Supreme Court set to hear case that could end partisan gerrymandering

[turbinetree]

The last, best hope all comes down to crucial Justice Kennedy.
IAN MILLHISER
SEP 27, 2017, 8:00 AM

The United States of America is very bad at democracy.

We have a president who lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots, a malapportioned Senate where the majority party represents close to 35 million fewer people than the minority party, and a House of Representatives that — in no small part due to gerrymandering — is firmly in Republican hands.

In order to regain control of the House in 2018, Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by more than 7 points. That’s not impossible, but it’s hardly a free and fair election.

Next Tuesday, the Supreme Court will consider whether to solve at least part of this problem. Gill v. Whitford asks the justices to hold that partisan gerrymanders violate the Constitution — a conclusion the Supreme Court has never really doubted — and, more importantly, to hold that the judiciary should actually do something about them.

Rigged maps
Whitford involves one of the most aggressive gerrymanders in the country: the Wisconsin state assembly maps.

https://thinkprogress.org/partisan-gerrymandering-scotus-1555f0a5140a/

[a kennedy]

1. It's in the math baby........just saying this might be one of the first times gerrymandering can be

proven by math.


"One of the centerpieces of their argument is a mathematical formula they call the “efficiency gap,” which provides an objective measure courts can use to separate out maps that are likely to be partisan gerrymanders from those that aren’t.

The core insight behind this efficiency gap is that gerrymanders work by forcing one party to “waste” more votes than the other. In Wisconsin, thousands of Democratic voters packed into solid Democratic districts wind up wasting their vote on a candidate that is going to win anyway. Other voters, cracked off into solid Republican districts, waste their vote on a candidate who has little or no chance of prevailing."

......When a map allows the party that received less than 49 percent of the vote to win more than 60 percent of the seats, that’s a pretty clear sign that something has gone horribly wrong.

[turbinetree]

4. The book by David Daley, "RAT F*CKED" The True Story Behind The Secret Plan To

Steal America's Democracy, came to mind, when I read this article..........

[Orsino]

2. Another 5/4 failure incoming.

They didn't steal Obama's nomination to lose on this, the load-bearing beam of their platform.

[a kennedy]

3. I hope you're wrong.......this is a huge case.