The Thomposon Report
As citizens of the United States of America, we view electoral politics as our chance to express our views and change our country. Presidential elections come around in November every four years. However, we as vote casting citizens do not usually think farther than our own vote. The process of voting and in turn elections is very complex. During this small time frame of voting season three very specific temporal properties apply. These temporal properties are periodicity, simultaneity, and finality. Periodicity is how often citizen’s vote, simultaneity is the range of time in which citizens have to vote, and finality is the unchangeable result that is reached during the vote. The Thompson Report is an article from the American Political Science Review that describes along with the temporal properties anomalies that can occur to weaken the democratic process.
We know that periodicity is the intervals at which citizen’s vote, and the Thompson Report describes some of the anomalies that occur within the system that make it flawed. The legislature branch has the dominate role in redrawing electoral districts based on their population changes. This basically means that they can control whose vote counts for what. If we live in a small district we may only have one representative. However if we lived in a large metropolis district we would have several representatives. The amount of representatives allotted to each district is decided by the party who is in control and the representatives of that party already controlling the district. This means that they can shift the vote by giving certain districts in which they know will vote a certain way more or less representatives based on their preference.
For example, if two districts have a relatively equal amount of citizens and one district was strongly democratic where as the other was strongly republican. The legislatures in control of deciding the amount of representatives that should...
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