gerrymandering the states

[ButterflyBlood]

I'm not talking about districts here, but the actual states. it probably can't be done, but hyphothetically, how would you redraw state borders to benefit us? Only rule being you must keep 50 states.

[gmoney]

1. Presidentially, it wouldn't make much difference

Because the electoral votes roughly equate to population.

You could fuse Idaho/Montana/Wyoming/North Dakota/South Dakota into one giant state that would only get a few electoral votes, then chop NY/Mass/Cali into about three or four slices each.

[unblock]

2. wrong!

the 435 electoral votes that are due to the us rep count would not really be affected by this ... they're already gerrymandered. opening up the idea of being able to gerrymander congressional district across existing state borders might change things slightly, but not much.

it's the 100 electoral votes that are due to the senate count that would greatly be affected. for example, simply by redrawing state boundaries to achieve equally populous states, this would eliminate the 'small state' advantage in the current scheme.

on the other hand, for an extremely partisan democratic solution, just carve up san francisco and manhattan into 49 'states' and the rest of the country into the remaining one....