21h ago

GOP's Texas map has Austin residents sharing district with rural Texans 300 miles away

abcnews.go.com

As Texas Republicans try to muscle a rare mid-decade redistricting bill through the Legislature to help Republicans gain seats in Congress -- at President Donald Trump's request -- residents in Austin, the state capital, could find themselves sharing a district with rural Texans more than 300 miles away.

The proposed map chops up Central Texas' 37th Congressional District, which is currently represented by Democrat Rep. Lloyd Doggett, will be consumed by four neighboring districts, three of which Republicans now hold.

One of those portions of the Austin-area district was drawn to be part of the 11th District that Republican Rep. August Pfluger represents, which stretches into rural Ector County, about 20 miles away from the New Mexico border.

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17h ago

GOP's Texas map has Austin residents sharing district with rural Texans 300 miles away

abcnews.go.com /Politics/gops-texas-map-austin-residents-sharing-district-rural/story

74 comments

I will never understand how this obvious manipulation has been legal for decades.
- Money. Every American politician is corrupt as fuck.
- The pretense is gone now though, which is fascinating. And scary.
  It’s literally just partisan warfare with legal exploitation, and voter bases apparently think it’s justified. I mean, what are they gonna do, side with the other party over it?
- when lawmakers break the law and nobody enforces the law, it stops being the law.
  
  And so many things were just 'common sense,' and not enshrined in laws because the thought was that anyone breaking them would be held accountable by the populace. We now have a critical mass of stupid, self absorbed, or malicious people that laws don't matter, much less norms.
- Federal government won't do anything about it. States control their own elections and therein lies the conundrum. Texas is proving very willingly that it doesn't care about the rules as long as they win.
  
  GOP, not all of Texas.
Reminds me of Kansas..
This repub regime is really showing us how much our system of government depends on having good-faith actors in (elected) positions of power. There truly are not sufficient checks in place to protect against one election's worth of bad actors.
Kind of amazing that this all worked for about 250 years, and heartbreaking that it could crumble in the next 2.5.
- worked for about 250 years for a select group of people only
  didn't work for the native americans, slaves, poor people, etcetera
- Apologies if I misunderstood the american election system, but the fact that for the past 100+ years you've had a bipartisan system in which both parties pander to the wealthy tell me it hasn't really worked. Or rather only worked for the ruling elite.
  
  The system has basically always been two-party. It's the only stable arrangement for FPtP voting anyway. So, yes, it has been status quo for 250 years.
- Even strong checks can't hold back bad faith actors indefinitely
- No, it depends on a population that actually cares about democracy and will punish those "bad faith actors" at the polls. Unfortunately, we're dealing with Americans here.
- Yes if you elect people that agree to the majority of the house, senate, president, state houses, and governors, they tend to get their way.
The worst part is that democrats will fight back by gerrymandering harder, and it just won't be as effective because gerrymandering always benefits the person behind. If democrats had an ounce of intelligence, they would be fighting for standard algorithms to manage redistricting. If it was federal law to minimize district perimeters, this whole nonsense would end.
- Lol except democrats have been using bipartisan/non-partisan commissions to do it in blue states, so it means the house will forever be favoring republicans, unless democrats actually have the spine to play dirty.
- If democrats had an ounce of intelligence, they would be fighting for standard algorithms to manage redistricting.
  The problem with that is they would need to regain power to be able to fix anything. But that would also assume they did, in fact, have the intelligence to fix problems while in power. Unfortunately, the reason the fascists are fighting so hard to dismantle democracy is to ensure that they can never lose power again despite their growing unpopularity.
- Except we're talking about Texas, where Democrats have never held enough power to do any significant gerrymandering. Assuming you're acting in good faith and not just a bot, is it possible that you're failing into the trap of assuming that because one of the most heavily gerrymandered districts (Texas 35th) is blue that Democrats did the gerrymandering?
  They didn't. Republicans did, to pack as many blue votes into a single district as possible so multiple others around it could be red. If the districts were drawn fairly, the thin corridor connecting Austin and San Antonio would be red, and multiple districts above and below that corridor would be blue.
- It’s a bit more complex than that—if you create districts on a purely geographic basis (like minimizing district perimeters), you usually amplify slight majorities into disproportionately large ones (e.g., a 55% demographic majority translating to a 90% legislative majority). An algorithm that tries to create districts that proportionally translate demographics to representation usually ends up with district boundaries that superficially resemble gerrymandered ones.
  
  I think this is an important point that https://bdistricting.com/2020/ glosses over. Some of the representation "guarantees" that were part of the VRA are actually defeated by doing purely geographic districting. Oft-times there's enough BIPOC population that's widely distributed, but needs to be "packed" (to use the gerrymandering terminology) in order to given even a chance of proportional representation.
  My state of Arkansas is a good example https://bdistricting.com/2020/AR_Congress/ BIPOC is >= 25% of the population, but to get a distract that was 50% BIPOC it would have to snake across the state in a way that would be very visually similar to a gerrymandered district.
  Multi-member districts can help, but they cause a loss of representation locality.
  It may be that it's impossible to produce an algorithm that satisfies all our (collective) fairness constraints.
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq-Y7crQo44
  This is a really neat video about algorithmic redistricting. It doesn't really make any claims about the politics around drawing maps but it does a great job of showing how easily the maps can be manipulated to give set results. It's really neat to see how the different things we can optimize for may or may not produce "fair" results.
  Really worth a watch imo!
- Oh? Then why are repubs gerrymandering so hard? Because they'll pick up 5 seats in Texas by doing it. And they're going to do the same in all the red states they can and pick up an extra one here and an extra one there and get a nice, cushy permanent House majority by blatantly violating district-drawing "norms" to a mind-boggling degree like this. Because now they can.
  But don't worry about Dems fighting back by doing a damn thing, let alone gerrymandering harder.
- Here in the best country on earth we just count the votes of our people and decide based on that. No district bullshit whatsoever. And that is how we ended with a backwards blackrock cocksucker and a corrupt von der leyen.... But seriously just count the votes in general, the us has such a fucked up system....
These assholes are going to make violent revolution inevitable. Why they think they will survive that revolution is a mystery.
- Because they think they have the vast majority of those institutions with the ability to inflict violence on their side.
  And from where I'm sitting, it looks like they're right
  
  Oh there is no doubt they have a monopoly on violence, but America has more guns than people and virtually no mental health care so..............
- it's all I cling to, to make it through every day
If you can't win, cheat. It's the official slogan of conservatives worldwide.
"Why should I have to pay taxes for roads and schools in Austin when I live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere by choice?"
-Desired Outcome
Aportionment voting. As close to possible make sure the voting for a party gets appropriate representation then vote in who by primary. If this is a 100 seat senate and the state goes 48%red 51% blue and 1 % green each color holds a primary after the election to choose who will represent this platform that got them elected. This creates unity inside a party on issues in which everyone should campaign on and if you aren't striving to enact the platform it is more seen and you are less likely to be voted in in the primary next time. This creates more parties as if you have a different platform what is the point being in the same party. You still have to play smart like the green party should work green if they have the same agenda that way people don't get upended but generally this is better
Republicans are cheating scum.
Yes
Texas has always been a lost cause. If you’re left and in Texas your choice is to leave.
- But they used to have to draw their districts in a way that wouldn't get thrown out by the courts. Now they can do whatever they want. There are still a few judges left that will rule against them, but not for long as more and more are replaced by MAGAts. In the meantime, they can still go ahead and do it now because by the time the issue works its way through the legal system the 2026 midterms will have happened and they'll have cemented control.
  
  Texas is a lost cause.
I live in CD4, and it's already just as ridiculous. A massive swath of rural voters to drown out relatively diverse parts of Plano, TX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_4th_congressional_district
- Texas 13th is horrible too. They cut the city of Denton out of Denton County and stretched it all the way to the top of the pan handle.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_13th_congressional_district
  
  Yep. It totally makes sense for Denton and Amarillo to have the same representative. /s
what fucking idiotic ideas. why, I am curious, are districts not drawn by immutable things like latitude and longitude?
- Because you have to take into account population numbers. The same number of people represented per representative(in the house) in a given state is one of the points of census.
  
  that’s just a ratio - population / max ppl in cohort.
- Physical landmarks like rivers and mountains would be best, but even county lines would be good.
  
  why have districts at all?
- That doesn't change much, it's possible to define this district that way.
I wonder if an AI system could feasibility generate fair, compact, impartial districts given appropriate prompts - if those prompts were agreed upon by all parties, and the AI and associated data gathering administered by a 3rd party non-profit.
- You don't need "AI", at least not the kind of unpredictable over-hyped bullshit called "AI", whether it's an LLM or something stupider.
  https://bdistricting.com/2020/ applies an predicable algorithm to produce geographically compact, equal-population districts.
  Of course, those are not the only "fairness" constraints we want to impose. The VRA "required" packing to ensure representation for historically disenfranchised populations, e.g.

74 comments