Voting Districts

[Jonathan Buhacoff]

Voting districts should be only a mechanism for collecting and tabulating the local vote and sending it on to the next higher level of government. The people who are on the ballot should not be related to the voting districts. All the voting districts for a local government should have the same people on the ballot. When they are used in this way, voting districts cannot be gerrymandered into influencing election results, which in turn reduces the frequency that lines are redrawn on the map, which reduces expenses, reduces confusion about where to vote, and improves the integrity of elections.

In a local election, for example for a mayor and city council and sheriff, all the voting districts have the same candidates on the ballot and are used only to collect the votes and send them to the local government offices. Each voting district certifies and publishes its own results, so that everyone in other voting districts can add up the totals themselves and there is no chance for officials or employees in the local government to cheat in elections by changing the numbers.

In the United States, voting districts are used to partition the land into areas of people who vote for a single candidate who then represents them. This sounds like a good idea, but in the United States this has led to widespread corruption called gerrymandering where the people in charge of drawing the map for these voting districts rig the map to help themselves or their party win future elections by slicing up areas that tend to vote for the other party and making them into minorities in adjoining areas.

To ensure the integrity of elections, voting districts should only facilitate where people vote — not who they vote for — and it should not be possible to change the election results by redrawing the voting district map. Instead of voting districts selecting a a representative for that district, voting districts should be only a mechanism for collecting and tabulating the local vote and sending it on to the next higher level of government.

Voting districts must be contained within a local government boundary.

To ensure a fair drawing of voting districts and reduce the opportunity to influence elections by making it harder to vote in some districts compared to others, the government should publish a geography-based and census-based algorithm for drawing of voting districts which must be followed by officials. The people can then compare their own results to that of the officials and petition the government for a correction if it seems that the algorithm was not followed.

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