When I first read this a month ago, I looked up the Charter's provisions and tried to understand what was going on. And the details, which should guide the court process, seemed useless in understanding the thing.
From my US-centric view, of course, higher level governments should mind their own business unless there's a clear violation of law taking place. And the timing was asinine. I think some of the gerrymandering judges were trying to redraw electoral maps down here after the primaries.
Who cares if a city wants to have 47 councilmen? If the citizens pay for them with their own taxes, let them have as many as they want. In fact, I generally think people are better represented with more representatives. But I don't think that's too well grounded a thought.
But then again, I don't see the point of the gerrymandering cases down here.* The current ones are based on party representation, but that's extra-constitutional -- and the way to achieve proportional representation, if that's the only goal you have, is to use proportional representation as a system. And which factors to include in redistricting is a political question: what does the state legislature, which is tasked with the job, think those factors are?
But in all, except for the changing of districts mid-election, the exact numbers and dispositions of the districts is procedural, and therefore insincere, as they say.
* If you look at the two different "ungerrymandered" maps here and compare them to the "gerrymandered" one, you can't really see the difference. It's not this one from PA, which is like the court-ordered majority-minority districts that started the gerrymandering bitching in the 90's. The Wisconsin gerrymandering is only gerrymandering because of its effects, that is, because it helps one party over the other.
It takes Chutzpah for someone to support lawsuits for middling complaints and then whine, in the same article, that the lawsuits are costing the state money.
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From my US-centric view, of course, higher level governments should mind their own business unless there's a clear violation of law taking place. And the timing was asinine. I think some of the gerrymandering judges were trying to redraw electoral maps down here after the primaries.
Who cares if a city wants to have 47 councilmen? If the citizens pay for them with their own taxes, let them have as many as they want. In fact, I generally think people are better represented with more representatives. But I don't think that's too well grounded a thought.
But then again, I don't see the point of the gerrymandering cases down here.* The current ones are based on party representation, but that's extra-constitutional -- and the way to achieve proportional representation, if that's the only goal you have, is to use proportional representation as a system. And which factors to include in redistricting is a political question: what does the state legislature, which is tasked with the job, think those factors are?
But in all, except for the changing of districts mid-election, the exact numbers and dispositions of the districts is procedural, and therefore insincere, as they say.
* If you look at the two different "ungerrymandered" maps here and compare them to the "gerrymandered" one, you can't really see the difference. It's not this one from PA, which is like the court-ordered majority-minority districts that started the gerrymandering bitching in the 90's. The Wisconsin gerrymandering is only gerrymandering because of its effects, that is, because it helps one party over the other.
It takes Chutzpah for someone to support lawsuits for middling complaints and then whine, in the same article, that the lawsuits are costing the state money.