edit: seems like some people interpret “full of” as a mathematical majority which, while it may or might not be true instance to instance, isn’t my intent in posting

feel free to swap in “has a lot of” if that’s more familiar language to you :)

  • teslasaur@lemmy.world
    1410·
    23 hours ago

    Do explain how gerrymandering affects the presidential election. All votes are counted for the entire state.

    I get that it affects local elections. That is obvious.

    • *dust.sys@lemmy.worldEnglish
      192·
      23 hours ago

      That’s actually easy.

      The shape of the district gets decided based on the concentration of votes for one party. The goal is to make enough districts with enough concentration of your voters that you always win those districts, and make the rest of the state have few enough districts with enough of a mix of of voters for both parties that A) the for-sure districts can’t be lost and B) the not-for-sure districts can never oppose the for-sure districts as long as they remain under your party’s control.

      So all the rigging party needs to do is campaign enough in the for-sure districts that they can’t lose, and campaign enough in the not-for-sure districts that their opponent can’t win. And then because of the Electoral College, all of the states votes go to the rigged party.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
      141·
      23 hours ago

      I feel less sympathetic for many conservative states than this image would encourage, but even though gerrymandering doesn’t impact presidential elections directly it does impact state legislatures who then control the rules around presidential elections.
      Every vote is counted, which is why there’s focus on voter suppression. If your legislature decides to make it harder to vote in liberal or more densely populated areas, voter turnout will naturally skew conservative. Same for shifting requirements to focus on criteria less often met by demographics that don’t support you, or changing the criteria for purging the voter registry and making it harder to register.

      • teslasaur@lemmy.world
        2·
        20 hours ago

        Read a bit of the Kemp wiki and found this unrelated gem:

        “Georgia was one of 14 states that used electronic voting machines that produced no paper record, which election integrity experts say left elections vulnerable to tampering and technical problems”

        Well. I see no problems that could arise from that 😑

        I mean, technically still not any gerrymandering in the presidential elections. Just making sure we understand what the word means. Otherwise we can extend the meaning to say something like: poverty leads to zoning of the empoverished which leads to gerrymandering. That doesn’t mean that poverty = gerrymandering

    • cAUzapNEAGLb@lemmy.world
      7·
      22 hours ago

      Reminder that most states, while the majority may have gone for one candidate or the other, were still mostly under a 60/40 split

      The States with the most landslide victory for trump where all northern states, Wyoming, West Virginia, and North Dakota, and even those were just 70/30 splits.

      Thats many people who did not want this president. The South is not some unanimous bloc

      • spujb@lemmy.cafeOPEnglish
        1·
        8 hours ago

        Sometimes seeing the numbers is the most meaningful! Even in a 70/30 state that’s still 3 in 10 people who didn’t ask for this—maybe more if, as is sometimes found, Democrats gain more votes when polls become more accessible.

        Thanks for sharing!

    • Frog@lemmy.ca
      5·
      23 hours ago

      The fact that Hillary Clinton can get nearly 3 million more votes and lose in 2016, and how Al Gore won the popular vote against George W. Bush in 2000 and somehow Florida, where the governor at the time was Jeb Bush, held significant power in deciding who the next president was going to be, is kinda fucked.

      • spujb@lemmy.cafeOPEnglish
        3·
        22 hours ago

        technically the electoral college and gerrymandering are not the same thing, but yeah i would honestly totally agree that the EC belongs in the list of oppressive forces in the meme (i stole the post otherwise i would edit it lol)

    • spujb@lemmy.cafeOPEnglish
      4·
      23 hours ago

      no one claimed gerrymandering affects presidential elections, not directly certainly. but local regressive policies and disenfranchisement also hurt oppressed people daily; that’s why all three are up there.

      (one could make some pretty valid connections between local elections and lobbying money going towards national campaigns, so we can discuss that if you want but just to keep it accessible and evidence based for now)