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Wednesday Night Acoustic Excellence: Adrian Bellue: "Alternate Pathways"

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KGxvi6/27/2019 10:46:08 am PDT

re: #212 Belafon

And when Democrats win 200K more votes in Wisconsin but gerrymandering still guarantees Republicans a supermajority in the assembly, then what?

I’m looking at the results from the 2018 assembly elections, and I feel like that 200k vote point is a bit of smoke and mirrors. There are a lot of districts where Republicans didn’t run, and in those districts the sole person on the ballot was a Democrat who often got as many votes as there were total votes cast in contested elections.

But there are things you can do at the state level - especially if you’re a state with ballot initiatives. You can put forward ballot initiatives that call for a non-partisan redistricting committee (we have one in California because we had lines draw for a decade that saw no seats at the state or Congressional level change party); or you can push for elections based on proportional representation (though that gives a lot of power to the parties and there’s long been a trend away from that).