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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?

Money. Every American politician is corrupt as fuck.

when lawmakers break the law and nobody enforces the law, it stops being the law.

We've lived in a fascist country for a long time.

centuries*

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.

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.

For about 200 years, a candidates morality was an important factor, now we apparently don't care, especially the MAGAs.

Even strong checks can't hold back bad faith actors indefinitely

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

Gerrymandering can still be effective with ranked choice. It's harder, but you can still do both cracking and packing, you just have to model top-2 or top-3 preferences.

Popular vote is already the norm for gerrymandered areas.

I mean we should definitely implement Ranked Choice up and down the ticket, and implement Popular Vote for President, but neither actually solves Gerrymandering.

I'd like to say "independent" redistricting organizations are the solution, but the practical success of those is mixed. The incumbents just pack those with cronies, or ignore them, sometimes with the assistance of the judiciary.

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.

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.

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.