The root of the issue is that the US doesn't separate elected lawmakers from district distribution. The fact[0] elected officials can redraw their own electoral map is just beyond belief, in a tough competition with Citizen's United for the worst political bug (well... feature) in the US. Cherry on top is calling/dubbing one such major and catastrophic instance of gerrymandering "REDMAP". So brazenly rubbing it in while openly chipping at US democracy.
As long as that holds true, theoretical solutions don't really matter when those using them will pry any model into their favor. Not that a mathematical solution even makes sense for a district map that accounts of cultural ties for local representation (short of going for proportional elections, which I think is desirable with some form of local representation).
In Canada, and I presume most countries of the G7, it's an independent entity[1], which one would think goes without saying. That's not incorruptible of course, but I wager it's held it's own for over 60 years here, modern district maps are quite reasonable.
> In Canada, and I presume most countries of the G7, it's an independent entity
Most countries have a proportional system, not a winner takes it all system.
With a proportional system where X% of the votes results in X% of the seats (corrected by 3% or 5% barrier and rounding effects) gerrymandering in some cases can effect who exactly is the MP for a region, but party association matches the vote.
In France two weeks ago they elected the president and the guy who in the second round got most votes nation-wide got the job. No counting per state/depardement/region. No electoral college, simple summing up.
In Germany there is an interesting system that a each electoral district has a candidate elected and then parliament is filled up to match proportion. Some gerrymandering there can lead to some party benefiting from direct mandates, but that has little effect in the end. (There is some weirdness as direct mandates are supposed to be 50% of seats, but if a party gets a lot more direct mandates than proportional weight the compensation is weird)
Generally the issue with giving districting away is that such commission have no democratic legislation, so if citizens are unhappy they have no way to vote them out. The University of Manitoba president is "unreachable" by the electorate. These core issues of core elements of the state (similar to rules for parliamentarians, election of supreme court justices, ...) are always problematic and rely on responsible individuals ...
Gerrymandering is an issue precisely because of winner take all. In a proportional system the definition of districts (if they exist at all) doesn't have the same effect on the outcome of the election.
In fact, the best solution to gerrymandering is adopting an electoral system (proportional) that isn't susceptible to gerrymandering.
Proportional isn't one system, there are further details and depending on them gerrymandering can still be possible (but less important than in winner take all).
For example the mandates might be distributed proportionally globally or per district. In the latter case gerrymandering works when you have rounding problems (10 mandates per district and one party has 9% of support). There are also usually thresholds under which you don't get to the parliament altogether, and the "wasted" votes are distributed proportionally between the other parties - so again, gerrymandering still works when this is done per-district rather than globally.
This is exactly the situation in my country (Poland), and gerrymandering isn't a thing mostly because of people looking at it as corruption and protesting whenever some government tries to do it (last time it was PIS trying to change voting borders to add a lot of PIS-voting countryside to the capital city to finally win elections there :) - after protests they didn't do it).
It's not a separate issue, it's the root cause of the issue. Without Winner Takes All, there's no point in gerrymandering. Without districts, there's not even the possibility of gerrymandering.
It’s funny that you link an article about Canada “ending gerrymandering” when in 2019 Trudeau’s party won the election while losing the popular vote!
You actually just proved the article’s point that gerrymandering exists in any political system that uses geographic districts. Given that fact, maybe SCOTUS wasn’t so dumb in kicking that futile exercise to the states
> You actually just proved the article’s point that
That doesn't logically follow. Even "perfectly" distributed districts, you can win an election like this without having the most popular votes; all you need is for the districts that vote the 2nd/losing party to overwhelmingly vote that party, while the districts they lose be more narrow.
Gerrymandering is a separate issue, and will arrive pretty much any time encumbants can affect district boundaries, as there is an incentive to either create "safe"districts, or to dilute the effect of areas unlikely to vote for you.
SCOTUS was asked to lay out a standard for courts to follow in deciding gerrymandering cases. A court can't know a priori whether a partisan skew in a particular map was deliberate or the result of geographic factors. So you can’t just treat it as a “separate issue.” Among other things, even if there’s evidence of intent, there might not be causation. You can intend to do lots of things that you don’t actually end up accomplishing.
You can kick the problem to a "neutral commission"--but that's giving tremendous power to unelected people. If "commissions of neutral experts" were a real thing that exists we could just dispense with democracy and rely on them! The Constitution is all about asking "who has the power?" but on issues like this people overlook that and get mired in "who would come up with the best answers under unrealistic assumptions about bias?"
Put differently, having legislatures draw districts might make it harder to "vote the bums out." But gerrymanders are actually pretty fragile. Democrats had massive geographic and gerrymandering advantages throughout the 1970s and 1980s: https://crystalball.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/conten.... But Republicans still managed to break through that in 1994, and since then it's flipped back and forth quite a bit. With a "neutral commission," by contrast, you've created a body with a lot of power that can't be voted out.
Also, what target are the experts shooting at anyway? That’s difficult to tell for the same reason it’s hard for the court to tell. Are the experts supposed to be leveling natural partisan skew due to geographic factors?
> If "commissions of neutral experts" were a real thing that exists we could just dispense with democracy and rely on them!
No, we have democracy in order to choose between competing policies and ideologies.
An expert comission has a pre-defined, fixed policy - produce fair district maps, and they work to carry it out.
The idea that no-one can carry out a task without bending the result to suit their personal views is absurd. If you ask some car designers to design you a saloon car, they'll design a saloon car, even if they personally prefer sports cars.
This is an important point, which I'd refine to: we have democracy in order to choose between competing goals and ideologies.
In theory, neutral experts could be used to determine the best policies towards the democratically chosen goals. And it actually works that way for the most part. The vast majority of stuff that goes through a parliament is stuff you never hear about, after all. They're like your car example. It's the few percent of topics where there's controversy where it's difficult, in practice, to find experts who will genuinely stay neutral - precisely because they're so controversial.
> This is an important point, which I'd refine to: we have democracy in order to choose between competing goals and ideologies.
I disagree with that. If you asked people what the goals should be for educating children, they’d probably be in broad agreement. But they differ widely in how they think those goals should be achieved.
Experts are only useful when there is a fairly rigorous scientific framework in place that has predictive power—the ability to predict what will work and what won’t.
Even in areas adjacent to those fields, the effectiveness of expertise quickly breaks down. Public health has elements of both medicine and social psychology, and the results were all over the place during the recent pandemic. When you get into other territory: education, welfare, etc., the real world value of expertise is even less.
> You can kick the problem to a "neutral commission"--but that's giving tremendous power to unelected people
It works pretty well in Australia. Here, federal election district boundaries are drawn by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), an independent federal agency. I've never heard anyone remotely mainstream suggest the system is rigged or gerrymandered or politicised. (There are certain elements of "unfairness" built into the system – most notably, that the least populous state gets the same number of Senators as the most populous state, just like in the US – but the AEC didn't decide that, the Constitution says it.)
The AEC has total control over federal elections–the states have no role in decisions regarding them. For state/territory and local elections, each state and self-governing territory has its own electoral commission, similar in principle to the AEC – although some of the details, such as how exactly it is appointed, will differ. Unlike the US, in Australia, local government has zero role in running elections, even local government elections–all control of elections is at the state/territory and federal levels.
The AEC and its staff (and their state/territory equivalents) are required to be politically neutral. They are not allowed to belong to political parties or publicly support or criticise them.
The chief executive of the AEC is appointed by the government for a five year term. Although government politicians (effectively) choose the chief executive, they are required by law and custom to choose someone without a record of past involvement in politics – the current incumbent used to work in a civilian executive role for the federal law enforcement, before that as a manager for a defence contractor, and before that he was in the military – so obviously someone with some demonstrated experience in management/leadership but without any known political affiliation.
As well as its chief executive, the AEC has two other members – a chair and a third member. The chair must be an active or retired federal judge – the Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Australia gives the government a list of three judges, and the government gets to choose one from that list to become the chair. The third member is also chosen by the government, but legally must be head of another federal agency – (non-binding) tradition dictates that the government choose the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Australian Statistician. Major decisions–such as drawing electoral boundaries–must be made by the Commission as a whole, by a two-thirds majority vote.
> With a "neutral commission," by contrast, you've created a body with a lot of power that can't be voted out.
Nobody can vote out the AEC, but the government can remove its three members from office for "misbehaviour". However, the removed member can challenge the removal in the courts, so if the government tries to remove one without a strong justification, the courts are likely to strike down the attempt, whereas removing them with strong justification is likely to be upheld. To my knowledge, no removal has ever been attempted. (Also, the AEC is established by statute not constitutionally, so Parliament could amend the law to abolish the AEC and replace it with something else–highly unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.)
I can't see why you couldn't use a similar model in the US, and why something like that couldn't work there. (You couldn't copy the exact Australian model into the US, due to various differences between their respective national constitutions, but you could translate some of the major ideas of the Australian model into something that could work in the US context.)
You’re defining gerrymandering as a deliberate act, but a looser definition includes the entire effect of geographic districts on the outcome of elections, including non-intentional effects.
Forming a minority government is not gerrymandering. In a healthy pluralistic democratic country getting >50% of the vote is almost impossible, and it's definitely not a good thing when it happens.
I’m not talking about that part, I’m talking about the part where liberals got 13 percentage points more seats than conservatives while the conservatives got more votes.
It's crazy that local elected legislators end up able to manipulate this, but you can't really prevent the government of the sovereign entity, in this case the Federal Government (which will presumably be elected in a democracy otherwise what's the point) from being able to seize this power if it determines to do so. If it can't then it's not much of a sovereign government.
For example in England an independent Boundary Commission draws these lines. But, they only exist because the government allows them to exist, Parliament can (and often does) ignore what the Commission says, indeed it's perfectly normal for a party who expect to lose seats to complain that it's unfair, and if that party happens to be in government they will stall boundary reforms. In practice the Commission acts as some sort of bulwark against gerrymandering overall, but it's for local stuff that this is more important, because local government just can't seize that power for themselves. That's where the US approach is crazy.
The extra crazy thing in the US is that its sovereign government acts as though it is permanently beholden to dusty old documents (a written "Constitution"), or rather, to the very modern interpretation of those documents by partisan hacks in its "Supreme Court". This makes no sense, and Americans shouldn't put up with it.
In 2018 Michigan voted to create a non-partisan redistricting commission, and from the results of the 2020 census the 13-member commission has selected new districts for the upcoming 2022 elections.
The commission is made up of:
> 4 Republicans, 4 Democrats, and 5 members who identify with neither party; no member can be a partisan officeholder, an employee of such an officeholder, or a lobbyist
> Citizens can apply, and the Secretary of State picks 200 at random, with party and geographic diversity. Republican and Democratic leaders in the Michigan House and Senate can each reject five names, up to 20 in total. Then the Secretary of State picks the 13 members at random. The commission will have final say over the entire process of redistricting.
The results of this have been pretty bad. The chosen members rarely all met, attendance was a huge problem. They delivered the final decision well past their deadline to do so, and the process went over budget. The final map changed the overall outcome from Republican favored, to somewhat republican favored. Democrats sued because majority minority districts were removed.
The election will prove the final results, but the process so far has been pretty bad to get what appear to be not significantly different results.
It is strange to pretend to be a democracy, and then give power to long dead men to decide what the rules are, offering a veto to a handful of unelected people to "interpret" what those men decided long ago.
A democracy should make its own rules as it goes. Americans living today ought to decide the rules under which those Americans live, not hope that somehow slavers who lived centuries ago magically determined the correct rules to live by forever.
I don't think writing some of the rules down in bigger type and calling those a "Constitution" helps much at all, and so I'd argue against it as a practice, but certainly a situation in which most Americans weren't born until after the constitutional rules in place today were fixed is not a success. The last successful new Constitutional Amendment to be written was in 1971. If you were born after 1971 your "democracy" never really decided any of these rules, if you were born after 1950 you never voted for the rules you live under.
In its early days the American Republic fiddled with the Constitution a great deal, and that's much less objectionable. Even as late as a century ago, there was some flexibility left in this vital joint, but today it's gone.
Constitutions are usually written after major crises in a period of national unity supposedly with large if not universal consensus. The idea is that a simple majority is not enough to change them.
Not everybody agrees, for example in UK the parliament is the ultimate sovereign and it is not bound by law other than self restraint.
Parliament offers the ultimate demonstration of how you know who is really in charge. King Charles kept starting wars, the Parliament told him to stop, he didn't and so they executed the King. That's a sovereign entity.
While requiring more than "a simple majority" seems like a mechanism to prevent certain regrettable outcomes, it really doesn't, it's just a line in the sand. We should oppose a million people voting to execute one innocent just as fervently as 500 people voting to execute 499 innocents, the problem isn't the ratio and so a correct solution can't be about the ratio.
Consensus is great, I love consensus - if you can find a consensus that's brilliant. But super-majorities are not a consensus. And of course when you really do have a consensus it tends to be naturally enduring anyway. I am very dubious of people who imagine that there might be a consensus for policy one minute and then shortly after the consensus is gone. I think there was only ever some clever sleight of hand to deliver the illusion of consensus at all for some purpose.
I don’t think the argument is that super-majority is consensus, but that it’s self-evidently closer to consensus than a simple majority is.
When contemplating making major changes in governmental structure, consensus would be best, but super majority is probably second-best and first-achievable.
You can’t run a country needing 100% consensus of over 200M people.
> It's crazy that local elected legislators end up able to manipulate this, but you can't really prevent the government of the sovereign entity, in this case the Federal Government (which will presumably be elected in a democracy otherwise what's the point) from being able to seize this power if it determines to do so.
They arguably have. The voting rights act took away redistricting power from... Bad acting districts. Some (certainly not all) of those districts have arguably made reasonable amends and are at low risk of 'stealing votes from minorities' but are stuck having the feds draw their lines due to a shitty history and no desire of the feds to give it back, while arguably racist northern districts get away with some bullshit Scott free because they aren't southern.
The state and federal governments are both “sovereign,” and the states were there first, exactly like the EU. Some people think that the states are obsolete and should be absorbed into the federal government, but that’s definitely not how sovereignty works. (Ukraine has existed as a distinct sovereignty for less time than South Dakota, but they seem pretty fixated by these arbitrary lines on a map!)
> The extra crazy thing in the US is that its sovereign government acts as though it is permanently beholden to dusty old documents (a written "Constitution"), or rather, to the very modern interpretation of those documents by partisan hacks in its "Supreme Court". This makes no sense, and Americans shouldn't put up with it.
I’d lecture you about the concept of “laws” but let me try a different tack. A bunch of Americans are flipping out right now because the Supreme Court refuses to invoke those “dusty old documents” to overturn a validly enacted law from a duly elected legislature. Who are the “partisan hacks” here?
The states all signed the Constitution, which requires a "republican" form of government. Such a thing was described (I think by Hamilton) as one where "the people choose their own rulers." There could be many implementations of this law, worthy of debate, but gerrymandering is not plausibly one of them.
I doubt that the concept of "laws" is a single coherent concept, but supports many different views, such as the conditions under which people are ethically obligated to obey them.
> There could be many implementations of this law, worthy of debate, but gerrymandering is not plausibly one of them.
The debate isn’t about whether gerrymandering is acceptable, but over who should be given the power, if anyone, to do something about it, and whether, if the courts are empowered to do so, they have clear guidelines to apply in exercising that power.
> The state and federal governments are both “sovereign,” and the states were there first, exactly like the EU.
To borrow from Mao Zedong, "sovereignty" grows from the barrel of a gun — in that sense, only one U.S. state has been sovereign in the past couple of centuries,* not least because of the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution, to say nothing of the Civil War Amendments and the 19th and 26th amendments (giving women and 18 year olds the right to vote).
And the former Confederate states are a special case: They probably make the most noise about their alleged sovereignty (apart from a few of the low-population, right-wing outliers in the non-coastal West), but they indisputably haven't been sovereign since Appomattox — they gambled and lost in a world-historic example of FAFO.
* The one exception was Texas, which was an independent republic from 1836 to 1845, with its own small army and navy as well as embassies in Washington, London, and Paris; Texas, of course, was one of the rebelling Confederate states that incontestably lost its claim to sovereignty in 1865.
> A bunch of Americans are flipping out right now because the Supreme Court refuses to invoke those “dusty old documents” to overturn a validly enacted law from a duly elected legislature. Who are the “partisan hacks” here?
A bunch of Americans were flipping out months ago because a local legislature basically flipped the bird to the Federal government and decided it gets to overrule national laws, and then a Supreme Court majority said yeah, we're not going to explain why but it's urgently necessary to let you go ahead with that with no further discussion.
In principle, if you believed a word of what these Supreme Court Justices said, you could do all sorts of violence to the Republic via this same mechanism. But of course if you were trying to, say, reduce gun violence, rather than help ruin poor women's lives you'd suddenly find they remember that you can't override national laws and there'd be an injunction in force before you could say "Shadow docket".
National versus state law is irrelevant here because there has never been federal law. There has never been sufficient support in the federal legislature to codify Roe as federal legislation.[1] Roe has therefore never been anything more than the Supreme Court’s interpretation of “dusty old documents.”
Phrases like “live by the sword, die by the sword” and “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” come to mind. You can’t, as OP did, call the Constitution “dusty old documents” that shouldn’t bind the nation on one hand, and in the same breath complain that the Supreme Court refused to rely on that “dusty old document” to overrule a law that the elected legislature of Mississippi chose to enact against a backdrop where the national legislature has never said anything different. There being no contrary federal law, that “dusty old document” is the only reason anyone has ever cared what nine lawyers think about abortion.
[1] There still isn’t—only 30% of Americans support Roe’s 22-24 week viability limit, and there is strong public support for restrictions that Roe prohibits: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-americans-stand-o.... Roe thus differs from even those other cases, like Griswold, that have become uncontroversial due to changes in public opinion.
There probably isn't strong support for the outright general ban that's coming to most states. My state has a trigger law and is unfortunately geographically right smack dab in the middle of a bunch of other states which will ban.
Where do you get “most states?” Only 13 states passed trigger laws after Roe. Nearly all are places where that’s probably what the majority in those states want. Several states like Michigan and Virginia have pre-existing bans on the books. I expect those will get quickly sorted out.
It is slightly less than half where abortion will likely be banned, my bad. I was looking at the chart on the link you gave. I didn't mean that most would automatically trigger.
> According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, a group that advocates for abortion rights, abortion would become illegal in about half the country if Roe were overturned. Its metric indicates that 24 states would likely ban abortion outright if Roe is weakened or overturned.
And I'd have to see numbers to believe you when you say that it's what the residents of those states want.
An estimate from an abortion advocacy organization about what happens if Roe is overturned means about as much as saying that america will become socialist if Biden is elected. If a state hasn’t been able to pass a trigger law yet—when they can do so just to virtue signal without actually having any consequences on abortion access—then it’s certainly not going to be able to do it after Roe is overruled when real chips are on the table.
> The state and federal governments are both “sovereign,” and the states were there first, exactly like the EU.
The majority of the US states were not there first – the majority of the US states were effectively created by Congress. Federal territories–which as such were fully under control of the federal government–were elevated into states by Congressional decision; frequently, Congress also decided how many states some federal territory would be partitioned into. The only states which could be said to have had some independent sovereignty pre-existing federal control were the original 13, Vermont and Texas. One might also count Kentucky and Maine, being consensual splits from the original 13, in the list; possibly also West Virginia, although the degree of consent involved in its separation is more debatable. So we are talking about 15/50, maybe 18/50 if we are generous. (Hawaii doesn't really count because the State of Hawaii is not continuous with independent Hawaii, since for over 60 years in-between Hawaii was a federal territory–but even counting Hawaii, that's only 19, leaving 62% of US states created by Congress out of non-sovereign territories.)
It is also different in that US states can have their sovereignty further limited, against their consent, by constitutional amendment (which they may have voted down, but the other 3/4th of states supported), or by Supreme Court decision (who decide what "state sovereignty" means in practice, and can choose to interpret the concept broadly or narrowly, and may alter its boundaries over time as their case law evolves due to changes in judicial whim and the ideological composition of the Court.) By contrast, under EU law, any further major transfers of sovereignty from the member states to the EU require unanimous agreement.
And the biggest difference is that the EU is a club you are allowed to leave (as Brexit demonstrates), the US is a club from which exit is near-impossible (see the US Civil War). That fact gives EU member states vastly more sovereignty than US states have. Indeed, it is disputed whether secession of a state from the US is possible even if Congress agreed to it – many say it would require a constitutional amendment. The EU treaties now contain an explicit right to leave, and it was generally assumed that one existed implicitly even before it was explicitly stated. If the EU tried to reduce the sovereignty of a member state against its will, bypassing unanimity (such as via qualified majority voting, or via an ECJ decision), the member state can always respond by leaving – and it is likely a mere serious threat of leaving would result in them being allowed to stay but with an exemption from the decision in question. What US state could ever hope for that kind of sovereignty?
I don't know why so many Americans want to compare the US states to the EU member states–it is not a very sensible comparison. Better comparisons for the US states would be the Canadian provinces, the Australian states, the German Länder, etc–they are roughly the same kind of thing as US states are (units of a federation lacking their own sovereignty under international law), whereas EU member states are a very different kind of thing (fully sovereign states under international law)
Also, if you're say, British Prime Minister, or German Chancellor leading the EU is clearly a demotion and nobody would seriously retire from leading their country to head the EU instead - whereas if you were say, Governor of Texas, the job of US President is an enormous promotion that you probably can't get.
Fair, I wasn't thinking of the Council (historically President of the Council was not a role for an individual, Tusk was I think the second such person) and perhaps I should have.
> It is also different in that US states can have their sovereignty further limited, against their consent, by constitutional amendment (which they may have voted down, but the other 3/4th of states supported),
I’m not sure that’s a dispositive distinction. The EU and the US are, on paper, more similar than different. In particular, EU law overrides national law just like federal law overrides state law. In some ways the EU is even more powerful—for example it can directly force member states to enforce EU law, while the federal government can’t force states to enforce federal law.
> or by Supreme Court decision (who decide what "state sovereignty" means in practice, and can choose to interpret the concept broadly or narrowly, and may alter its boundaries over time as their case law evolves due to changes in judicial whim and the ideological composition of the Court.)
> This groundbreaking case established the principle of supremacy in EU law, which is an independent source of law that cannot be overridden by domestic laws.
> By contrast, under EU law, any further major transfers of sovereignty from the member states to the EU require unanimous agreement.
The notion of the Supremacy of EU law over national law was created by judicial fiat. It was included in the EU constitution, which was never adopted by consent, yet remains the law of the EU.
> Better comparisons for the US states would be the Canadian provinces, the Australian states, the German Länder, etc–they are roughly the same kind of thing as US states are (units of a federation lacking their own sovereignty under international law)
The German Lander are a better comparison, because the Canadian and Australian states were created at the same time as those countries. And the German Lander are in fact sovereign entities.
More generally, international law doesn’t recognize one kind of “sovereign entity” and demote everything below that to “administrative subdivision.” Sovereign states can cede part of their sovereignty to a federation and yet retain part of that sovereignty, as the US states did, as the EU member nations did, as the members of the Soviet Union did, and as the members of the United Kingdom did. The aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the impending dissolution of the United Kingdom (of Scotland secedes) demonstrates that these sub-federal boundaries continue to have meaning.
The problem is that the primate of the ECJ over national supreme/constitutional courts is not settled [1]. As far as I understand, it is a fiction where everybody plays along, but an actual conflict can lead to a major constitutional crisis (see for example [2]).
In practice diplomatic solutions are found to avoid direct clashes.
[1] ECJ has of course claimed otherwise, but some national constitutional courts reserve the right to interpret and follow their own constitutions, even when they would lead to diverging from ECJ rulings. In fact they might not have other options.
> The German Lander are a better comparison, because the Canadian and Australian states were created at the same time as those countries.
The Canadian provinces and Australian states were pre-existing self-governing British colonies, and are legally (under domestic law) considered to be continuous with those colonies. When the Colony of New South Wales became the State of New South Wales on 1 January 1901, initially very little changed – the colonial government became the state government, in fact it was the same thing, they just replaced the word "colony" with "state". Gradually, certain powers were transferred – over time, the Australian states lost some of their powers which were taken over by the federal government; concurrently, London gradually gave up the powers which it had over the Australian colonies/states, either passing them to the federal government, or the states. It was a slow process over decades, and is generally not viewed as having been officially completed until the Australia Acts of 1986, which formally terminated the UK Parliament's legislative power over the Australian states (which however had de facto fallen out of use decades earlier).
Also, under Australian constitutional law, the Australian states are considered "sovereign", albeit the term is understood differently than in US or German law – sovereignty comes from the Crown (the British monarchy), and the states are sovereign because their governments have a direct relationship with the Crown which acts as their formal head, separate from the federal government's relationship. In a certain sense, the Australian states are more "sovereign" than the Canadian provinces, because their relationship with the monarchy is more direct–Australian state premiers directly advise the monarch who to appoint as the state Governor (the monarch's representative in the state); by contrast, Canadian Lieutenant-Governors (the monarch's representative in the province) are appointed by the Governor-General on the advice of the Prime Minister.
> More generally, international law doesn’t recognize one kind of “sovereign entity” and demote everything below that to “administrative subdivision.” Sovereign states can cede part of their sovereignty to a federation and yet retain part of that sovereignty, as the US states did, as the EU member nations did, as the members of the Soviet Union did, and as the members of the United Kingdom did
The same word can mean different things in different legal systems. A good example is "treaty", whose meaning under US domestic law is much narrower than under international law. Under US law, something is only a "treaty" if the President asks and receives the Senate's consent to its ratification, otherwise it is just an "international agreement". As far as international law is concerned, "treaty" and "international agreement" are synonyms, and the distinction US law draws between them is largely irrelevant.
In the same way, when domestic legal systems such as those of the US or Australia speak of "state sovereignty", they aren't using that phrase in the same sense that international law uses it. Nevada is a "sovereign state" under US constitutional law, New South Wales is a "sovereign state" under Australian constitutional law; but neither is a "sovereign state" as public international law defines that term.
> The aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the impending dissolution of the United Kingdom (of Scotland secedes) demonstrates that these sub-federal boundaries continue to have meaning.
As long as sub-national boundaries remain sub-national, international law doesn't care about them. The moment they become national boundaries instead, international law suddenly starts caring. When independence occurs – which is primarily a factual rather than legal question - the status that entity had under domestic law prior to its independence has no international legal relevance. The US has "sovereign states" such as California and "non-sovereign territories" such as Puerto Rico; suppose the US suddenly breaks up, and both California and Puerto Rico become independent sovereign states – the fact that one used to be "sovereign" under US law and the other wasn't, has zero relevance to international law; from an international law viewpoint, they are both now sovereign, but prior to their independence neither was.
Similarly, whether a newly independent state is regaining its past independence, or has never been independent before, has little or no relevance under international law-as far as international law is concerned, prior to its independence, there was no "state" (in the international law sense); and when a state regains its independence, it is not always considered legally to be a continuation of the earlier state (whether or not it is really depends on the circumstances of the case, and whether other states choose to treat it as one or not). From an international law viewpoint, if Scotland becomes independent, effectively that is a new state called "Scotland", lacking any direct legal continuity with the former state of the same name
The boundaries between EU member states are within the scope of international law, because they are inter-state boundaries; the boundaries between US states or Australian states are outside the scope of international law, because they are intra-state boundaries, in the international law sense of "state".
Allowing politicians to own property is a big mistake. If someone wants to be the president or a similar high up office, permanent lifelong loss of property rights should be required. Upon rising to a high governmental office, all property is sold and donated to charitable causes. This helps weed out selfish people.
As long as that holds true, theoretical solutions don't really matter when those using them will pry any model into their favor. Not that a mathematical solution even makes sense for a district map that accounts of cultural ties for local representation (short of going for proportional elections, which I think is desirable with some form of local representation).
In Canada, and I presume most countries of the G7, it's an independent entity[1], which one would think goes without saying. That's not incorruptible of course, but I wager it's held it's own for over 60 years here, modern district maps are quite reasonable.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP
1: https://www.vox.com/2014/4/15/5604284/us-elections-are-rigge...