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It does, in fact, seem very similar to getting a driver’s license before you drive a car. However, there are two major differences, one more critical than the other.First, and the lesser issue, you don’t actually need a driver’s license to own a motor vehicle. You need one to operate a car on public roads. For many of us, that’s a distinction without a difference, as without a license our car just gets to look pretty in the garage or driveway. However, for a farmer on 1000 acres, their 13-year-old son could already have been driving farm trucks and tractors for years. Those trucks, in turn, don’t have to be registered or insured, and farmers often get steep discounts in registering them for the rare instances they need to take that truck on a government-owned road.So, driver licenses are closer in theory to carry permits, not ownership permits. If your use of a gun is limited to your home property and that of anywhere you have the landowner’s permission to possess a firearm, the government doesn’t really have any skin in the game.Second, and much more important to most gun owners: nobody speaking in favor of licensing drivers wants to use the system to ban all cars.Licensing of gun owners, and even gun carriers, has been commonly abused in U.S. jurisdictions where political leaders just do not want there to be any guns at all, in order to achieve that very goal.8 states in the US currently have what is called a “may issue” system for carry permits; the permitting entity, often a part of state or local law enforcement, has a subjective or discretionary ability to say that an otherwise qualified applicant may not carry a gun. It’s most commonly seen in the form of a “good cause” requirement, where the applicant has to distinguish themselves from the general population in their stated need to carry a gun. A general desire for self defense won't cut it; you have to somehow convince the permit approver that you need a gun more than the last guy, or the next.These “may-issue” policies, contingent on approval by the local head of law enforcement (police chief or sheriff) or by a State-level permitting board, used to be much more common in the US, as well as “no-issue” policies where there simply was no way for a person not associated with law enforcement or professional security to get a permit to carry a gun:The concealed-carry movement, and the open-carry movement for that matter, have resulted in nationwide reforms; click the above image to watch the progression, or if like a couple of commenters you just want the essentials, here’s the current map:As you can see, attitudes in the country have relaxed considerably, with no State-level “no-issue” jurisdictions, and a number of states following Vermont’s lead in not requiring a permit at all (Unrestricted, aka “Constitutional carry”).Those remaining yellow jurisdictions as of the end of the above animation remain may-issue for one sole reason; they use the discretionary criteria to deny any application by anyone who can’t make that a politically costly decision for the police chief or permit board members. As such almost all the yellow states are “no-issue” in practice; the law’s on the books, but current government/law-enforcement policy is not to issue a permit to an “ordinary” law-abiding citizen.As one example: San Francisco County, CA, on the southern peninsula sheltering San Francisco Bay, is home to 880,000 people and most of the City of San Francisco proper. Travis County, TX, containing the bulk of the City of Austin, is home to 1.2 million, and despite being in Texas is considered a very close ideological match to the Bay Area, with a lot of ex-Silicon Valley tech sector workers moving to the “Silicon Hills” for lower cost-of-living (though that demand has raised prices considerably over the last 30 years). In 2016, Travis County went for Hillary Clinton by a 2:1 vote margin, about the same as the California statewide average.Travis County had 7,946 LTC permits issued or renewed in 2018 alone, which when you multiply by the 5-year life of the permit, assuming application rates are steady (they aren’t; they grow by about 5% each year) gives us a per-capita rate of about 3%. That’s low for Texas, which has a statewide average of about 4% of Texas residents with an LTC (and that in turn is below the national average of 5.25% of the US population with a concealed carry permit).San Francisco County? Has 2 active carry permits. Two. One, two. The per-capita rate is 0.000226%. The most recent reports state that the county has doubled its permit count to 4, which would make the rate 0.000452%.You might point out that San Francisco County is much smaller, and therefore denser, than Travis County, and you’d be right. Santa Clara County, around the south end of the Bay and home to 1.9 million people in a much larger land area including the true “Silicon Valley” of the Guadalupe River basin feeding into the Bay through San Jose, might be a better comparison. How many permits does it have?108. A per capita rate of 0.005%.Texas active permit holders by county: Demographic Reports for CY 2018California active permit holders by county: CA CCW/LTC Map & TableSimilar populations, similar densities, similar wealth class distribution, similar local ideology. Yet the California urban counties have permitting rates between a hundredth and a thousandth that of the Texas county. You in fact have to go out into the Sierras, into “NorCal” cities like Fresno and Sacramento, to find the highest urban-county permit rates in California, which are still on par with the lowest urban-county permit rates in Texas.This isn’t because people in the Bay Area don’t want permits; quite the contrary, when a Ninth Circuit judicial panel struck down the state’s good cause requirement in the case of Peruta v. San Diego County, SFC permit applications spiked into the dozens (which may not seem like much, but compared to two active permits and 13 applications from the previous year, all still pending as of the article, it was a spike). Statewide, the roughly 16,000 applications pending as of the panel ruling would have increased the active permit count by 20% in the state had the panel ruling held up. As it was, the Ninth Circuit revisited the case despite neither party appealing the panel ruling, and overturned the panel decision, with SCOTUS declining further review.Because a commenter asked, here are the homicide and crime rates for the three counties in question, latest available data and all figures per 100k:Property Crime:San Francisco: 5715 (FY17–18)Santa Clara: 2414 (CY2017)Travis: 3344 (CY2017)Violent Crime:San Francisco: 712Santa Clara: 309Travis: 427Homicide (All weapons):San Francisco: 6.32 (56 events over 885k residents in CY2017)Santa Clara: 2.43 (43 events over 1.9m residents in CY2017)Travis: 2.73 (26 events over 950k City of Austin residents CY2017)Homicides (Firearms only):San Francisco: 4.29 (38 events CY2017)Santa Clara: 1.72 (based on report of 71% of county homicides being firearm-related)Travis: 1.58 (15 events CY2017)Sources:https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/sites/default/files/Documents/PoliceDocuments/CompStat/SFPD-CompStat-YearEnd-2017.pdfhttps://www.sccgov.org/sites/da/newsroom/newsreleases/Documents/2018NRDocs/CSU%202017%20Annual%20Report.pdfAustin, TX Crime RatesAustin homicide statistics - Austin Homicides Project - Austin American-StatesmanWhile there are numerous variables besides gun ownership and carry, I would predict that gun control advocates won’t be trumpeting these numbers too loudly. At best, the comparison between Santa Clara and Travis counties show no statistically-significant difference that could be attributed to gun control laws; in fact Austin’s numbers on firearm-related homicide are just a little better, but not by enough to draw a conclusion. At worst, comparing Travis County to the shining jewel of Californian gun control in San Francisco, having nearly twice the property and violent crime, more than twice the homicides per capita and almost three times as many of those homicides committed with a firearm, it’s clear zero tolerance gun control isn’t working too well.Getting back to the main point, permitting laws are commonly used by legislators and law enforcement to deny the right to keep and bear arms to residents, in the name of promoting public safety. Even in “shall-issue” jurisdictions, the cost and time required to obtain a permit is often deliberately prohibitive; Illinois went shall-issue in 2012 after a Seventh Circuit case in Moore v. Madigan struck down the state’s no-issue policy, but that permit still costs $150, plus the cost and time of a two-day course on state law and firearms safety and proficiency. Add the course cost to the permit application fee and many of the guns you would carry once you had the permit would cost less than the government permission to exercise your Second Amendment right. Texas had a similarly high application cost of $140, with classes costing up to the same amount, but unlike Illinois it has been consciously reducing the cost burden, with classes now costing about $75 and the permit itself costing just $40. Since that application fee reduction went into effect in September 2017, over 100,000 new permits have been issued in each of the two years since, more than exist in California today, evidence that the high cost had been a prohibiting factor for many Texans.So in summary, right or no right, many gun owners would likely accept permitting, especially for public carry. A majority likely do; Pew Research poll numbers on gun ownership and on support of concealed carry permitting laws have a 13-point overlap, representing just under half of the gun-owning population in the surveys.What they do not accept, and what likely keeps support for permitting in general from being near-universal, is the use of the prerequisites, conditions and costs of obtaining a permit in order to minimize the number of permittees. If, the next time you renewed your driver license, the DMV clerk took your money, stamped a big “DENIED” mark on your application and tossed it in a bin because you didn’t convince the clerk you needed that license, you’d be pretty hacked, and in fact long before you showed up there would likely have been a full-on riot at the DMV office from the hundreds of other drivers getting the same treatment. Yet that is exactly what California, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, Massachusetts and Hawaii do to their residents who wish to carry a gun. The usual counterargument is that you don’t need a gun every day of your life, which is quite correct. However, carry weapons are like hospitals in this regard; when you need one, you need it now, you need it desperately and you need it very close by.Unfortunately, the genie’s out of the bottle; it is generally known by gun owners that gun control advocates like using permitting laws (and a host of other safety-oriented laws and regulations) to accomplish their goal of minimizing the number of guns in civilian use. So, there may not be any lengths to which you could go to demonstrate that these abuses can and will no longer happen, that would get gun owners to believe and trust you. The Democratic Party could do a 180 on the subject, expel every politician in favor of gun control from their party and blackball every candidate who so much as looked the wrong way at a portrait of John Moses Browning. Gun owners would sit back and wait for the other shoe to drop. In reality, the rhetoric, though played a bit closer to the chest than in the 1990s during debate over the Brady Bill and AWB, is no less anti-gun; when Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, instrumental in tightening the gun laws of their respective states, are Presidential candidates for the Democrats, and no more reasoned or moderate in their tone or language, it’s obvious little if anything has changed about the party’s goals for civilian firearm possession and use.

Hello!Absolutely! Let me just show you based on facts and numbers!Military and Overseas Voting: Donald Trump’s trade war with China has already victimized many American farmers and businesses, but a new group of citizens could soon pay an unexpected price: Voters who cast ballots from overseas—including members of the military—may have to pay $60 or more to send their ballots back to the U.S. in order to be counted.​What does overseas voting have to do with trade policy? The Trump administration is seeking to punish China by withdrawing from the 192-member Universal Postal Union, which for a century and a half has set international postal rates. The UPU allows China to ship packages to the U.S. at a discounted rate, a policy designed to help developing countries that Trump wants to see changed.To get its way, the administration has placed the U.S. on track to leave the UPU in October, just a month before critical elections in many states. If that withdrawal comes to pass, normal mail service could be disrupted for Americans living abroad. As Tierney Sneed noted in a detailed analysis in June, such voters already “face tight—and sometimes impossible—turnaround times between when they receive ballots and when they must send them out to meet their state’s absentee voting deadlines.”Shipping services like FedEx or UPS offer the only alternative, but they’re prohibitively expensive. According to Jared Dearing, the executive director of Kentucky’s Board of Elections, it could cost “upward of $60” just to send in a ballot, prices that would be paid by both civilians and service members living overseas.Making matters worse, Sneed now reports that many election officials are preparing to send out absentee ballots just before the UPU meets in late September to discuss Trump’s demands. These administrators therefore don’t know whether “to tell overseas voters to proceed as usual or to expect new issues” in terms of the cost and time it will take to send back ballots.Turnout is already quite low among Americans abroad: A study published last year by the Federal Voting Assistance Program found that just 7% of voting-age civilians participated in the 2016 elections. The expense and uncertainty surrounding Trump’s conflict with the UPU are only likely to send those numbers even lower.And while overseas voters may appear to be unintentional victims rather than deliberate targets of Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to negotiations with foreign nations, Democrats are likely to suffer more. Overseas civilian voters are some of the strongest Democratic constituencies, and they well outnumber overseas military voters.” That fact can only make it more likely that Trump proceeds on his current course.REDISTRICTING● Michigan: In their ongoing efforts to preserve their ability to gerrymander, Republicans have now filed a second lawsuit in federal court arguing that Michigan's new independent redistricting commission is unconstitutional.This latest suit contends that the process for selecting commissioners violates the GOP's First Amendment rights to freedom of association by preventing political parties from picking their own commissioners. Republicans claim that, since Michigan has no party registration, Democrats could try to apply for the commission as Republicans, even though the process allows each party’s legislative leaders to strike a certain number of applicants from the pool of prospective commissioners.This newest lawsuit follows another one that Republicans filed last month, which also targeted the commissioner selection process by arguing that it's unconstitutional to prevent political candidates, officeholders, lobbyists, and their relatives from serving on the commission. Both lawsuits seek to stop the voter-approved commission from taking effect, and this latest challenge is asking for a preliminary injunction that would leave redistricting in the hands of the Republican-run legislature while litigation remains ongoing.As we wrote when Republicans filed their first lawsuit, it's unclear just exactly what they hope to gain from this litigation in the near term, since even if they succeed in striking down the commission and returning redistricting to lawmakers, they'd still be facing a veto of any new gerrymanders by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. That would likely yield maps drawn by a court, which would adhere to nonpartisan standards similar to those the commission would rely on.However, it could be that Republicans plan a future lawsuit seeking to remove the governor's veto power over new maps, though it's unclear what mechanism such a frontal assault on the separation of powers would rely on. Their counterparts in Wisconsin nonetheless appear to be plotting just such a maneuver, creating a new front for reformers to monitor.● North Carolina: State Rep. Kelly Alexander and fellow Democrats have filed a lawsuit in state court arguing that Republicans' gerrymandering of the districts used to elect trial court judges in Mecklenburg County violates the U.S. and state constitutions, along with the federal Voting Rights Act.Mecklenburg County is a Democratic stronghold that's home to Charlotte and more than 1 million residents. Last year, Republicans in the state legislature changed Mecklenburg's procedures for judicial elections from a countywide system to one in which the county is split into separate judicial districts, even though all of the elected judges still retain countywide jurisdiction.The GOP's new law gerrymandered the districts in an attempt to elect more white Republicans in place of several black Democrats. Plaintiffs contend that this violated the U.S. Constitution's provisions guaranteeing equal protection and freedom of association, as well as the 15th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act for discriminating against black voters. They furthermore charge that the GOP's judicial redistricting violated the state constitution by creating a new court system without a constitutional amendment. Consequently, they're seeking a preliminary injunction to block the new law.● OH Supreme Court: On Monday, The Columbus Dispatch reported that former Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and state Judge John O'Donnell will run as Democrats for the two Ohio Supreme Court seats up for election in November 2020, which could have a major impact on redistricting. Ohio Supreme Court candidates run in party primaries but face off in a nonpartisan general election. Brunner indicated that she plans to run against Republican Justice Judith French, and O'Donnell will challenge GOP Justice Sharon Kennedy.Brunner had previously won the 2006 election for secretary of state but later lost the 2010 primary for U.S. Senate. However, she has since been elected to the state's 10th District Court of Appeals, serving since 2014. O'Donnell has been running for some time and is making his third attempt at Ohio's high court: He previously lost by just 50.3-49.7 against GOP Justice Patrick Fisher in 2016 even as Trump was winning Ohio by 51-43. In 2014, he lost to French by a wider 56-44 as the Republican wave hit Ohio especially hard, although that was still a narrower margin than every Democrat running statewide for partisan office.If Democrats win both of these 2020 races, they would gain a 4-3 majority on the state Supreme Court for the first time since the 1980s. Such a majority would have profound consequences for the upcoming post-2020 redistricting cycle. As I’ve explained in detail, Ohio's new systems for congressional and legislative redistricting passed since the last round of redistricting still give the Republicans who dominate state government the power to gerrymander again. However, a Democratic state court majority could use state constitutional protections tostrike down unfair maps in a way that may be insulated from federal review.ELECTION SECURITY● Georgia: The plaintiffs challenging Georgia's paperless voting machines have now asked the federal court that just banned those machines for use in 2020 to also prohibit the state from deploying new voting machines that print a paper ballot with a bar code record, which voters can't verify themselves. Instead, the plaintiffs are urging the court to require paper ballots filled in with pens, which would be fed into optical scanners.FELONY DISENFRANCHISEMENT● Illinois: Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker has signed a new law that aims to ensure everyone in jail who is awaiting trial and has not been convicted of a felony can exercise their right to vote. In Cook County, home to Chicago and roughly 3.5 million eligible voters, this law will require the county jail to operate an in-person polling place. Jails in every other county will be required to provide absentee ballots for eligible detainees.Illinois disenfranchises incarcerated citizens who have been convicted of a felony, but it automatically restores their voting rights upon release from prison. However, many individuals don't realize they regain their right to vote upon release, so this law also seeks to remedy that problem by requiring officials to inform citizens upon releasethat they have regained the right to vote and to provide them with a voter registration form.VOTER REGISTRATION AND VOTING ACCESS● New Jersey: Democratic state senators have scheduled a legislative session for next week to debate legislation to fix New Jersey's vote-by-mail law to ensure that voters who cast an absentee ballot in 2017 or 2018 will automatically receive a new mail ballot for this November's state Assembly elections, and Assembly Democrats may soon do the same.Democrats are mounting this effort after the secretary of state's office decided that voters who requested absentee ballots in those elections would have to make new requests for this year. Supporters of the new mail voting system say that decision runs contrary to the intent of the law, which was passed last year. Jonathan Lai at The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that an estimated 172,000 voters requested mail ballots in 2017 or 2018 but wouldn't automatically receive a ballot this year without a new request unless lawmakers act.Writing at the New Jersey Globe, David Wildstein reports that Democrats are adamant about fixing the vote-by-mail law because of the major absentee ballot campaign operations they mounted in 2017 and 2018, which led to absentee votes heavily favoring the party in those elections. Since the Assembly elections are at the top of the ticket this year (neither the state Senate nor the governor is up for election), turnout would typically be very low. However, voters would likely be more inclined to cast a ballot if they automatically get one in the mail.● Ohio: Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state senators from both parties have introduced a new bill that would make it easier to register to vote at Ohio's Bureau of Motor Vehicles. While the bill would not establish a true automatic voter registration system, it would let eligible voters who are conducting business with the BMV register for the first time or to update an existing registrations electronically rather than with cumbersome paper forms.VOTER SUPPRESSION● North Carolina: State House Republicans have given preliminary approval to a billthat would use lists of people excused from jury duty to try to find noncitizens who are on the voter registration rolls, but reporting from local NBC affiliate WRAL indicates that such an effort could risk removing eligible voters thanks to widespread false matches. Furthermore, WRAL reports that the exact process for removing flagged registrants isn't spelled out in the bill and would be left up to election officials, raising further questions about the risks of removing eligible voters, such as recently naturalized citizens.Republicans passed a procedural hurdle last week with the support of a handful of Democrats, but unclear if they could muster enough support to override a potential veto by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, since the GOP doesn't have enough votes to do so on its own.● Voter Suppression: The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected an appeal by the right-wing American Civil Rights Union and conservative activist J. Christian Adams, who sought to overturn a 2018 district court ruling that blocked Adams' ham-fisted plot to get populous Broward County, Florida, to aggressively prune its voter rolls in a way that would have ensnared eligible voters.Adams is one of the foremost Republican peddlers of lies about voter fraud and is also a former member of Trump's bogus voter fraud commission. As explained last year, his courtroom defeat only came as the culmination of his years-long effort to bully local governments into purging eligible voters through legal action. Adams had largely been successful because he’d mostly targeted poor, rural counties with predominantly black populations that had little choice but to settle out of court to avoid costly litigation, but populous Broward was able to fight back—and win.This isn't the only legal setback that Adams has faced this year. In July, Adams and another group he's affiliated with called the Public Interest Legal Foundation settled a lawsuit brought by registered voters in Virginia whom Adams had defamed and intimidated by falsely claiming they were not citizens and exposing their personal information online.SECRETARY OF STATE ELECTIONS● Secretaries of State: The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State has unveiled the races it plans to target next year, which will determine who runs elections in several states. Democrats hope to flip Republican-held offices in Missouri, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and West Virginia, and they aim to defend Democratic incumbents in North Carolina and Vermont. (In North Carolina, elections are administered by an appointee of the governor rather than the secretary of state.)The Pacific Northwest in particular offers top pickup opportunities for Democrats. Oregon will host an open-seat race after Republican Bev Clarno agreed not to seek a full term in exchange for getting appointed by Democratic Gov. Kate Brown following the death of Republican incumbent Dennis Richardson earlier this year. (Oregon law requires appointees to be members of the same party as the deceased office-holder.) Meanwhile, in Washington, Democrats are trying to unseat Republican Secretary of State Kim Wyman.The position of secretary of state is singularly important for guaranteeing fair elections and equal access to the ballot box. Missouri's Republican incumbent Jay Ashcroft recently demonstrated just how vital it is to have a pro-democracy secretary of state after he crafted deceptive ballot language for several proposed ballot initiatives that would expand voting access. Supporters of those measures responded with a lawsuit earlier this month to block Ashcroft's misleading language and substitute in fairer descriptions.BALLOT MEASURES● Colorado: On Tuesday, a panel of judges on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a district court decision in a 2-1 ruling that upheld Colorado's requirement that those seeking to put amendments to the state constitution on the ballot must gather signatures from at least 2% of registered voters in each of the 35 state Senate districts.Even though some districts have up to 60% more registered voters than others, the judges held that the provision doesn't violate the U.S. Constitution's "one person, one vote" principle because the districts were drawn to be roughly equal in terms of total population based on the 2010 census. It is unclear whether the plaintiffs will seek a further appeal, which could include petitioning the entire 10th Circuit to review the case or appealing to the Supreme Court.Prior to 2016, initiatives only needed signatures equivalent to 5% of the votes cast statewide in the last election for secretary of state. However, a measure passed that year, supported by business interests and then-Gov. John Hickenlooper, established the state's new geographic distribution requirement and also increased the threshold for passage from 50% to 55%.But even though it was backed by Hickenlooper, a Democrat who is now running for Senate, the new distribution requirement makes it disproportionately harder to place progressive initiatives on the ballot than conservative ones. That's because liberals must gather petition signatures in conservative rural districts where Democratic voters are spread out across significant distances, making it costly and time-consuming to canvass for petition signers.By contrast, while conservatives would need to gather signatures in left-leaning strongholds like Denver, districts in urban areas are much more densely populated. Therefore, even though Republicans may be few in number in major cities, they're much easier to reach because they live more closely together.ELECTORAL COLLEGE● Colorado: In a 2-1 decision, a panel of judges on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a district court ruling that rejected a challenge by a Colorado elector for Hillary Clinton who was removed from office and replaced after he tried to vote for John Kasich.The majority held that it was unconstitutional for the state of Colorado, which has a law on the books that allows for the replacement of electors who don't vote for the candidate by whom they were nominated, to remove elector Michael Baca, who had unsuccessfully attempted to convince Republican electors to write in Kasich's name in order to deny Donald Trump an electoral majority and throw the election to the House.The 10th Circuit's ruling, however, may not stand on appeal. As election law expert Derek Muller notes, this decision failed to take notice of a similar case out of Minnesota that the 8th Circuit rejected last year, deeming the issue moot. Should the Colorado case be reviewed by the entire 10th Circuit or the Supreme Court, Muller says "it could well be tossed on procedural grounds" much like the Minnesota challenge.But if the Colorado ruling were to be upheld by the Supreme Court and set a national precedent, it would unbind every elector from any state law prohibiting faithless electors. Such an outcome could alter the result of a close Electoral College vote, adding uncertainty as to whether a candidate who appeared to have won a narrow victory would in fact prevail in the Electoral College. While faithless electors have been infrequent in modern history, removing any limits could embolden electors to defect and consequently risk chaos if electors were to randomly overturn the expected results…Edit: I would like on Susan Normand’s request add this link: Many Native IDs Won't Be Accepted At North Dakota Polling Places.The Supreme Court declined to overturn North Dakota's controversial voter ID law, which requires residents to show identification with a current street address. A P.O. box does not qualify.Many Native American reservations, however, do not use physical street addresses. Native Americans are also overrepresented in the homeless population, according to the Urban Institute. As a result, Native residents often use P.O. boxes for their mailing addresses and may rely on tribal identification that doesn't list an address.Those IDs used to be accepted at polling places — including in this year's primary election — but will not be valid for the general election. And that decision became final less than a month before Election Day, after years of confusing court battles and alterations to the requirements.

The main argument in favour is that the US constitution doesn’t work very well with high-population states like California. There are two basic problems:The inhabitants of the huge state have minimal representation in the US Senate. This is especially important on matters where the US House of Representatives has no veto, such as confirmation of judicial appointments.Because there are fewer layers of institutions, an individual state can become dominated by one political party more easily than the US as a whole, and when it’s a huge state, that distorts the politics, particularly at the state level: a single group of politicians (or even a single governor) gains a lot of clout to push through their agenda, and for their opponents, being literally millions of votes behind, it’s hard to see how they can change anything. I’m not worried about a situation here where there is overwhelming voter consensus in the state; I mean situations where say 60% reliably votes one way, leaving the other 40% of voters shut out. Federally as well it’s not good: the state is not competitive, so gets less attention than its population would otherwise merit, and a large population plus a single dominant party makes it very easy to gerrymander for the US House of Representatives.That said, I don’t think “split up California” is a good way of thinking. Rather, there should be some general principle by which excessively large states can break up. Here is one way to do it:First and foremost, it should be up to the voters in that state. States should only be broken up if it is approved by referendum/ballot initiative by voters in the state, based on a specific map of how the state will split. Otherwise you have a situation where the US as a whole is imposing its will on a state, in a way that runs against the whole basis of a federal republic.You could have the dominant party problem that although part of the state really wants to break off, more populous parts of the state want to keep dominating them, so the partition plan can’t get majority support statewide. In that case, maybe have some sort of supermajority rule, so if there’s a region of the state that feels especially aggrieved, they can break off without approval from the rest of the state, but there has to be an overwhelming consensus in that region. For example, let’s imagine that most of Illinois outside the Chicago metro area is sick of being outvoted by Chicago, and wants to create a new state. Democrats in Chicago would tend to oppose this, given their party interests; but if let’s say 2/3 of downstate Illinois voters agree on the plan, they could make it happen despite the Chicago votes against it.To avoid “packing the Senate” and/or creating states based on too narrow interest groups, every new state created by partition should have some minimal threshold of the population in it, let’s say some % of the total US population as of the most recent census. (If you set it to 2%, currently only the four largest states could split, with Pennsylvania and Illinois falling just short; if you set it as low as 1%, a lot of splits become possible, but that’s not necessarily a good thing.)Adjacent states can also merge by referendum/ballot initiative, as long as each of the states to be merged supports it. I doubt many mergers would happen, but again, it’s up to the people of those states, and if you think that large states actually do a better job of representing their voters than small states, you can go ahead and campaign for one. This also means that if some state partition goes badly, it’s not a totally irreversible decision.