We should make it proportionate to economic output. Not number of people. Seems like the capitalist way.

But it creates others. In the US we vote for people, in proportional representing, you vote for parties.

You can argue that's better, but it's very different from what we have now.

If we do that, they will be all Republicans

It’s only a small portion of Austin. If you take a sliver of a city where 20k people live and add it to a large rural district with 30k people across thousands of square miles you then spread the population of the dense city across the rural districts without overwhelming the ratio.

For about 200 years, a candidates morality was an important factor, now we apparently don't care, especially the MAGAs.

worked for about 250 years for a select group of people only

didn't work for the native americans, slaves, poor people, etcetera

Apologies if I misunderstood the american election system, but the fact that for the past 100+ years you've had a bipartisan system in which both parties pander to the wealthy tell me it hasn't really worked. Or rather only worked for the ruling elite.

Even strong checks can't hold back bad faith actors indefinitely

We've lived in a fascist country for a long time.

The pretense is gone now though, which is fascinating. And scary.

It’s literally just partisan warfare with legal exploitation, and voter bases apparently think it’s justified. I mean, what are they gonna do, side with the other party over it?

Money. Every American politician is corrupt as fuck.

when lawmakers break the law and nobody enforces the law, it stops being the law.

Federal government won't do anything about it. States control their own elections and therein lies the conundrum. Texas is proving very willingly that it doesn't care about the rules as long as they win.

Because they think they have the vast majority of those institutions with the ability to inflict violence on their side.

And from where I'm sitting, it looks like they're right

If democrats had an ounce of intelligence, they would be fighting for standard algorithms to manage redistricting.

The problem with that is they would need to regain power to be able to fix anything. But that would also assume they did, in fact, have the intelligence to fix problems while in power. Unfortunately, the reason the fascists are fighting so hard to dismantle democracy is to ensure that they can never lose power again despite their growing unpopularity.

It’s a bit more complex than that—if you create districts on a purely geographic basis (like minimizing district perimeters), you usually amplify slight majorities into disproportionately large ones (e.g., a 55% demographic majority translating to a 90% legislative majority). An algorithm that tries to create districts that proportionally translate demographics to representation usually ends up with district boundaries that superficially resemble gerrymandered ones.