Hi. I’m Gareth McCaughan. I’ve been a consistent reader and occasional commenter since the Overcoming Bias days. My LW username is “gjm” (not “Gjm” despite the wiki software’s preference for that capitalization). Elsewehere I generally go by one of “g”, “gjm”, or “gjm11”. The URL listed here is for my website and blog, neither of which has been substantially updated for several years. I live near Cambridge (UK) and work for Hewlett-Packard (who acquired the company that acquired what remained of the small company I used to work for, after they were acquired by someone else). My business cards say “mathematician” but in practice my work is a mixture of simulation, data analysis, algorithm design, software development, problem-solving, and whatever random engineering no one else is doing. I am married and have a daughter born in mid-2006. The best way to contact me is by email: firstname dot lastname at pobox dot com. I am happy to be emailed out of the blue by interesting people. If you are an LW regular you are probably an interesting person in the relevant sense even if you think you aren’t.
If you’re wondering why some of my very old posts and comments are at surprisingly negative scores, it’s because for some time I was the favourite target of old-LW’s resident neoreactionary troll, sockpuppeteer and mass-downvoter.
If I am reading things correctly, section 2 of the Voting Rights Act says:
(and subsection (b) clarifies this in what seem like straightforward ways).
It seems to me that if this “asymmetrically binds Republicans” then the conclusion is “so much the worse for the Republicans” not “so much the worse for the Voting Rights Act”.
As for “the unfair advantage Democrats have had nationally for decades”:
https://www.cookpolitical.com/cook-pvi/2022-partisan-voter-index/republican-electoral-college-advantage says that the Electoral College gives Republicans a ~2% advantage in presidential elections
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-senates-rural-skew-makes-it-very-hard-for-democrats-to-win-the-supreme-court/ says that “the Senate is effectively 6 to 7 percentage points redder than the country as a whole”
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/advantage-gop/ says that “The Electoral College’s Republican bias in 2020 thus averaged out to 3.5 points”.
Why different years (2022, 2020, 2020)? Because each of those was the first thing I found when searching for articles from at-least-somewhat-credible outlets about structural advantages for one or another party in presidential, Senate, and House races. I make no claim that those figures are representative of, say, the last 20 years, but I don’t think it’s credible to talk about “the unfair advantage Democrats have had nationally for decades” when all three of the major national institutions people in the US get to vote for have recently substantially favoured Republicans in the sense that to get equal results Democrats would need substantially more than equal numbers of votes.