| the-pi-guy said: Take Wisconsin 2018: - Democrats got 9% more votes for their House Representatives, and yet 5/8ths of the Representatives went to the Republican party. - Democrats got 8% more votes for their state legislature, and yet 2/3rds of the assembly went to Republicans. Democrats would have needed to win by 20% in order to get control of Assembly. |
I agree that gerrymandering is a problem, but it is important to also note that it is possible for there to be discrepancies between the popular vote and seat apportionment like this without too much gerrymandering and therefore a better measurement would be to compare the gerrymandered map to the average map produced in n number of random simulations when determining whether or not there is a political gerrymander.
As an example of a sort of "natural gerrymander", the general court of Massachusetts had a state senate of 37 Democrats : 3 Republicans (7.5% GOP representation), and a HoR of 129 Democrats : 29 Republicans : 1 Independent (20% GOP representation) before this election. This is despite the fact that about a third of the state votes Republican on a consistent basis.
Unlike most states, in Massachusetts, Republicans and Democrats are pretty evenly distributed. This means that Democrats are the majority throughout most of the state so they win pretty much every seat more or less. They'd win like this even if they didn't gerrymander, which they don't seem to need to do anyway.
With something like Mixed-Member-Proportional-representation, Republicans would probably go from having no national HoR seats from Massachusetts (and much of New England) to having something like 15%-20% of them (assuming there is no other conservative opposition pulling votes from them.)
At this point, given that the Supreme Court has upheld political gerrymandering, moving away from single-member districts to multi-member districts is the best option to resolve that and other problems.
