Comments on: High Court Strikes Three Amendments From Ballot

By: David Huie Green

David Huie Green — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:10:44 +0000

Yep, and note that this one would not have required the districts to be contiguous. Not that that wouldn’t be interesting too. Imagine just going down a randomly ordered list of Florida voters and assigning a district to each one without regard to where they lived. That should produce some interesting results too. It would look somewhat like the salt and pepper function in math, (Y equals One if X is a rational number, zero if X is an irrational number.)

But they wouldn’t do it randomly–All you guys go in this district because you are white, all of you guys go in this district because you are black, all of you guys go in this district because you are Hispanic, all of you guys go in this district because . . . I say so.

I get the impression that was what the amendment it was trying to kill was all about, ending institutional racism and sectarianism.

David who sometimes wonders at motives

By: anydaynow

anydaynow — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:19:34 +0000

I agree, DHG. The manipulated redistricting every decade was entertaining, though. I think the most creative was the district along the East Coast of the state in the Ft. Lauderdale region that was never more than 3 miles wide and 90-some odd miles long.

By: David Huie Green

David Huie Green — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:28:54 +0000

REGARDING:
“. . . they threatened minority interests by not allowing districts to be drawn to favor certain types of candidates . . ”

Balkanization. Small groups at odds with each other and forever broken into a them/us mindset. This idea is part of what led to so much problem in Iraq, an attempt to break voting blocks into ethnic or sectarian units rather than say every so many people will have one representative without trying to make that group Sunni, Shiite, black, white, latino.

good and surprising that the courts threw it out