Fairness

In three years there will be a census and the year after that the States will redraw their congressional districts.  Now, this last happened ten years ago when there was a reaction to the Affordable care act and many state governments became Republican controlled.

The districts they drew up, aided by computers pretty much led to a decade of Republican majorities in the House of Representatives as well as in many state legislatures.

This is called gerrymandering and it has been around since the early days of the Republic.

It use to be done fairly crudely, but with computers it can now be done precisely.

One technique is to pack districts.  Assume you have an equal number of Republican and Democratic voters.  You would assume they would be equally represented.  But if you pack Democratic districts you can easily manipulate the representation, or vice versa.

Assume you have ten district but you can draw them up so that 90% of the Democrats are packed into just three of them, leaving the other seven safely in Republican hands.  You see that the Democrats are guaranteed less than equal representation.

Some of this may seem like the results of geography, where say the cities are predominantly one party and have large concentrations of voters.  Of course in a fair system the number of representatives would still equate the number of voters.

There are other techniques used, such as dispersion, but it can get pretty complex and you can simply look at certain results to see the inequality.

In the link below they explore the issue and give examples of the 10 worst examples.

Gerrymandering examples

One solution would be to have an independent group draw up the districts but of course this would probably have its own issues.

If we believe in giving each person an equal vote we need to do something.

Its only fair.