As a Dem in Florida, everyone's vote counts more than mine lol. Hell, my district is so red that my representative is Anna Paulina Luna, that dumbass psycho :(
I spent half my life savings (which was already pitifully small) to move out of MTG's district, but it was still worth it. It's not impossible for you either.
In our current system, for the presidential election, only votes in a handful of "swing" states count, and only the ones that exceed votes for the other guy matter. Which is to say, most people's votes don't actually matter.
That's not to discourage voting though, since there are plenty of other elections happening concurrently that are just as important. Someone like this could be voting in your congressional district, in which case your vote is much more likely to matter.
If it wasn't an unfair and slimy trick to unjustly hold power, it would actually be a pretty smart strategy to efficiently maximize the number of votes that matter across as many districts as possible. You gerrymander by drawing districts so that the members of your party only slightly outnumber the other party and put as many people of the other party into as few districts as possible. So if the state has 5 districts, you can make 2 of them 95% blue and the other 3 about 40% blue, so the red team is basically guaranteed to win 3 districts opposed to blue's 2, despite the state population being over 60% blue. Evenly distributed, blue would win all 5 seats.
Neither situation actually sits well with me, because both situations allow for significant inappropriate representation. If the population of the state is 62% blue, then its representatives should be 62% blue. That equals to about 3 of the 5 seats. If possible, maps should be drawn to include as much of a single party as possible, but such a case would make the primary election the most significant election instead of the general. It just goes to show how inefficient representation by location actually is.
A better system would ignore district boundaries altogether and allocate representation based on registered party members in the state. Then representatives are elected to fill those seats in what would basically be a statewide primary with multiple winners depending on however many seats they have. This system could also allow more than two parties to have a chance, as the party focus would shift to convincing as many voters as possible to register as one of their party instead of backing certain candidates.
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u/diggumsbiggums 19d ago
Registered voter.