This country was founded on the idea that land is power and land owners get to vote.
We need to change that. Peacefully first. But if that doesn’t work…peaceful protesting only works for so long.
¡VIVA LA PROLETARIAT! DEATH TO THE RICH!
I don’t think it is relevant.
The xkcd points out distribution and population.
The second map highlights how much more democratic the us is than republican and that is it obviously a broken system that republican’s have a chance of winning
2nd map only shows full red or blue dots, whereas in reality each dot would be a pie-chart of red and blue.
agreed - love xkcd, happy to see it anytime, but it’s very specifically out of context here.
Population maps are what it’s about.
Is the top image a map someone tried to push as the ratio of red vs blue counties?
That’s often how it gets portrayed, yes.
I was just checking to see if this was a specific instance or if there was a certain news outlet that did so recently.
I don’t know of any news outlets doing so. But apparently Trump made that particular misrepresentation by retweating a meme in 2019.
The meme in question was basically an electoral college map like that top image in the OP with “Impeach This” or “Try To Impeach This” across the top.
And if you want to see the actual tweet in question but twitter (I refuse to call it “X”) is a huge asshole about it, here’s a link to the tweet Trump retweeted on Archive.org:
As others have said, yes it is. Unfortunately it’s also a strong representation of how the voting process operates in the US. At the local level (towns and cities), individual votes matter. However, for something like the presidential election (for example), then the votes are averaged by county and state.
So what happens is everyone from a county votes, and if that county is more of one side than the other, that entire county is “voting x/y”. Then the counties across the state are compared, and that state is declared as “voting” for either side. Then nationally, each state is counted as either/or, so even if the more populated cities vote one way, if enough of the rural population votes the other way, the rural side wins, and the urban side loses.
It’s almost as if the system urgently needs reform. Too bad the powers in charge of that were elected specifically because of it.
Land doesn’t vote. People vote.
Abolish the senate.
Why does land determine who tells me what to do then?
Because the US electoral system is fundamentally broken?
What? It’s a worldwide thing, not just the US
Yes, to some extent it happens everywhere but the US has reduced the phenominon to its grotesque final form.
No, it happens to the same extent in basically anywhere that’s populated and can afford to enforce it
Ya…ok…
Why does the Senate exist then?
I’m not sure what you’re asking. The Senate isn’t based on land. Texas gets just as many votes in the Senate as Rohde Island.
Normally, in a democracy, you have two chambers for the legislature so that one of them is filled by popular vote from all over the country and the other by representatives allocated for administrative divisions.
In the US both chambers are allocated for predefined divisions, just on different scales (state vs slice of population), so the principle of the popular vote is not represented.
It does serve (in theory) to make up for a state that had lower population, but since the slices are subject to manipulation it’s debatable.
State governments, which represent the people, vote.
**Land SHOULDN’T vote.
What’s the medium sized red dot just north of LA? I live around there and it makes sense but there’s a lot of small-ish towns around here and I don’t know what it represents. What population patterns do these dots represent? I’m guessing the red dot is either Visalia, Tulare County, San Joaquin Valley in general, or Fresno.
The dots are counties - the largest red one above LA is Kern county - Tulare county is the smaller red dot above it to the right
This is a clearer version of that map. The other two much smaller red dots above LA are Kings and Inyo counties - this map is based on 2016 presidential results, as Inyo went blue in 2020 (by only 14 votes though)
Yeah and that’s only because they lean that way by slim majorities. There’s still mid 40s percent democrat affiliation here in both counties. I’d like to see a version of this map that shows the purple continuum. That would reveal even more.
I don’t know that there’s a lot of sand in Kansas.
There’s a whole lot of dumbass rednecks though.
Hey now, the KS governor just vetoed some bullshit anti-abortion stuff. Somehow.
But yes, KS is a poster child for letting right-wing idiocy run rampant.
All I know was the last time I was in Kansas City, MO, which was many years ago, the people I was with would yell, get back to Kansas if a car drove by with a Bush Jr. bumper sticker.
Missouri is even more fukt than Kansas, ironically.
Having only ever been to Kansas City and Fulton, I couldn’t say. But I did read What’s the Matter With Kansas? years ago. I’m sure it hasn’t substantially changed since that book came out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What's_the_Matter_with_Kansas%3F_(book)
I think it actually has. My understanding is the KS GOP so thoroughly fucked the state that they started to lose support from generational voters.
All the hospitals closed, economics got worse, big agri bought everyone, etc.
But they still run most of the state, so, that’s not saying much.
Any improvement over what’s in that book is good.
Hey, that’s not fair. Some of that is also sagebrush and pine trees. And some of it is cool rocks.
I’ll allow it.
Cartography is super cool.
I hate sand
It’s coarse and rough, and it votes Republican
there’s no lying like lying with maps
(for those ggr nerds, yes, “the map was a lie”)
Especially Google maps, they persuaded my friend to turn right and now he thinks corporations are people.
never considered online service maps much as political maps, but of course they are. What gets mapped as POI tells people what they are to find interesting and what not vice versa.
Well Biden just stepped down from the elections
I loved finding this out from a random comment on Lemmy. The interweb’s still got it!
That huge red circles Phoenix right?
Why would a popular video game character get his own spot on this map?
Ace Attorney is just that popular in Arizona
Eat your hamburgers, Apollo…
Oh, I thought he was talking about 7-11’s Cool Spot Video Game.
I doubt anyone will disagree with me but “look at how red this map is” is the stupidest arguement.
Last year after ana election my dad reposted a map on Facebook like this but for the single issue on our states ballot. The comment from the original poster was something like liberal cities decided this all counties need representation. Of course the counties that weren’t blue were mostly populated by cows.
But like seriously this was a direct popular vote on a single issue you can’t get a more representative election than that one.
Yep. There are currently three heavy biases favoring the rural population. -senate (by design) -the house --not by design, but because the representation was capped at 435. It hasn’t grown with population and thus a citizen in Wyoming gets more representation than a citizen in California (or Texas for that matter) -the presidency by virtue of the above two being biased.
Fix house apportionment, let the Senate be the safeguard, and the presidency will have a very slight protection by nature of the electors via what matches the Senate.
This is all in line with the framing of the Constitution, but it gives up power to “the bad guys” (aka the actual majority)
My favorite thing to do with these people is to ask them “okay, would it be alright if these issues were decided on a per-county basis then?”, if they say no they’ve outed themselves as just wanting to hold as much control over others as possible from a minority position, if they say yes ask again but with individual towns, if they say yes to that, then you narrow it down to individual people, then they tend to get mad when they realize what you’ve done
then you narrow it down to individual people, then they tend to get mad when they realize what you’ve done
That’s anarchocapitalism…
Who’s read an argument that’s something like “if we change this, then elections will always go blue, and red areas will feel unheard and _____”
It’s argued the blank is something bad but I can’t recall what it was 🤷♂️ IDK if it was civil war/secession bad or what
I remember a coworker from Utah once telling me that farmers are the most disadvantaged minority or something. Basically his argument was it is better that rural areas get more representation and people in the cities don’t need to be represented as much. For him it was an easy argument to make since it is the status quo and serves his interests.
The people who want to change things are who need to come up with either strong arguments to win public opinion or increasingly evident win their rights by direct action. No one who benefits from the current system will give up anything.
The farmer argument is such BS though, believe in some past that is long past and may never have happened.
My grandparents were one of those farming families it would apply to. They had it tough, it was hard to make any money and people relied on them for food. They also were forced out of business half a century ago. Currently farmers are much more likely to be large businesses and definitely not in need of special treatment
It’s a variant of state’s rights. Basically up until a generation or two ago a lot more people lived in a medum-to-small town. For a lot of those people, the cities were strange places of violence and grossitude. Full of corruption, and evil.
The idea that they would also make all the laws was unthinkable. “Why - they’d let the gays marry! We know there’s no such thing as gays!” and so on. (Although practically speaking - where the political rubber met the road so to speak - it was about being allowed to keep humans in concentration camps for money.)
So, back before we knew how conception worked or what an automatic rifle was or even that we were one small part of a larger group of stars called a galaxy - they developed the Electoral College to ensure that everyone had an equitable say. That, and the Senate having exactly two representatives no matter how many people lived there. From a political point of view, it was reasonable at the time.
Fast forward to 2016 and batshit insanity is literally trying to topple the government in a demented coup attempt and it starts to look less like a good idea.
Ah so elections should be a piece of cake then!
Presidential? Yea you would think. But seeing this map overlayed with districting lines would help explain how we get some of our senators representatives we have.
Districting lines have nothing to do with Senate elections - senators are whole state affairs. Districting lines only affect two things at the federal level - House elections and presidential electors in two particular states that grant one elector based on the results within each House district and two based on overall state vote.
Fair fair, I am not even a armchair expert. And yea a moment of thought about senator I ever voted for would have reminded me thay. But at least I wasn’t crazy about the house.
Now, I still think any election however local, does affect stuff up the ladder.
