Cheating At Democracy: Deciding How To Vote On Prop. 50

Would you, could you in a boat?
Could you, would you with a vote?
– TFN

Proposition 50 is Gavin Newsom’s idea for how California can contribute to dealing with Texas’ egregious gerrymandering of its Congressional districts to try to grab a few more House seats for the Republicans.

And it’s not actually a horrible idea.

I know, right?

The proposal is to temporarily re-draw California’s Congressional districts in a way that would probably give the Democrats roughly the same amount of additional House seats, and then return the districts to normal after three Congressional elections.

Since California’s districts are drawn by an appointed commission, because California loves them some appointed commissions, this has to be done through a Constitutional amendment which requires 50%+1 vote to pass.

Which, I should note, is at least mildly more democratic than Texas’ changes which did not even go up for a vote.

So, is more gerrymandering an acceptable response to gerrymandering?

From a simple theory-of-conflict perspective, the answer is obvious: of course it is. If your opponent has deployed a strategy in a conflict, they certainly have no reasonable grounds to object to you using the same strategy against them.

So any complaints from the Texas or national Republican parties can be ignored; they’ve already waived any right they had to object.

Complaints from California Republicans may have some merit, though by affiliating themselves with the national Republican party they’ve severely weakened their right to complain. So for them, we should maybe feel bad about doing this but I don’t think they’re in a position to demand any more than that.

So, no one who’s disadvantaged by Proposition 50 has any real right to complain about it.

But, is it just wrong on its own?

Yes? Sorta.

Messing around with the election mechanisms in a democracy for any reason other than to optimize the accuracy of its results in representing the desires of the voters is wrong.

Full stop.

There’s no wiggle room in that.

In a democracy, fiddling with the system to get results you like better is just plain wrong.

But, bluntly, that doesn’t really apply here.

While you could certainly debate about how good a democracy the United States used to be, it isn’t really a democracy anymore.

Or, alternatively, you could just as reasonably say that since the United States was a weak-but-functioning democracy and what we have now is certainly not that then the United States as described by the Constitution does not exist anymore and the State we’re dealing with today is something else that’s taken its name and is wearing its face.

I’m frankly more inclined to the latter way of thinking about it.

But either way, the moral arguments that are based on what it’s acceptable to do in a democracy just do not apply.

So if the moral arguments allow it, is it legal?

Yes.

OK, so will it work?

That one’s trickier.

If by “work” you mean will giving Democrats more seats in the House of Representatives put this country back to where it was before January 20th then I think the answer is pretty obviously that it will not.

The Democratic party has not demonstrated any real ability to address this problem. Even the current federal government “shutdown” is only over the national Democrats demanding something that would genuinely help the Republicans in the next election. Yeah, it really is that bizarre.

But if by “work” you mean will giving Republicans fewer seats in the House of Representatives slow down the literal and metaphorical destruction of all the things that make this country worth having then I think the answer is that yes it would do that.

That’s a really low bar for success.

But at this point we should probably not complain about taking pretty much any actions that would slow the destruction, even though they don’t actually fix anything. Even slowing things down a bit will allow more time for people to preserve the data, the expertise and the systems that the country had this time last year and could dramatically increase our chances of being able to build something functional here after this is over.

So, yeah: if you’re a California voter, you probably should vote for Proposition 50.

At least it’s not gonna make anything worse.