• dogerwaul@pawb.social
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    3 days ago

    Gerrymandering is a crime. We just don’t consider what’s going on to be legally gerrymandering for some bullshit fuck ass reason. There’s only been a few cases of gerrymandering being caught in a legal sense. It is largely ignored.

    edit: a bit wrong here but whaddya know it’s because our laws are not transparent

    • hypna@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      This issue is actually pretty weird. Racial gerrymandering is a violation of the voting rights act, hence illegal. Partisan gerrymandering is completely legal.

      In practice this seems to mean that it is harder to gerrymander in states where racial voting patterns align with party, e.g. whites vote Republican, blacks vote Democrat. In states where party lines do not predominantly fall on racial lines, you can hack up the districts to favor your party as much as you like.

      • dogerwaul@pawb.social
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        3 days ago

        wow, i did not know that. thank you for elaborating. i looked into it further and found SCOTUS asshole Roberts: "The Constitution supplies no objective measure for assessing whether a districting map treats a political party fairly.” lol cool, cool…

          • tomenzgg@midwest.social
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            2 days ago

            So much of their arguments rely on that; “clearly the Constitution says nothing explicitly on this issue (or alternatively, the constitution wasn’t microscopically specific this was a case it had in mind so, really, who are we to allow it to apply to this scenario?); as an originalist, I just presume that there was no intent rather than assuming anyone in the project of writing a founding document has any interest in it working fairly or well.”