Can Pizza Be Gerrymandered?

Maybe. Or maybe that's the only way to give everyone what they actually want.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

So with gerrymandering still pretty hot in the news, I'd like to expand on that just a little bit and point out maybe some places and good reasons for ill for for gerrymandering and some bad reasons for gerrymandering. Gonna use the illustration of a pepperoni pizza. You buy a pepperoni pizza for eight people. Okay, so that's gonna make it nice easy slices. However, one of the people says, uh, cannot get not pepperoni pieces on my slice. What's the polite thing to do? Is move a couple pepperonis and then cut up the pizza. Alright then. So now of the seven people who wanted pepperoni, and the one person who did not want pepperoni, everybody gets what they asked for. To pull the illustration aside for a second, if 90% of your people voted for Kamala Harris, 10% of your people voted for Donald Trump, it might be nice then if you have 90% of your delegates, you state congressional, which is proportionate to your population. 90% of your congressional delegates are in fact Democrats, and one is Republican. Now, your one Republican is gonna be overrepres is gonna be overwhelmed by his fellow congressionals, but it is still fair representation. Now, switch it a bit back to the pizza. Let's say that instead you got a pizza and seven people said, I don't want any pepperonis on mine. Okay. Now you might think that in a polite society then that they would move all the pepperonis to one piece's worth and then cut up the rest of the cheese. But instead, you end up with somebody choosing to cut it so that every slice has a bit of pepperoni, thus making every slice taste a bit like pepperoni. And all you people say this is not what I wanted. I do not want a piece of pepperoni pizza. Now, in the pizza illustration, the people can just take the pepperoni off. But when you have a gerrymander district where, again, 90 per switching it around, 90% of the people in your state voted for Trump. Or 90% of the districts voted for Trump. But there were a lot of people that voted for Harris. Now, if your state legislature draws up a map that puts a lot of Harris voters in all of the non-Harris, in all of the Trump voting districts, not because you moved them around, but because you just changed where they changed what the zone looked like. Well then, that's a little bit of an issue, then, isn't it? Because now all these people's gonna have their interests potentially hyper superseded by people who are not in their interests. And in that way, you can end up with a state map where 40% of the people voted for Donald Trump, 40% of the congressional delegates did not vote for Donald Trump. I messed that last sentence up. 40% of the people voted for Trump, but for reasons of sheer being outnumbered by the folks that did vote for Kamala Harris, they don't even get 40% representation in Congress. Is that fair? Back to the pizza for one last illustration. You say you got uh one person who wants pepperonis, seven people want cheese, but you can't move where the pepperonis are. Now they are mostly congregated on this one section of the pizza, but there's one outlier way over on the side here. Say, alright, but each person only gets one piece of pizza. You might have to cut weird shapes to get that other pepperoni there, and that one district is gonna look really large and oversized, but then each person gets one piece. Pulling it back now, yeah. If one person has all of the pepperoni and at like a piece of the third the size of the pizza, but everybody else at least gets cheese, yeah, people are gonna complain about the size of it. But if people are only concerned that they each get a piece of cheese pizza, then you could basically cut off a section of the rest of the pizza that has a bit of cheese and no pepperoni on it, hand it to them, and if that is a condition by which they say, I feel represented here, then they are satisfied. They can be tiny little districts, I'm sorry, tiny little pieces, but they each carry, in the dis in pulling back to the government, they each carry the weight of the people that wanted them. So then the size of the district is less important than the constituency they're in. And you might have to say, look, I cannot, to draw a zone that is decent to look at, I might have to chop this up. I might have to give you like this this tiny little city might have more people in it than this big old district over here, but they each get one representative and they each have equal voting power. That's the thing about representative government. Now, you can also have a problem where you say, I got maybe only 10% of the congress of the representative of the people voted for Harris, but they are in these two cities over here. Now I could draw a district that connects those two cities and it looks weird as heck, but it represents accurately the voting interests of those within those districts. Okay. Or you might say it's close enough populationally that I can have one city as one district, one city is another district, and then you just have because here, if you have like 20 representatives in your state, you don't have to have just one city or one big long weirda representative weirdy zone district connecting all of it. You can actually say these are each gonna have their own section, and population-wise, they're gonna be massive, size-wise, they're gonna be small, but when it comes down to it, they choose one person to represent them, and that one person has the same value, say, as someone from a larger and less populated district when it comes to the passing of laws. So do I believe all gerrymandering is bad? Maybe, or maybe just maybe, it's a proper tool for making sure that your voting interests are more than not met. And maybe, just maybe, some of the maps that have been drawn by the past or present are trying to piss off the people who just want cheese pizza by putting pepperoni enough on there that it really destroys the pizza eating experience. Cheers.