Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
I haven't really read enough about this to know for sure (but when has that ever stopped me on the PB), but, is it not true that the existing map resulted in the election of a proportion of Democratic representatives well out of line with the proportion of individual votes cast for those representatives? Do you see that as a valid result of what's supposed to be a democratic process?
(Edited to add: and I think we're saying the same thing about Repub v. Dem - the empowerment or disempowerment of groups was the means to the partisan-power-grab end.)
|
I think that everyone agrees that the map drawn in 1991 was a work of genius by the Democrats at the time. BUT, there was an opportunty to fix everything in 2001, and the legislature never got its act together so a court ended up drawing the census map. The Republicans have argued that their actions last year was an effort to take everything out of the court's hands and put it back in the legislature. I'm not entirely clear when Tom Delay was elected to the legislature.
And of course, if one argues that the proportion of Democratic reps should roughly approximate the proportion of people who voted for Democrats, then one might want to re-look at the 2000 presidential election and wonder if that was a democratic process.
Someone, I think it was the Houston Chronicle, suggested that a computer randomly draw maps without political input. Put in the geography and VRA requirements in and go with whatever the computer spits out. I think that everyone in the legislature would pass out if that happened.
