral votes one way or the other, as long as they can remain divided; smaller states are largely ignorable either way, it's generally not worth the effort, regardless of those two measly extra votes, unless they can effectively align in some bloc, which they've pretty much never done before). But it will still be open to gerrymandering, and even the best drawn borders can just randomly diverge from the will of the people based on how they were arbitrarily drawn. It doesn't make sense to have an electoral college if you're just going to divide things up by population. An electoral college necessarily reduces the amount of resolution with which the people can express their will; what you get in return is the ability to disproportionally allocate votes to some interests you consider important for some reason. If you allocate the electoral votes proportional, then what the hell are you accomplishing? You're just rounding the popular vote in every district to a single answer and summing the results in all the districts. So, you've basically invented the popular vote with rounding errors. Why not just use the damn popular vote? I mean, usually, when you round some number, it's because it's not important and you want to save time. We're jumping through hoops to introduce rounding errors to the most important number in our nations system of government. The guys at NASA don't calculate the approximate course of their rockets by assigning their measurements to electoral districts and sending the majority winners to a measurement electoral college. No, they take all the measurements into account and get the actual damn course. But surely it'd make more sense and be less damaging to have a few rockets blow up than to have the will of the people ignored because of the way some district was arbitrarily drawn.
As for the senate, I don't think it would be possible to signifigantly reform it at this time. People find the notion of failing to compensate people for having the bad luck of being born in a state who's arbitrarily drawn borders happen to encompass fewer people than someone else's offensive. I'd suggest trying to reduce it's power somewhat, to take away it's power over money bills. As for redrawing the borders of the damn states so that the senate happens to equally represent people, that is, again, just retarded.
Liberty
Libertarian Minded
Not my cup of tea.
Although it would be nice if Texas could just leave the union, and become a nation again.