IP: How to rig an election

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Title: approve:ggfarber How to rig an election

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli" <mo@idiopathic.com>

Dear Dave,
I wondered if fellow IP's would be interested in this article from the economist about redistricting in the USA:
 
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1099030
 
Here's the first part:
How to rig an election
Apr 25th 2002 | WASHINGTON, DC 
>From The Economist print edition
In a normal democracy, voters choose their representatives. In America, it is rapidly becoming the other way around

IMAGINE a state with five congressional seats and only 25 voters in each. That makes 125 voters. Sixty-five are Republicans, 60 are Democrats. You might think a fair election in such a state would produce, say, three Republican representatives and two Democrats.
 
Now imagine you can draw the district boundaries any way you like. The only condition is that you must keep 25 voters in each one. If you were a Republican, you could carve up the state so there were 13 Republicans and 12 Democrats per district. Your party would win every seat narrowly. Republicans, five-nil.
 
Now imagine you were a Democrat. If you put 15 Republicans in one district, you could then divide the rest of the state so that each district had 13 Democrats and 12 Republicans. Democrats, four-one. Same state, same number of districts, same party affiliation: completely different results. All you need is the power to draw district lines. And that is what America provides: a process, called redistricting, which, through back-room negotiations too boring for most voters to think about, can distort the democratic system itself.
<snip>
 
mo
Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
e mo@idiopathic.com
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