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6 votes
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It began at the pub: The campaign to shame Brexit's biggest 'donkeys'
6 votes -
Legislative Round-Up: Criminal Justice Reform in the States
3 votes -
Brexit: MPs back May's bid to change deal. MPs have backed seeking "alternative arrangements" to replace the Irish backstop in Theresa May's Brexit plan
11 votes -
How did Arron Banks afford Brexit?
9 votes -
Let’s Talk: The hypocrisy of Bell Canada and mental health under capitalism
4 votes -
Brexit: Game theory suggests we may be headed for a no-deal Brexit. The parties are trying to play two different versions of the prisoner’s dilemma; to agree, they need to pick one.
10 votes -
The US President's $2,614 per minute transport system
4 votes -
The claim that democracy fares better in the West than in Africa is a fallacy
7 votes -
Betsy DeVos Is Fabricating History to Sell a Bad Education Policy
14 votes -
Socrates versus Roger Stone
9 votes -
Australia recognises Juan Guaidó as Venezuela president
6 votes -
The alt-right playbook: The card says moops
18 votes -
Venezuela opposition leader swears himself in as interim president
27 votes -
Jean Wyllys: Gay Brazil politician will not return over death threats
12 votes -
Greek lawmakers ratify Macedonia's name change, ending nearly thirty-year dispute
10 votes -
US President Donald Trump ally Roger Stone arrested on seven charges in Robert Mueller inquiry
12 votes -
Venezuela crisis: Russia condemns bid to 'usurp power' from Maduro
7 votes -
Angola is the latest African country to decriminalise homosexuality
9 votes -
The plot against George Soros - How two Jewish American political consultants helped create the world’s largest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory
12 votes -
Ex-Jakarta Governor Ahok, jailed for blasphemy, freed
3 votes -
Stop trusting viral videos
16 votes -
With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Americans finally have a politician who agrees with them about taxes
24 votes -
What would happen if the US House of Representatives decided to investigate sitting Senators?
The current US Senate majority continues to support the president. However, the current president may have been compromised by the Russian government. The connections that several senators have to...
The current US Senate majority continues to support the president. However, the current president may have been compromised by the Russian government.
The connections that several senators have to Russia (Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, to name two) raise the very real possibility that the current Republican majority in the Senate owes its existence to Russian help.
The FBI, a renewed Republican target, has suggested as much in briefings given to that same U.S. Congress.
What are the chances of the House investigating sitting menbers of Senate, and what twists and turns might occur should it happen?
9 votes -
President Donald Trump directed his attorney Michael Cohen to lie to US Congress about the Moscow Tower project
24 votes -
Kim Stanley Robinson’s lunar revolution
4 votes -
GOP Rep. Tom Marino resigns from Congress
9 votes -
Privacy and Politics
I was thinking about the intersection of internet privacy and politics. You could even say I was having a bit of a mini-crisis. I like to think of myself as being pretty liberal, but I wondering...
I was thinking about the intersection of internet privacy and politics. You could even say I was having a bit of a mini-crisis. I like to think of myself as being pretty liberal, but I wondering how that fits into privacy. I was a little upset when I learned that Obama called Edward Snowden unpatriotic. I was kind of thinking that what he did was patriotic. Wasn't the NSA monitoring US citizens without warrants. That's morally wrong right? I think I would be pretty fine with the government monitoring someone if they had a warrant given to them by a non-secret court. I'm wondering if anyone here can give me some insight on this or if anyone else feels/has felt this way.
4 votes -
When leaders are bullies
5 votes -
Macron and French centrists don’t have answers as “Yellow Vest” protests head for tenth week
8 votes -
The 2019 geopolitical reading list
8 votes -
These are all the federal HTTPS websites that’ll expire soon because of the US government shutdown
8 votes -
Jailed model who claimed she has dirt on Russian oligarch speaks out
3 votes -
Transparency-seeking OPEN Government Data Act signed into law
7 votes -
Theresa May loses Brexit deal vote by majority of 230
35 votes -
Who owns the internet? (What Big Tech’s monopoly powers mean for our culture.)
11 votes -
Fact: Calling out political furphies works, in Australia at least
An article from the Sydney Morning Herald: Fact: Calling out political furphies works, in Australia at least (with some local flavour) An article from New Scientist: Australians care if...
An article from the Sydney Morning Herald: Fact: Calling out political furphies works, in Australia at least (with some local flavour)
An article from New Scientist: Australians care if politicians tell lies, but people in the US don’t (from a non-Australian point of view)
The study itself in Royal Society Open Science: Does truth matter to voters? The effects of correcting political misinformation in an Australian sample.
4 votes -
Tories on brink: Historic split looms as Brexiteers and Remainers threaten to torpedo government
6 votes -
How the UN migration pact got trolled
5 votes -
A basic analysis of the 2018 US midterm elections suggests it was less gerrymandered than other recent elections for the House of representatives
Now that the ballots for the 2018 House of representatives election have been counted, how badly was the vote gerrymandered? Gerrymandering is the creating of political districts to maximize the...
Now that the ballots for the 2018 House of representatives election have been counted, how badly was the vote gerrymandered?
Gerrymandering is the creating of political districts to maximize the number of representatives a political grouping gets per vote.
The degree of gerrymandering can be approximated by calculating the difference between the outcome of a proportional voting system and the actual districted representatives each party gains.
Here's a look at the last 5 elections to the House of representatives.
In this congress, the Democrats have 235 representatives, the Republicans have 199 and there's 1 other representative.
Voter turnout was 50,3%, the highest for a midterm election since 1914.
The Democrats got 53,5% of the popular vote and 54,0% of the seats. The Republicans got 44,8% of the vote and 46,0% of the seats. Others got 1,8% of the vote and a single seat.
Since the Republicans are no longer getting vastly outsized representation, is gerrymandering dead?
If the US would have had a proportional voting system, 7 of the 435 seats would have been distributed differently in 2018.
The Democrats would have had 3 fewer representatives, the Republicans would have had 4 fewer and others would have had those 7 seats.
Here are the similar figures for the last five elections.
Year Votes per seat ('000) Dem diff. Rep diff. Other diff. 2010 199 -3 +18 -15 2012 281 -11 +27 -16 2014 179 -10 +24 -14 2016 295 -15 +27 -12 2018 261 +3 +4 -7 The change from getting 27 seats "wrong" in 2016 to 7 seats "wrong" this year is large and changes the historic trend.
Turns out that higher turnout led to more accurate representation in 2018. Who would have guessed.
(There are many other additional possible explanations for why this has changed too)
If we just look at the two major parties, what does this mean in real terms?
Here's an overview of the average difference in the number of voters the Democrats have needed for each seat they actually got in the last five elections compared to the Republicans.
Year Additional Dem voters for a seat 2010 8,6% 2012 19,4% 2014 16,6% 2016 21,4% 2018 0,8% There are other ways of trying to engineer specific election results.
This basic overview only looks at people who actually vote. Therefore it obviously doesn't consider those who are prevented from voting in the election process, whether that's from voting requirements, accessibility of polling places, registration requirements, etc.
It will be interesting to see what happens in 2020.
Is this a trend that'll continue?
Is it just a blip because those gerrymandering haven't been able to predict what party voters vote for in today's political climate?
What about turnout?
15 votes -
Ontario is under one-man rule. Who will stop Doug Ford?
13 votes -
Donald Trump Was Never Vetted
20 votes -
Noam Chomsky - The Right Turn (1986)
9 votes -
A 1950s TV show had a fear-mongering conman named Trump who wanted to build a wall.
7 votes -
The noisy dispute over the meaning of populism is more than just an academic squabble – it’s a crucial argument about what we expect from democracy
12 votes -
Danish government to improve conditions for prostitutes
9 votes -
Build the US wall? It could take at least ten years, even with 10,000 workers.
11 votes -
How an emerging African megacity cut commutes by two hours a day
11 votes -
Ocasio-Cortez’s seventy percent top tax rate is a moderate, evidence-based policy
23 votes -
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez keeps firing back at her haters
19 votes