The NY Times today had an article called “Don’t Blame the Maps” which discusses the fact that, even though the Democrats won the popular vote, the Republicans still won the majority of votes in the House of Representatives. For most Democrats, this majority is viewed as an artifact of Republican gerrymandering, and the article points out that this isn’t true. As someone who lives in Illinois, a state that works hard to saddle the Republicans with no voice in their one-party rule, it is nice to see that “ensuring my vote doesn’t count” is mentioned, even in passing.
But keep in mind that Democrats play this came as well. For example, by artfully dividing up Chicago into pie-sliced districts extending from Lake Michigan into the suburbs, the Illinois Democrats have done better for themselves than the outcome of our nonpartisan solutions.
Here is a post I wrote about the fifth district of Illinois, my district, and a contender for the most Gerrymandered district in the entire country. And our representative, a man so lax in his duties that he couldn’t even be bothered to vote to impeach Blagojevich.
Cross posted at LITGM
Illinois and Chicago politics were illustrated for me by the treatment of my mother at the 1996 election. I grew up in South Shore, once one of the nicest and most prosperous areas of the city. It is now noted chiefly for the murder rate. My mother, who died at the age of 103 in 2001, lived in a high rise building on Lake Shore Drive until 3 months before her 100th birthday, 7447 South Shore Drive. She was one of three elderly white women in the building the last year or so. She had many friends, including a number of black and Hispanic women who attended her 100th birthday party in Beverly after she had moved to live with my sister.
In 1996, she went to the lobby of the building in which she had lived for 30 years, to vote at the polling place. Her Congressman was Jesse Jackson Jr but she intended to vote anyway. She would probably have been the only Republican vote in that building but she was not allowed to vote. Her registration was challenged by a Democrat poll watcher and she was not offered a provisional ballot. She was 98 years old at the time she was denied the vote. She went right up to her apartment and called the Tribune. She told me that the paper reported her complaint although I have never been able to find the reference.
Chicago gets the government it deserves.
Yes that is shameful behavior by the elections official.
The redistricting wasn’t just a Chicago affair; it was done by the Illinois democrats in Springfield.
Step one – gerrymandering the district so that your vote doesn’t count (Springfield)
Step two – ensuring that even if you try to vote, it won’t count (Chicago)
This is our national politics now.
We have no representation.
The nice old lady mentioned above has no representation. Nor apparently even the right to vote.
Nor do we.
So therefore…?
The profs have just figured out what anyone who looked a Charlie Cook’s ratings of congressional districts after the 2010 elections could figure out fairly quickly. The Democrat party depends upon rotten borough full of blacks and mexicans who vote like mindless sheep for the Democrats, no matter how little the Democrats can or will do for them. They pile up enormous majorities in those places. In most of the rest of the country they carry about 40% of the vote.
If the Republicans had any huevos (spare me, I know they don’t) they would push for a modification to the electoral vote system where each presidential candidate would receive one electoral vote for each congressional district carried and 2 for each state. (This is what Maine and Nebraska do now)
Gerrymandering: only bad when republicans do it.
In CA and IL Republican complicity can’t be avoided.
From Zombie in Pajamas Media: The Top Ten Most Gerrymandered Congressional Districts in the United States [in 2010]. Most of these gerrymandered districts are Democrat voting.
In all fairness, the Pubs in Texas have also shown that they can also be virtuosi at Gerrymandering, as shown in Gerrymandering in 2013.
A lot of the current gerrymandering is done, as many have pointed out, to get districts which result in minority Congressmen. I believe that the Interstate 85 district in North Carolina is one example of this.