Fight in Virginia: Bickering over Election Districts Undermines Democracy
The U.S. electoral system is already undemocratic enough. Both parties keep making it worse in their fight for advantage.
Two days, two news stories. The first story is good news for U.S. Democrats, and second story is good for Republicans. Neither story bodes well for representative democracy in the U.S.
On Tuesday, it was announced that a narrow majority of voters in Virginia granted the Democratic governor the right to redraw election districts outside the normal election cycle. As a result, assuming all other voters remain the same, Democrats would send 10 representatives to Washington in the November midterm elections instead of six, while Republicans would send one instead of five. There was jubilation from the Democrats — then on Wednesday evening, a letdown.
After President Donald Trump complained the vote was rigged, a judge ruled that the ballot question was misleading, rendering the result invalid. The Democrats appealed, and the case is now moving through the courts.
It’s hard not to come away with the sense that the democratic process and party-political representation have less and less to do with each other.
The U.S. already has plenty of problems like this: Its single-winner voting system and Electoral College often distort the results of presidential elections.
And each member of the Senate — two per state — carries equal weight in Washington, whether it’s Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana, who needed just under 320,000 votes to win, or his Democratic colleague, Alex Padilla of California, who had to secure 6.2 million.
These imbalances, rooted in an exaggerated form of federalism, are further exacerbated by extreme gerrymandering — the politically motivated drawing of election districts. A president who keeps crying “fraud!” and the billions increasingly poured into election campaigns do the rest. In the end, the leading Western nation is unwittingly shredding more and more of its own democracy.
Two days, two news stories. The first story is good news for U.S. Democrats, and second story is good for Republicans. Neither story bodes well for representative democracy in the U.S.
On Tuesday, it was announced that a narrow majority of voters in Virginia granted the Democratic governor the right to redraw election districts outside the normal election cycle. As a result, assuming all other voters remain the same, Democrats would send 10 representatives to Washington in the November midterm elections instead of six, while Republicans would send one instead of five. There was jubilation from the Democrats — then on Wednesday evening, a letdown.
After President Donald Trump complained the vote was rigged, a judge ruled that the ballot question was misleading, rendering the result invalid. The Democrats appealed, and the case is now moving through the courts.
It’s hard not to come away with the sense that the democratic process and party-political representation have less and less to do with each other.
The U.S. already has plenty of problems like this: Its single-winner voting system and Electoral College often distort the results of presidential elections.
And each member of the Senate — two per state — carries equal weight in Washington, whether it’s Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana, who needed just under 320,000 votes to win, or his Democratic colleague, Alex Padilla of California, who had to secure 6.2 million.
These imbalances, rooted in an exaggerated form of federalism, are further exacerbated by extreme gerrymandering — the politically motivated drawing of election districts. A president who keeps crying “fraud!” and the billions increasingly poured into election campaigns do the rest. In the end, the leading Western nation is unwittingly shredding more and more of its own democracy.
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