Is gerrymandering or voting fraud worse?

[msc545]

Guess which method Republicans use...

[Anonymous]

Gerrymandering is simply the drawing of house legislator districts to insure they represent political parties.

From the point of view of representation this has the effect of insuring a more finite level of representation in the house. In contrast to more evenly divided districts which have less in-common with themselfs and thus end up with more generic middle of the road representation.

Voter fraud by contrast it simply rigging the election itself, to represent a minority of the people.

[msc545]

Gerrymandering is quite a bit more than that.

[richardcory]

Gerymanering is drawing the lines in a way that favors one side or the other. Since most US elections are pretty tight, its a very effective way to control the outcome of an election. Imagine if 60% of people favor "A" 40% "B". If you draw lines so that there are 5 regions. I put 20% of A in each of regions 1 and 2 (regions are 100% A) they both vote for A.

Then I have 6.33% of A in each of the remaining regions and 12.66% o B. So B wins the 3 remaining regions and wins the election.

Obviously an exaggerated example but shows that drawing borders carefully can cause the minority group to win

[msc545]

@richardcory That is a better description.

[Red_Arrow]

Both can be bad. Gerrymandering is often legal, but often puts groups in unsavory positions. Such as forcing people to go far from their homes to get to a polling place they can use. Fraud is also terrible, but if discovered, it usually can be corrected.

[Red_Arrow]

As another here said, fraud can be worse. But he rattles on nonsense about democrats doing a lot of it. Nonsense! The MAGAturds accused various groups and individuals of many illegal acts, and just about every accusation was proven to be bullshit. The made up lies about people counting ballots, about aides moving ballots, about ballots being destroyed. Just about every one of those was actually being video recorded and examination of those recordings proved the accusations to be false. On the other hand, investigations have found that the Trump group tried to get valid ballots thrown out, tried to get non-existent ballots added to their candidate, tried to get Republican governors to throw out valid electors and replace them with electors that were not valid, and the list goes on. Messages and texts have been presented to courts, witnesses have given sworn testimony about these acts, and recordings of conversations (in person and over phone) have also been given to the courts. The Republicans are doing what they are falsely saying the Democrats are doing.

[exitseven]

Voter fraud is worse. Gerrymandering is a problem but stuffing ballot boxes and having dead people vote is worse. There were always tales of this going on but it was never as widespread and as organized as it was in the 2020 election. Covid made a perfect smokescreen for the widespread voter fraud. It provided an excuse to expand mail in ballots and democrats just kept printing and printing and they were counting and counting until they got the result that they wanted. In a few cases there were more ballots than there were registered voters.

[AngryCarl2]

What voting fraud?

[msc545]

Republicans have been screaming about (non-existent) voter fraud for months mostly because Trump lost a fair election and they cannot accept that.