At 12:22 PM 11/1/2002 -0500, you wrote:
On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 11:10:36AM -0600, Julia Thompson wrote: > If you are registered to vote in the US, be sure you vote on Tuesday > (unless you do early voting like I did). I don't care about *who* you > vote for; even if you're in my precinct (which I don't think anyone is, > unless there's a lurker living close by), or just in my state, and you > vote against every single candidate I voted for, you should take > advantage of your right to vote and have some sort of say in who > represents you in your government.True. Unless, of course, you live in one of the approximately 415 Congressional districts where the race has already been decided by devious re-drawing of the districts. According to a recent Economist article, out of 435 races for US House of Rep., only about 20 are competitive. 4 of those are in Iowa (Iowa has 5 total seats in the House), and Iowa is the only state that has a non-partisan committee determine the districts (although Arizona recently passed a referendum to do that). In a "typical" democracy, about 20% of the Congressional/Parliament races are competitive, in the U.S. this year, that number is only 4%. Depressingly, I haven't seen much news about this, and none of the candidates I have an opportunity to vote for have made district-drawing reform an issue. I have to do some more research, but I am going to try to find a non-profit group that lobbies/campaigns for this type of reform, and donate some money and maybe some time to them (that is the only way I can think of to get a vote, since the re-districting has taken it away). Erik Reuter
What's the best thing about Google? Finding other people who spell as bad as you do, you get links with the misspelled word right there for the whole world to see!
Anyway I was trying to find an updated map for PA, but only found old ones:
http://www.pacul.org/Governmentaffairs/pamap.htm
Found half of a new map: (See the world Clinton on the right above center? There's a town underneath there, where I'm from. All the big squares around it are forest and hills.)
http://www.post-gazette.com/popup.asp?img=/images2/20020104congressdist.gif
There is a huge race here that is down to the wire tight. Gekas(R) vs. Holden(D). The Repubs in the state combined their two districts 17 and 6, I guess figuring Gekas would win easily. Holden is a conservative Dem, so it's hard for the fence sitters to decide either way. It looks like the other seat was lost in the central region.
I'm not disagreeing with you Erik, but redistricting isn't easy. Here in PA we lost two seats, we've been losing at least two seats every ten years since 1950 when we had 32. The main problem is the big cities are losing the people but they still have enough to force the big rural districts to be even bigger to balance the population. The article that accompanies the second map says the new western districts have a population difference of only 15 between the largest and the smallest, one vote = one vote as mandated by congress, or 646,000 votes = 646,015 votes. But 15 municipalities had to be split to get it, and the obvious convoluted map.
Another question: is it good to have a competitive race everywhere, for the state? You interest is in the right place, but imagine if Iowa elects four new members for it's five seats. They will have no real clout for the next two years. I'm not saying incumbents are great, but there is power gained the more years they are in there. (Plus those new members each earn a new pension, while an incumbent would get a smaller raise in their pension. We need to give away more money for more years? ;-)
Not being nosey, but do you support voting early? I don't, only for disease and travel. You know how many votes are thrown out because they didn't matter in some races? Making it easier for people to vote hasn't increased the turnout has it? (Doesn't stop people from complaining).
Kevin T.
Starting to ramble, going to see Signs in 30 minutes
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