Question: What is my position on gerrymandering

Yeah, so the difficulty here is that technically speaking, gerrymandering is already illegal. The problem that we face is that it's difficult and expensive to challenge uh the districting in court. We have seen a few times in cases where this has worked in the United States. For example, in Wisconsin, they recently overturned uh a district there for being unlawful.

However, whether or not a court case is successful in rejecting a district depends on the metrics legally bound to the districts and their thresholds. For example, in Texas, on the redistrict website, you can find that race and population are two metrics that are recorded for each district. Right? In Texas, basically there's a rule that says each district

must roughly have the same amount of population as other districts. So, for example, for state house uh districts in Texas, the population has to be around 200,000, and for a Senate districts it has to be around 900,000. Uh however, uh whether whether or not a district setup can be considered legal or unlawful is based upon how far away the proposed district's population is off from those

numbers. And sometimes, unfortunately, the thresholds for how far off the population can be can be can be quite lenient and thus gives a lot of power to those who want to draw a lines in the sand. Now, in order to fix the problem of gerrymandering in Texas, uh, we need to tighten these thresholds, right? As well as I think uh we need to look

at and tighten other thresholds as well. For example, we see a lot of uh black and brown communities being divided up into uh two and sometimes maybe even three different districts. Uh that needs to be tightened. In addition, I think there's another metric that we should be looking at as well. And I'm gonna bring up uh this metric called uh

looking at the standard deviation of land ownership. Now that might sound a little bit confusing, but let me let me try to paint a picture like this. Draw a bar graph on how many acres of land everyone owns in that district, and then add another bar there for how many people uh have apartments or simply live in a residential uh family home. Now, if you do that, you'll find that in district

64, for example, there are a lot of people from UNT, there's a little bit of suburb, and a lot of farmers. Now, the farmers, they're very rural. Now, right, they they own a lot of land mass. But again, we're batching in all of UNT, all those students there, and a little bit of the suburbs, for uh particularly uh northwest Denton County, and then uh HD

64 reaches far out to its western uh neighbor county. So what you can tell from a human standpoint what they're doing there is they're trying to mix the farmers with UNT to try to you know uh weaken the vote uh from those college kids out there and the suburban people as well. But if we were to establish a rule where we had to look at the metrics of saying, hey, look,

if you have a wide standard deviation of land ownership like that, then that would take care of this problem. Because if we said if we establish a rules saying, hey, look, the standard deviation cannot be that high, then essentially that would force all the those kids in UNT to be districted into the same district to the same areas as those immediate suburbs and would not be able to reach out to the more rural areas, and vice

versa, because in the end of the day, these districts are supposed to be uh really drawn around uh cultural uh cultural similarities, right? So you would expect those in rural areas to be part of their own district, you would expect those in city areas to be their own district, you would not see districts reaching back and forth between ultra-rural and ultra-suburban, andor even like college kids near city life.

You you wouldn't see that if the lines were drawn fairly, and I think the only way to establish a rule or a law to make sure that that is actually upheld is absolutely to look at the standard deviation of land ownership and how many acres each uh each individual owns versus those who live in a residential home versus an apartment.