I posted this comment last night when this story was on HN for the first time:<p>I&#x27;ve come to expect this kind of painfully unhelpful commentary from the rag that is the NYT. On par with their myopic mainstream-ism, this article&#x27;s purpose is to confuse and pacify readers with a narrative that states we can continue on our current government&#x27;s course, if only we were to allow for a minor change of our political system&#x27;s vote-counting partitions. We cannot save or rekindle democracy with such pathetic incremental changes, nor are &quot;we&quot; as citizens empowered to make such changes anyway-- purge this article&#x27;s idiotic train of thought. To be explicit: changing who gets elected via more neutral partitioning won&#x27;t change a single thing, because the titanic problems of American &quot;democracy&quot; (in realistic terms, oligarchy or perhaps autocracy) occur post-election outcome, and occur regardless of whether it is Democrats or Republicans who win.<p>Redistricting won&#x27;t save democracy; at best, algorithmic or &quot;mathematical&quot; (a fool&#x27;s term for neutral and objective) redistricting will allow for the voters to pick candidates that are proportionally and geographically anchored to their districts. Geographical picking of representatives isn&#x27;t broken beyond repair within the political system, nor is the physical counting of votes to determine which representatives win, though the electronic voting systems leave the latter terrifyingly unverifiable and unquestionably anti-democratic.<p>The slaughter of democracy in our time is an intentionally engineered result of post-election corruption as effected by bribes of lobbyists, raping the power of the vote in the name of capital flow to those that are already morbidly obese with riches. You cannot have democracy when money is allowed to have a coercive power that eclipses any feasible democratic comeuppance.<p>Let the banishment of money from the election component of political activity exist as an iron law in any new democracy which is established. That would be the start of having a fighting chance for democracy, which America has long since discarded.