Squiggly lines do not necessarily imply a gerrymander. California is unfairly on this list even though it’s districts are drawn by and independent bipartisan commission that attempts (generally successfully) to give an even balance to both political parties as well as different ethnic groups.
That's a big part of the problem right there. We've shoehorned US politics into two silos that constantly steal all the feed from the much smaller independent silos.
Not necessarily. It would take a pretty tremendous gerrymander to give the Greens (as an example) a seat in the state legislature. At the point where they held a meaningful percent of the vote we could easily incorporate their voters into this framework. The simple truth is most people support one of the two main parties (independents are about 1/3 of voters but these are generally aligned between the two major parties than any alternative). You could take issue with the legislature being allowed to localities instead of parties. The scheme used by the European parliament is nice for representing more fringe political orientations but it neglects the immediate material interests of different regions. Given that most of what the state legislature does is allocate resources to different localities, the ideological issues are probably secondary to the basic questions like who gets water, or funding for roads.
I don't think that I am understanding the objection. The idea is that the legislature should roughly match the popular vote. Having a legislature that proportionately represents the demographics and opinions of the populace is essential for a meaningful democracy what is the problem?
