The Louisiana state legislature has until the middle of January to enact a new congressional map after a federal court ruled that the state’s current map illegally disfranchises Black voters.
A conservative federal appeals court in New Orleans issued the deadline on Friday. According to the order, if the state legislature doesn’t pass a new map by the deadline, then a lower district court should conduct a trial and develop a plan for the 2024 elections.
Whether the outgoing Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, will call a special session to redraw the political boundaries or whether his elected Republican successor, Jeff Landry – who will be inaugurated on 8 January – will have enough time to call a special redistricting session and meet the court’s deadline has yet to be determined.
Black voters in Louisiana represent about one-third of the state’s population, but currently represent a majority in just one out of six congressional districts in the state.
I wonder what the results would look like if, when courts rejected district maps, and there was no acceptable map created, they instead mandated that there would be no districts and the top N candidates statewide would go to Congress.
That’s hopeful, but republicans would never allow it. For the same reason gerrymandering is a thing in the first place. Republicans don’t win fair, truly democratic elections.
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There is a voting system like that, and it works quite well:
In a nutshell, votes are first counted in a district; if I’ve candidate had enough votes to secure a seat they do so, but all the remaining votes and votes above the count needed to win the seat, are pooled into a larger region. A number of seats are then assigned in the larger region, depending on which exact system is used, ‘unused’ votes from the region might be pooled on a state or national level afterwards.