SACRAMENTO, Calif (AP) — California voters will decide in November whether to approve a redrawn congressional map designed to help Democrats win five more U.S. House seats next year, after Texas Republicans advanced their own redrawn map to pad their House majority by the same number of seats at President Donald Trump’s urging.
California lawmakers voted mostly along party lines Thursday to approve legislation calling for the special election. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has led the campaign in favor of the map, then quickly signed it — the latest step in a tit-for-tat gerrymandering battle.
“This is not something six weeks ago that I ever imagined that I’d be doing,” Newsom said at a press conference, pledging a campaign for the measure that would reach out to Democrats, Republicans and independent voters. “This is a reaction to an assault on our democracy in Texas.”
Republicans, who have filed a lawsuit and called for a federal investigation into the plan, promised to fight the measure at the ballot box as well.
California Assemblyman James Gallagher, the Republican minority leader, said Trump was “wrong” to push for new Republican seats elsewhere, contending the president was just responding to Democratic gerrymandering in other states. But he warned that Newsom’s approach, which the governor has dubbed “fight fire with fire,” was dangerous.
"You move forward fighting fire with fire and what happens?” Gallagher asked. “You burn it all down.”
Texas’ redrawn maps still need a final vote in the Republican-controlled state Senate, which advanced the plan out of a committee Thursday but did not bring the measure to the floor. The Senate was scheduled to meet again Friday.
After that, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature will be all that is needed to make the map official. It’s part of Trump’s effort to stave off an expected loss of the GOP’s majority in the U.S. House in the 2026 midterm elections.
My only qualm with that is that if you select an algorithm, it needs to be selected, which means that the people in control of that selection can decide what’s non-partisan in the selection criteria.
I’m more in favor of defining properties that districts must have and then selecting a districting commission by lottery. Make it so you can’t be fired for being on the commission, and pay people 20% over their wage for the time they’re on the commission.
If an algorithm has an outcome that seems flagrantly incorrect, you can’t subpoena it and ask about its reasoning. The courts are already geared towards handling complaints regarding how a commission handled its responsibilities.
Anyone with a sibling that has had to divide something equally to share it knows how to solve this. One group chooses the algorithm and the second group chooses which side they get to on.
The first group, who have the power to introduce bias disadvantaging one side cannot benefit from it, and worse, they’d hand the power to the second group. It forces the first group to choose a method with built in equality because the second group could force the first group to take the disadvantaged side.
In practice this would require the second group to basically have a switch that switches all voters’ preferences. So I don’t think that’s gonna work here.
That wouldn’t be the variable choice by the second group in what I’m suggesting.
In this scenario if the first party choices algorithmic weights which favor their voters, given them a controlling outcome, the second party would be able to substitute their own weights making the algorithm shift the districts to give the second party the control. The rules would forbid baking the weights into the algorithm meaning the first group would work very hard to produce an algorithm producing equal representation districts without being able to swing it either way by weighting it.
this seems to assume a baked-in 2 party system I would prefer not to continue to plan around
Unfortunately I don’t think that’s how algorithm development works, not if you want to make a fair one.
Not for nothin’, but there is an entire college discipline dedicated to this called “Conflict Resolution.” People trained in it are the ones who tend to get sent by the UN to an accord meeting to negotiate for peace or for mutual use of a contested resource.
It’s a whole corner of Sociology with journals and everything.