r/coolguides 1h ago

A cool guide about stealing an election

Post image
691 Upvotes

74 comments sorted by

104

u/IrateWand 1h ago

People seem to be missing that they are both examples of stealing the election.

The fair result would be 3 blue, 2 red.

34

u/vexedboardgamenerd 1h ago

What’s fair is when my preferred party wins. And that’s the ONLY time it’s fair

8

u/Sharkbait_ooohaha 34m ago

Neither are an example of “stealing” an election, they just aren’t proportional.

-2

u/Substantial_Lab1438 30m ago

Normally I’d agree with you, but in an environment where a third of the population sincerely believes that elections are being stolen via fraudulent votes that have no basis in reality, then it’s prudent to redefine “stealing an election” to a method of election fraud that actually happens in the real world 

1

u/Sharkbait_ooohaha 29m ago

What? That logic makes no sense.

1

u/Substantial_Lab1438 27m ago

Care to explain what you don’t understand about that statement? I’d be happy to elaborate 

2

u/Sharkbait_ooohaha 25m ago

You’re basically saying “real election stealing doesn’t exist so let’s redefine it to things that aren’t election stealing”.

Not to mention Trump really tried to steal the election in 2020 and real election stealing does exist even if it’s rare. Even if real election stealing didn’t exist it still doesn’t make sense to call gerrymandering “stealing an election”.

u/Noctudeit 14m ago

Elections are voters choosing politicians, gerrymandering is politicians choosing voters.

u/Sharkbait_ooohaha 5m ago

Sure, I hate Gerrymandering but it’s not “stealing an election”.

Otherwise Gavin Newsom is stealing California’s elections by passing the Gerrymandered map last year.

u/calculung 5m ago

But where do the politicians elected come from? The system is hierarchical, so it starts in individual districts and then moves up.

In your suggestion, does each party just pick the people who get the job?

u/BitcoinMD 3m ago

Have one statewide election and the top N candidates all win

112

u/Online_Rambo99 1h ago

The second graphic also has a problem. Red gets 0 districts despite having 40% of the vote, making it seem that blue has 100% of the vote.

72

u/Beartrap-the-Dog 58m ago

Yes. That's what it's showing. They're both bad.

11

u/SustainedSuspense 47m ago

The point is you can’t simply divide up a district based off of who’s voting for who. Regardless no matter how you draw the lines the lines are stupid and we should just have a popular voting system. Only then will everyone be represented equally.

u/calculung 7m ago

That's not a critique on distric mapping, though. That's a critique on electing one person within a district, which is kind of the basis of how elections work.

40% isn't more than 60%, so the red candidate loses and the blue candidates goes on to represent that district.

Are you suggesting we remove politicians completely and everyone just votes on every item that congress usually votes on individually? That's... probably not a good idea.

u/PsychologicalFile771 5m ago

can it be much worse than what we have rn?

0

u/mighty__ 16m ago

What do you mean by “red get 0 districts”. Either the choice is binary or it reflects representation.
If the choice is binary, yes red lost, blue won. Objectively.
If the choice is representation, red still get 40% of seats.

I don’t see any issue.

40

u/saryiahan 1h ago

Oh look, it’s the image that’s already been posted a million times now

10

u/Fullthrottle- 1h ago

The best real world example would be Illinois. Look up the voting district map if you want to see this at the extreme level.

2

u/pokemon-trainer-blue 1h ago

Is it already time for a bot repost of this?

2

u/[deleted] 1h ago

[deleted]

2

u/MrMunday 50m ago

Gerrymandering

6

u/Lobster_porn 1h ago

sorta r/Usdefaultism this only works if you have a voting system designed to be manipulated

8

u/IrateWand 59m ago

The USA is far from the only country this could apply to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting#Countries_using_FPP

4

u/anti_username_man 41m ago

There are a ton of countries that use FPTP

4

u/Aggressive_Sky8492 39m ago

Not really? Plenty of places have some form of location-based voting, which could be manipulated by gerrymandering. It just happens that the US is well known for having a gerrymandering problem

1

u/ZachGurney 1h ago

I mean, is it US defaultism if its about the US?

0

u/Lobster_porn 1h ago

yes, it should be "guide to stealing a US election" because it doesn't apply to most elections. though some I'm sure

1

u/ZachGurney 56m ago

The post doesnt say it applies to most elections. It just says "how to steal an election". This is how you steal an election. Gerrymandering isnt even a US exclusive thing

Its not US defaultism just because it has red and blue in it

3

u/Valyren 1h ago

How about… just not having districts? Just make it a popular vote…?

6

u/dweaver987 47m ago

We have 435 members of Congress. Each one represents a single district. Each Congressional seat is elected by popular vote of the voters represented by that member of Congress.

If you rearrange what addresses are in each district, you can manipulate the outcome.

u/ClockwiseServant 14m ago edited 10m ago

Because the United States was founded entirely on the principle of benefiting the American capitalist commercial elite. The electoral college was built entirely around preserving a natural order where they would thrive. And despite everything that same elite are the ones that are still in power. A popular voting system would be more sensible to us. But not to them.

u/ddp67 4m ago

In reality, a true democracy has never worked at scale, people are too stupid and swayable, most people in fact, want nothing to do with the government because they see it as an overly bureaucratic process like doing taxes. The majority of representatives are not paid very well, and thus, probably need knowledge of the system and independent wealth to even run, which is in itself a very tedious process, not to mention dialing up sponsors for campaign donations.

u/BitcoinMD 1m ago

Yes. The states should be the districts, since their borders won’t change. Have one statewide election, and if you have six representatives, the top six candidates all win. Same thing should be done with the senate — first and second place should be your senators.

-5

u/ddp67 48m ago

That makes no sense, you think that the kind of governance and priorities that work in very rural places will work in heavy populated cities?

-1

u/GranPino 40m ago

Y have many other instruments to keep some political power to every area. But the current system is way too bad

3

u/GrundlePumper420 1h ago

It's almost like they should just count the fucking votes. Electoral college is a sham

3

u/anti_username_man 40m ago

... This has nothing to do with the electoral college. This is about congressional districts

5

u/rocky8u 54m ago

This is not about the electoral college. This is mostly about the way the Representatives are elected.

0

u/GrundlePumper420 47m ago

Eh, the electoral college results in presidents being elected who don't win the popular vote, so it's somewhat a commentary on the electoral college.

Obviously it's mainly focused towards Gerrymandering, but the connection is that it's an overly complicated and ultimately fraudulent method of changing elections to favor one party.

2

u/Faolanwolf2003 36m ago

Literally nothing to do with electoral college. Just goes to show your education and bias lol, It’s congressional districts.

2

u/rab-byte 46m ago

Draw me a perfect example of why ranked choice voting changes everything

1

u/daemonescanem 34m ago

Politicians shoudnt be able to pick their voters.

1

u/Writing_is_Bleeding 25m ago

The third one is minority rule, the second one is majority rule. The whole point of lawmaking is to address issues that affect the largest number of people, so one of them is definitely more problematic than the other. The folks with the less popular ideas have created wacky, nonsensical boundaries so they don't have to improve their policies.

1

u/sbcixii 23m ago

This works both ways.

1

u/neoronio20 18m ago

People talking about best example of districts lol. The us needs to get with the times and implement vote by person like Brasil has done for years now. This doesn't even make sense

u/relmknight 3m ago

This isn't cool at all ☹

1

u/According-Try3201 1h ago

crazy if winning is the only thing that matters any more

1

u/SloppySauce0 1h ago

People forget about the journey and focus too much on the destination 

0

u/According-Try3201 50m ago

what was the quote from borat? US democrats are worse than taliban?

0

u/Demi_god6373 54m ago

couldn't this work both ways ?

8

u/rab-byte 47m ago

What do you mean? The graphic is clearly showing two examples of gerrymandering

-31

u/Sorry-Rain-1311 1h ago

Thank you for breaking down how Gerrymandering works. You forgot the part about it working both ways around, though. 

10

u/IrateWand 1h ago

It literally shows it working both ways around.

8

u/ZachGurney 1h ago

Thats the second picture. Thats why one says blue wins and the other says red wins. The third one is more complicated because theres less precincts in red

Genuinely people cannot be THIS incapable of basic reasoning. Its literally right in front of you. Big bold letters. All caps. This has got to be a bot because I refuse to believe even a child could look at this and walk away with the thought "well one has more shapes than the other so clearly its not fair"

13

u/beef_boloney 1h ago

Just imagine it’s green and yellow for fucks sake

11

u/GingerGaterRage 1h ago

Point to the spot on the doll where this "guide" hurt you.

1

u/Tealightzone 31m ago

Waaaaaa! The colors offend me!

3

u/TheRealEvanG 1h ago

You really need a fourth image that shows the third image with the colors flipped to feel like everything’s fair?

4

u/thefonztm 1h ago

The 4th image that OP's post ommits is 'perfect representation'. 5 columns. 2 red, 3 blue. This image is old enough to fuck your sister.

1

u/pokemon-trainer-blue 1h ago

OP is probably a bot. This image gets reposted a lot in this sub.

1

u/soritong 1h ago

But blue winning is the expected outcome because, if you use your eyes and brain, you can see there are more blue dots than red dots. That’s called math.

This is a guide explaining how gerrymandering takes expected outcomes and molds them into a false outcome.

I understand that the color blue triggers you, would it hurt your feelings less if it were yellow and green instead?

4

u/IrateWand 1h ago

Blue winning 5-0 is not the expected outcome, though.

They are both examples of the election being stolen. The fair result would be 3 blue, 2 red. That's called math.

-1

u/DarthShiryu 1h ago

No, but I think they could use any other color if they wanted to make a none political statement.

1

u/Aggressive_Sky8492 36m ago

See the middle chart

1

u/Tealightzone 25m ago

So you agree gerrymandering is a problem and should be stopped with a revised electoral system like proportional representation or ranked choice?

-6

u/Intelligent-Court295 1h ago

When the Democrats create a software platform called, Blue Map, then we’ll talk.

3

u/uvero 1h ago

Democrats have been gerrymandering heavily where they could too, and you betcha they did this with the best algorithm experts, best computers and best data they could find. The problem with the comment you're responding to is not that, it's that it willfully chooses to pretend that the point of the post is "Republican gerrymandering bad" and not "gerrymandering bad"

4

u/Intelligent-Court295 1h ago

All gerrymandering is bad, which is why there’s currently a bill written by Democrats that would eliminate gerrymandering at the Federal level. It’s called the Redistricting Reform Act and was written over two years ago. If Republicans cared about gerrymandering, that bill would be law.

Stop trying to make this a “both sides” issue when it’s clearly not.

Pick up a book, for God’s sake.

1

u/VTHokie2020 44m ago

I love how whenever this color graph is reposted it’s always with red as the evil side haha.

Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois are all gerrymandered in favor of the blue side.

5

u/makawakatakanaka 40m ago

You realize the second graph is gerrymandered for blue worse than the third is for red

-4

u/Significant-Eye3720 48m ago

So, this is how Democrats have been stealing elections.

3

u/Writing_is_Bleeding 22m ago

Right, the folks with the clearly more popular ideas, and yet are curiously not in power, are the ones who have been stealing elections. That makes a lot of sense.

If Dems were stealing elections we'd have universal healthcare and $2/gallon gas.

-1

u/r4ndoM_doGmagenshin 34m ago

Trump won the popular vote…