by Feeling better about my living situation, because I know it won’t last for ever, has enabled me to think of other things, such as…
Gerrymandering. A lot of people know this word without knowing what it means. It’s a political term for the process of dividing an area (in the US, a state) into districts so as to give one party disproportionate power. Each state in the US is divided into a number of congressional districts, each of which elects one member to the House of Representatives. In the case of North Carolina, which was mentioned on Al Jazeera tonight, prompting me to write this post, there are 13 districts. By law, each district has roughly the same population. In the state of North Carolina as a whole, support is just about evenly split between the Republicans and Democrats. But the Republicans control 10 of the 13 districts! How? Well, because they have control of the state, they get to draw the boundaries between the districts. And that’s how you end up with maps like this. The “before” map is absolutely batshit crazy, right? The aim of the Republicans is to pack lots of Democrat-voting people (in this instance African-American people) into as few districts as possible, conceding those districts by massive margins, while hoovering up all the remaining districts by far smaller margins. So what starts out as 50:50 becomes anything but. The same thing goes on in (most?) other states, such as Illinois, where districts have shapes that are just as absurd. And the Democrats engage in this process too. It’s totally undemocratic, just like so much of America’s “democracy”; power is taken out of the hands of the people and placed in the hands of the few who draw those goddamn maps. It also leads to massive inefficiencies and in some cases (like in North Carolina) expensive lawsuits.
Unlike so much of American politics, where I wouldn’t know where to start trying to sort out, gerrymandering is a problem that I could solve myself. Give me a week and a decent GIS program, and from almost the other side of the world, I could make the US significantly more democratic than it is now. I’d respect geographical features and centres of population, but pay no attention whatsoever to racial or other demographic data: drawing boundaries along racial lines is part of the problem. Of course it would be better if the US could abandon the district system altogether and bring in something like STV (which could even help end the horrible two-party system) but you have to start somewhere.
North Carolina and four other states vote in the presidential primaries in a few hours’ time. Donald Trump might have one hand on the Republican nomination this time tomorrow. Although I think he’s odious, he’s giving the biggest middle finger to the system (even if he has the smallest hands) and when people are so desperate and fed up, that has a definite appeal.
