When Candidates Can’t Lose
28th April 2008
Think about this for a bit.
When district boundaries are adjusted so as to include a greater number of people who find a particular legislator satisfactory, this is somehow “undemocratic”. Gee, I thought that the whole point of the process was to give people as much as possible a representative who, you know, represented them.
So we ought to adjust boundaries so that a little less than half of the people in the district disagree with the policies that their representative is going to push — and whose voices are therefore not going to be heard?
This is the silliest method of argumentation that I’ve ever heard of in my life.
If a representative nominally represents X number of people, then a perfectly representative system is one where each candidate signs up exactly X number of people to vote for him, and it ought not to matter where they live. So-called “Gerrymandering” attempts to adjust our territorial system, based on nothing more than history and an implicit assumption that people living in the same place have the same natural interests, to that ideal system. How is this a bad thing?
In electing local government candidates, there may be an argument for people living in the same place having the same natural interests. But for national government candidates, such as Senators and Representatives, that’s absurd. The only impact “natural local interests” have with respect to federal-level legislators is that it encourages pork-barrel earmarks, and how is that a good thing?