The Supreme Court discussed my research on gerrymandering: some misconceptions
I never understand why at large proportional voting systems are never even considered. Even without gerrymandering, district based plurality elections are an extremely flawed system. Imagine we have a perfectly well distributed state - 35% democrat, 30% republican, 20% libertarian, 15% green. And we draw up perfectly fair lines for our 10 representatives. And this state now has their election. What any person would rationally expect would be about 3.5 democratic representatives, 3 republican representatives, 2 libertarian representatives, and about 1.5 green representatives. Instead we get 100% democratic representatives as they get a plurality of votes in each district. 35% of the support, no gerrymandering whatsoever, and 100% of the seats. I don't see how anybody can find this system defensible, let alone desirable.<p>And this is even more true now a days where geographic vicinity to a representative doesn't really mean much of anything. In the times these laws were drawn up good chunks of the population would have known their representatives personally, or at worst have a very minimal number of degrees of separation. So there would be some good argument for having geographically close representatives. In today's society we're very disconnected from our representatives, physically and metaphorically. There's no intimacy between constituent, so much as we can even be considered constituents anymore, and representative. They're simply the person we send our letters to and whom gets to respond with focus tested form letters.