2026 Mid-Term Elections

[Elixir]

What does “fair” exactly mean in this context?

It means a campaign’s success should depend on the product of
(messaging skills)x(money spent).

Any other way, could enable the rabble to threaten billionaires’ fiefdoms.

 

[Elixir]

Anti-woke Vivek Ramaswamy confronts racism in his run for Ohio governor

CINCINNATI — Vivek Ramaswamy didn’t mention the racist taunts that follow him online or the GOP primary opponent who said he’s not a real American. But the Ohio gubernatorial candidate who clinched his party’s nomination this week alluded to bigotry on the right in his opening message to a town hall full of young Republicans.

Ramaswamy, a Hindu son of Indian immigrants, warned the crowd against adopting the same “victim” mentality that he said had afflicted the left. “The number one factor that determines whether you achieve your goals in life … is actually you,” he said at the May 1 event.

“It’s not the Jews,” Ramaswamy added. “It’s not the White people. It’s not the patriarchy. It’s not the Black people. It’s not the foreigners.”
It was a striking message from a candidate who has long cast racism as an obsession of Democrats and has more recently confronted it on the right. After building his political career denouncing “wokeness” on the left, at one point dismissing “the myth of white supremacy” during his 2024 presidential campaign, he is trying to steer his party away from the extremist fringes that have flared up in his own race.

I smell political expedience.

 

[Bomb#20]

... It is the right ruling. ... And of course, the GOP have not a inkling of shame for trying to reverse the referendum.

Why on earth should anyone be ashamed of bringing about the right ruling? If the people were to vote yes on a referendum to pass a bill of attainder and convict you of some newly invented ex post facto crime you didn't even commit, would it be shameful for your lawyer to point out their new law is unconstitutional and try to reverse the referendum? What's the point of having a constitution if laws don't have to follow it, regardless of whether they were enacted by representatives or directly by the people?

 

[Bomb#20]

Virginia Supreme Court rules "Oh no you didn't!" and undoes the ugly partisan gerrymander. It is the right ruling. But now we appear to be stuck between lesser partisan blue state legal systems and partisanly corrupt red state legal systems. Our democracy is on the verge of flatlining by the court doing the right thing.

And of course, the GOP have not an inkling of shame for trying to reverse the referendum.

It seems to me that this whole district drawing thing is inherently flawed. Is there a better system that could be employed?

Yes. Abolish districts.

Sorry, I was interested in more specificity here. I will try to look into this myself. When any lines are drawn, there will be subjectivity involved and I am curious how that can be done “fairly”, whatever that means.

It can't be done fairly. As long as there are districts, the choice will always be between unfair and even more unfair. When my neighbor and I disagree about everything, any system that restricts us upfront to having the same so-called "representative" is a system that disenfranchises one or the other of us. Whoever wins will only be representing the views of one of us in legislative votes.

The fair way to implement representative democracy is to have at-large elections where each voter can vote for anyone he pleases, with the top N candidates seated, the votes for unseated candidates redistributed to winning representatives by some mechanism that reflects the preferences of those voters, and the legislators' votes on bills weighted in proportion to how many voters voted for them. STV and PR can be made to approximate this, but there's no good reason the real thing couldn't be enacted exactly.

At-large elections have largely been prohibited in the US by court rulings and/or legislation, on the theory that they're discriminatory, but it's one specific at-large voting rule that leads to this outcome, the "slate" system. Versions of at-large voting that don't have this problem have generally been prevented from being used by guilt-by-association with the slate system.

 

[Elixir]

some mechanism that reflects the preferences of those voters

Hoo boy. Let’s gloss over the hard part.
But no arguing with the fact that it would reflect the preferences of those voters.

I wonder what relics of unfairness would remain if districting was done by a computer programmed to minimize district boundary lengths.

 

[unapologetic]

I think that when you get to ten billion, you should forfeit all but ten million of it to the fed and have to start over.

Yeah but... How much of the 10B is liquid, and how much is tied-up in stuff like companys, factorys, land. Would you have them forfit companys to the gov. Could you see the gov. running Tesla? Merge Space-X with NASA?
Just raise their tax %.

Yes. Abolish districts.

Even worse. At-large would produce state reps of solid one party or the other.

The fair way to implement representative democracy is to have at-large elections where each voter can vote for anyone he pleases, with the top N candidates seated,

How much is N?
How about House: N = the % of voters registered for each party
Senate: N = One from each party.

The real solution would be to abolish partys.

 

[Derec]

Yeah but... How much of the 10B is liquid, and how much is tied-up in stuff like companys, factorys, land. Would you have them forfit companys to the gov. Could you see the gov. running Tesla? Merge Space-X with NASA?
Just raise their tax %.

Indeed. Add new capital gains and income brackets and close loopholes.
It would do a lot more than questionable wealth tax and similar schemes that would need a constitutional amendment anyway.

Yes. Abolish districts.

Even worse. At-large would produce state reps of solid one party or the other.

Only if it's implemented as N independent elections, which would be the stupidest way to do it.
Best approach would be proportional representation and party slates.
But if voting for an individual person is essential, the system used in German municipal elections would be good. There is one election for N seats, and everybody gets N votes. The votes can either be given at once to the party slate, or distributed across slates.
It looks like this:

In that system you can aslo, as the instructions say, give any single candidate up to three of your total N votes, but that's not necessary for the system to work.

How much is N?

N would be the number of seats in the state. As I said, the German municipal system would improve upon Bomb's by giving everyone N votes, not just one. Note also that very small states with N=1 there would be no change compared to what we have today. Unless, of course, House is expanded to make every state have more than one (or ideally, more than two) representatives. Initially, we had 33-34k people per congresscritter, and the House grew with population, but today it's more than 20x that because the size of the House became fixed. Now, a House of 10,000 would be highly impractical, but it definitely could be bigger than today.

How about House: N = the % of voters registered for each party
Senate: N = One from each party.

Wait, are you proposing that outcome of House races be fixed at registration, not election, and that Senate be in state of perpetual stalemate, with the Veep casting the deciding vote?

The real solution would be to abolish partys.

It's "-ies" as plural for "-y", and I do not think we can squeeze that particular toothpaste back into the tube. But maybe we can do more to acknowledge the reality of parties in our elections by allowing party slates.

Since district boundaries are completely arbitrary, why not do away with them? Could we, for representatives, do a statewide election and top N candidates win? Not really a good idea: let's say 1 person gets 99% of the vote, all the rest are statistically close and maybe some extremists. Maybe there is a better way to do it with instant run off voting that allows for diversity but also maximizes top choices.

Yes, there is. You get N votes for N seats, and you can give your N seats to N candidates as you see fit. German system also allows to "cumulate" votes by being able to give individual candidates up to three votes, but that may be too much complexity for voters who leave chads pregnant or hanging, and get easily confused by butterfly ballots.

 

[Derec]

It’s usually geographical proximity, and an attempt to include approximately the same number of people in each district.

The approximately equal populations and being geographically contiguous are among the very few hard legal requirements for districts.
That's why salamander-shaped districts still have disparate parts connected to each other by isthmi. For example Louisiana's infamous 6th district that gets very narrow around Boyce.

 

[Toni]

It’s usually geographical proximity, and an attempt to include approximately the same number of people in each district.

The approximately equal populations and being geographically contiguous are among the very few hard legal requirements for districts.
That's why salamander-shaped districts still have disparate parts connected to each other by isthmi. For example Louisiana's infamous 6th district that gets very narrow around Boyce.

For many reasons ranging from preferring to stay near family for support/to provide support to preferring familiarity to laws and custom and mortgage officers and realtors, some places are more likely to have distinctly black or distinctly Hispanic or distinctly Jewish or distinctly Muslim or Chinese or Italian or whatever neighborhoods. Although it is no longer legal it is a fact and my personal experience that realtors do steer families into neighborhoods that they think are most likely to reflect the demographic preferences of their clients. I've had it happen to me actually and only ended up in a relatively diverse neighborhood because I found a listing that seemed interesting and that my realtor had not wanted to show me--but ended up helping me buy, probably against her better judgement. I only realized afterwards what she meant by some of the word choices she used.

So that indeed is something that has driven gerrymandering since its inception: the desire to skew the electorate to favor one party over another--more recently along racial/ethnic lines.

It makes the consideration of where to draw lines when redistricting is being considered. Some places deliberately try to break up certain groups in order to favor the outcome they support.

Not for racial/ethnic reasons, but for political reasons, something like that happened in my current community. There's a main town and then a couple of smaller towns which no one outside of this area would ever notice were separate municipalities: they share streets, fire department, school system, most law enforcement but have their own separate town councils, etc. Several years back, the GOP gained a majority in our state and when it was time to examine districts, they carved mine into pieces such that our more centrist/slightly left leaning district is now divided into two and each half is now part of a geographically larger, more rural and more conservative districts that...are suddenly represented by the GOP where previously they had been mostly centrist Dem. but often GOP, with -liberal candidates not generally doing so well. So I am currently 'represented' by an idiot who cannot even be assed to write his own 'newsletters' which mostly consist of GOP/MAGA talking points that seem to be cut/pasted from a MAGA playbook, they are so devoid of any actual pertinence to the area he supposedly represents. But we are in the middle of nowhere and so no one outside of the area knows or cares. We're still planning to work like hell to vote the idiot out.

 

[Derec]

if I end up dead it will be at the tender hands of all them wimmens!

Elixir, artistic impression.

 

[Bomb#20]

some mechanism that reflects the preferences of those voters

Hoo boy. Let’s gloss over the hard part.
But no arguing with the fact that it would reflect the preferences of those voters.

It's not a hard part -- I glossed over it because there are several mechanisms that would do the job adequately and it doesn't matter a lot which is adopted. The simplest and most obvious is two-round elections. The top N vote-getters in the first round are elected to the legislature. In the second round each voter gets to pick one of those N legislators to represent her, and each representative's vote on legislation is weighted in proportion to the number of voters she represents. There are endless variations that could be designed to do it all in one election by some instant-runoff technique. It gets a lot more complicated if the system insists on legislators having equal-weighted votes, but that requirement is a pre-computer-age anachronism.

I wonder what relics of unfairness would remain if districting was done by a computer programmed to minimize district boundary lengths.

A computer programmed to minimize some objective function while districting doesn't actually address unfairness; it only addresses gaming the system. (Not knocking it -- gaming the system is a really good thing to prevent!) But all even the best-drawn districts can accomplish is ensure that geographically concentrated minorities get representation. A geographically dispersed minority gets screwed over by district-based representation no matter where the district boundaries are. Integrated minorities are no less deserving of representation than segregated minorities.

 

[Bomb#20]

Several years back, the GOP gained a majority in our state and when it was time to examine districts, they carved mine into pieces such that our more centrist/slightly left leaning district is now divided into two and each half is now part of a geographically larger, more rural and more conservative districts that...are suddenly represented by the GOP where previously they had been mostly centrist Dem. but often GOP, with -liberal candidates not generally doing so well.

Ah, the infamous "pack and crack".

 

[ZiprHead]

Yeah but... How much of the 10B is liquid, and how much is tied-up in stuff like companys, factorys, land. Would you have them forfit companys to the gov. Could you see the gov. running Tesla? Merge Space-X with NASA?
Just raise their tax %.

Indeed. Add new capital gains and income brackets and close loopholes.

I'd like to see the math on that.

It would do a lot more than questionable wealth tax and similar schemes that would need a constitutional amendment anyway.

Why would a wealth tax be unconstitutional?

 

[Bomb#20]

Yes. Abolish districts.

Even worse. At-large would produce state reps of solid one party or the other.

That's a consequence of the "slate" system I mentioned, not a problem with at-large per se. The slate system is very common in US local elections -- city councils, county supervisors, school boards and so forth. If there are five seats on the council they give you a list of candidates and the instruction "Vote for no more than five". The "solid one party" outcome results from giving voters five votes but prohibiting them from voting multiple times for the same candidate. If you tell the voter either "Vote for one", as I proposed, or "You can vote for the same candidate three times", as in the German elections Derec described, then the one-party-state problem goes away.

The fair way to implement representative democracy is to have at-large elections where each voter can vote for anyone he pleases, with the top N candidates seated,

How much is N?

Arbitrary. Conventionally, it's the smaller of the number of seats in the meeting room and the number of salaries the people are willing to pay. Canada has a hybrid system where N = 3 voting members plus 340 trained seals who get paid to bark on command and pretend their weighted-vote system is an equal-weight system. Their last back-bench rebellion was 90 years ago; they might as well just set N = 3.

How about House: N = the % of voters registered for each party

You mean if 60% are registered D and 40% are registered R then N = 60 + 40?

Senate: N = One from each party.

Awesome. I'm forming my own party.

The real solution would be to abolish partys.

Madison tried, got to give him that. It's harder than it looks, because organizing themselves into parties is in the interest of the legislators, intentions of the framers be damned. So how do you disincentivize it?

 

[lpetrich]

Virginia Supreme Court rules "Oh no you didn't!" and undoes the ugly partisan gerrymander. It is the right ruling. But now we appear to be stuck between lesser partisan blue state legal systems and partisanly corrupt red state legal systems. Our democracy is on the verge of flatlining by the court doing the right thing.

And of course, the GOP have not an inkling of shame for trying to reverse the referendum.

It seems to me that this whole district drawing thing is inherently flawed. Is there a better system that could be employed?

Yes there is.

Proportional representation.

I suggest doing a serious evaluation of PR before dismissing it outright.

 

[Bomb#20]

It would do a lot more than questionable wealth tax and similar schemes that would need a constitutional amendment anyway.

Why would a wealth tax be unconstitutional?

It's unconstitutional for the feds to impose a nation-wide wealth tax because it's an "unapportioned direct tax", which Article 1 Section 9 prohibits. This is why the federal income tax required a constitutional amendment. As far as I can see there's nothing in the federal constitution barring states from imposing their own wealth taxes; you'd have to check each state's own constitution to see if they prohibit them.

 

[unapologetic]

electing a “businessman”, even a competent one, is a bad idea.

Government is a not-for-profet service industry, not a business. Rump is a high rent slumloaed, not a businessman.

are you proposing that outcome of House races be fixed at registration, not election

Somewhat. Fixed at primary.
I'm suggesting, for example:
If you have 11 canidates from party A, and 12 canidates from party B.
But only 10 open seats. And party registrations are 60/40%.
So you seat the top 6 from party A, and the top 4 from party B.
I actualy prefer that Reps represent their distrect, not their party.

Senate be in state of perpetual stalemate,

That would happen if senators were assholes voting strict party lines... like now.
Senators are suposed to represent the states, not parties.
I would think the threat of stalemate would force some to abandom party loialty, and vote their conviction. But that doesn't seem to be the case at present.

I am strongly opposed to 'slates'.
I haven't heard the term 'slates' since I was a kid.
My memory is weak. But I think we had slates when I was a kid. 60-70 years ago.

 

[unapologetic]

The slate system is very common in US local elections

OK, that's what I remember from my youth. (before I was voting)

 

[Bomb#20]

are you proposing that outcome of House races be fixed at registration, not election

Somewhat. Fixed at primary.
I'm suggesting, for example:
If you have 11 canidates from party A, and 12 canidates from party B.
But only 10 open seats. And party registrations are 60/40%.
So you seat the top 6 from party A, and the top 4 from party B.

Is there any way to do that without effectively gutting the secret ballot? Which party a person is registered with is public information.

 

[unapologetic]

Is there any way to do that without effectively gutting the secret ballot? Which party a person is registered with is public information.

How would that violate secret ballot? As you said, registration is public info. You don't need to vote the way you registered. I don't.