Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Gerrymandering 2

The upcoming proposal to at least reduce the amount of gerrymandering done here is proceeding apace now with whines from the usual suspects, holders of racially gerrymandered districts who complain:
But black and Latino voters quickly raised concerns, pointing out that the language could limit minority voting blocs across the state by prohibiting drawing districts for the purpose of “augmenting ... the voting strength of a language or racial minority group.”
These are incumbents who complain that they effectively only hold their seats on account of their race and having to run in an honestly competitive district would cause them to lose their phony-baloney jobs.

Bummer, dudes.

Further detail emerges that the actual map boundaries would be drawn by the "unaffiliated" members of the redistricting committee and the 4 Republicans and 4 Dems would be there in an advisory capacity until it came time to vote on inflicting one of the maps on the citizenry.

No word yet as to where the unaffiliated people are coming from. Personally I'm favoring a system in which a cluster of computer geeks set up a program to generate maps and a super majority of 6 of the remaining 8 members on the committee must approve the map. This should be easy as this kind of map drawing programs are already available.

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