Thoughts on Political Redistricting

On the advice of a frequent commenter, Bob, I've added Kevin Drum's blog to my RSS reader. I asked Bob to suggest to me a liberal blog; it's only fair to look at both sides of the political issues. I haven't really been reading it in depth yet, but, on the other hand, I haven't really been reading anybody in depth lately. (I'm still trying to find my pace with my schoolwork and my other priorities.) There's been stuff I disagree with, as I expected, and some stuff I do agree with. For example, he, as well as conservative Stephen Bainbridge, think that our current system of setting up political districts is broken, because gerrymandering is far too tempting for politicans on both sides of the aisle.

Naturally, of course, Drum and I disagree with how to deal with the situation. He suggests dividing the states up into congressional districts by straight geographical lines rather than by counties. I like several of his commenter's ideas. One of my favorites: let a computer randomly assign everybody in a state a "virtual district." So, in my state, I could be assigned any one of the eight districts; my dad and my mom might be assigned another district. So long as it's done on a completely random basis, it should make the districts each be representative samples of the state.

Other ideas: setting up a non-partisan committee for each state to determine the districts (to keep the politicans hands off) and/or adding more house representatives. The disadvantage to the computer solution above is that you lose whatever small measure of local voice in national politics you had. To quote a commenter:

No one person can accurately represent the local concerns of 600,000 people, and the constitution doesn't limit us to only 435 house members. In the words of another commenter:

If I did my arithmetic correctly, that would mean each representative would represent 27,000 people, which is a lot easier to do than representing 600,000. If the districts are divided up on a local basis and not a random basis, it would also make it easier to campaign. And, of course, since there's more competition between candidates, it's harder to gerrymander your way into getting more votes.

And, of course, with nearly 10,000 house politicans, the political process should slow way down, which can only be good for our wallets.

Posted by Blog Jones at September 20, 2004 10:23 PM | Category: Politics