Or you could enlarge them and guarantee 3-5 winners, where each party can have only a single winner. That makes it almost impossible for any party to monopolize the districts (which right now they are by definition, because they are winner-takes-all elections):
To me, the problem is winner-take-all districts to begin with. It all but ensures some constituents are going to be sorely disappointed. Why not consider something like multi-member districts? We could tune it even further by awarding variable voting power. Then the way the borders are drawn becomes far less relevant. I'm sure there are tradeoffs, but it would certainly be more representative.
District-based elections, where each district had one winner, tend to lead to two-party systems. The counting mechanism doesn't meaningfully impact this. If you want to change this, you can expand current districts to cover multiple seats. That way, second-placed, third-placed, and so on, candidates also get seats. Depending on the #seats of the district. Parties could run multiple candidates, since there are multiple seats.
For the US, districts with e.g. 5 seats would be very interesting. The effect would be two-fold: first, more distinctiveness between candidates of the same party. Extreme example: a prolife Democrat, a gun-regulation Republican running alongside more traditional candidates. Secondly, at least some candidates outside the 2 major parties will get a seat. This probably means no more majority in House/Senate, but a need to form a coalition. That means talking with each other and reaching agreement would no longer be the newsworthy exception it is today, but would be part of the very fabric of the House/Senate.
I don't see how a different counting mechanism could lead to the same effects.
Yeah, I never understood really this district thing... Do they that often really represent only the certain area? Or would it be more sane to have larger districts? Maybe in some cases up to whole state where the winners were selected in proportional way.
Then again this would allow third parties to actually gain foothold and the corrupt duopoly can't allow that.
Also this whole electoral college thing. Why is there this idiotic winner takes all method? Why not also maybe have lists. So electors would be chosen in order of list and voters could pick a list endorsing certain candidate pair?
Because the whole point of messing with the districts is to make each district 50.01% party A 49.99% party B. A winner take all system with multiple candidates would work like the presidential election, you vote for them as a group.
If you switch to top 10 then it's not winner take all anymore.
This would be an improvement, but i think it illustrates the paucity of thinking in American politics.
You shouldn't be using single-member districts at all. It's basically impossible to represent people fairly with them. You should either have proportional election of entire legislatures (or state delegations to federal ones), or at least proportional election of a smaller number of multi-member districts.
Probably the best way is to not have the districts in the first place. If a state has five representatives, run a single state-wide election with five winners, using some variant of proportional representation.
Even better: modify the fundamental nature of the House of Representatives such that a representative's voting power is proportional to the share of the vote they got.
Both of those are pretty major reforms, so absent those probably the best thing is to make sure the redistricting process is not controlled by a single party, and maybe imposing some restrictions on how complex the shapes can be.
This further deepens the two-party system. That's no solution at all.
Districts should be compact, as simply shaped as possible, equally populated, and ideally follow as many lines of local government concern as possible.
We already have utility districts, school districts, city precincts, county precincts, townships, drainage and levee districts, cities, towns, villages, counties, wards, neighborhoods, state police districts, state House districts, state Senate districts, and more boundary lines within states. Rather than one county precinct being cut into four parts so each can be a portion of four different Congressional districts that also overlap other county precincts, perhaps as much as possible your part of town should have the same candidates on the Congressional race as your neighbors using the same voting station.
Even better, do multi-winner districts (3-9 per district) with a ranked choice voting system that would greatly increase how well people are represented in Congress through proportional representation.
If someone appointed me as the czar of legislative voting, my way to resolve this and reduce the incentives to gerrymander while improving minority representation would be to replace single district voting with a vote-point system.
If one candidate in a district gets 100,000 votes and another 85,000 votes, both would go to congress and each would get that many vote-points. Rather than number of representative votes, voting outcomes would be determined by who has more vote-points. That way if you have three similarly sized districts, District X and District Y where 40% want party A and 60% want party B, and then district Z where you have 90% want party A and only 10% want party B, you'd still end up with .4/3+.4/3+.9/3 (56%) votes for party A rather than 67% for party B, regardless of how you redistrict. Plus you'd have asymmetric interests where opposing parties would represent the same districts so they would be incentivized to work together, and also some representation for minority regional parties who may align with one party on some issues and another on others.
To limit budgets, I guess there would have to be a maximum number of candidates per district, maybe filtering out anyone who does not have at least 10% of the vote (or some other number determined by some reasonable formula), an option for candidates who don't meet the threshold to reallocate their vote-points to someone who did (or a ranked choice voting system that keeps going until everyone remaining has the minimum vote threshold), and maybe no matter what you'd at least send two candidates unless literally only one candidate had votes.
This would also have a side effect of incentivizing more people to vote and allow people to vote with a bit less strategy and more earnestness.
Note that I said district/state. Your senate has 2 seats for each state and the house has a seat for each district. This still means that there is no realistic way for a third party to get any sort of real power. Because the votes are arbitrarily divided among districts, only parties that have significant majorities have a chance of winning.
Any third party in the USA has very little chance of winning any seat. Even if they have 10% support among the electorate it is unlikely that they'll get much seats. The nice thing about a system without districts is that smaller parties get power approximately in proportion to the votes they get. The coalitions you get in these systems are messy but more fair.
It's a bit unrealistic to forbid people from forming political parties on these somewhat vague assertions. Reforming the election system to be more fair to smaller parties should have a bigger effect I think.
This advocates for proportional representation instead of winner-take-all for US federal legislative seats. Today, if a US House race ends 60%/40%, the 40% counts for zero. Instead:
> Now consider the alternative: What would happen if that same district were represented by not one House member but five. There would be multiple Democrats and Republicans vying for the five seats.
… with the results reflecting the actual electorate. In that 60%/40% example, 5 seats would yield 3 & 2 representatives.
> Most plans for multi-member districts also call for reducing the number of districts overall. For a state such as Virginia, for instance, that could mean moving from having 11 single-member districts to three — two with four representatives each and one with three. Such proposals also typically call for expanding the size of the House, which would allow congressional delegations to more closely reflect partisan splits in their states.
…
> Parties also represent smaller slices of the electorate in multiparty systems, which incentivizes cross-party cooperation to create legislative majorities. This tends to foster moderation. “As a general rule, when a wider range of parties gets representation in the legislature, it’s hard to form a majority governing coalition that doesn’t include the political center,” Drutman wrote. As a result, moderate candidates are empowered and the extreme elements are banished to the fringe.
Turn each state into a multi-member district. Small states with only one rep can be combined with other states to form three-rep blocks, i.e., North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana can be combined into one election. Elections can be party-list elections. For example, Utah has 3 seats; each party puts forward a list of 3 candidates, and the voters vote for the party of their choice. There's no longer a need to redraw lines because there are no more lines.
Right. Any method of drawing single-member FPTP districts will, unless voters of different persuasions are perfectly uniformly distributed, will:
(1) Produce disproportionate advantage for some party, and/or
(2) Produce some number of safe seats where the general election is a forgone conclusion and the mechanism that selects candidates decides the winner in practice.
You can select methods to choose which of these effects predominate, and which party benefits from either disproportionate representation or safe seats (there's a certain tension -- you get disproportionate representation for your party by giving the other party super safe seats), but you can't avoid them unless you throw out FPTP, and really single-member independent districts entirely.
I was thinking that there would be an overlay of squares, each identical, like graph paper. As long as the squares contain a relatively small population as compared to the rest of the state, then the two parties are forced to make real choices. And that's the real goal - for both partoes to make real choiced, and not to simply game the system via gerrymandering.
It's kind of a half-assed idea at this point. But I was thinking that, by forcing identically drawn boundaries, then it would force both parties to choose.
Now that I think about it more, it probably wouldn't work. Both parties would just grab squares that guaranteed their victory. It would end up ultra-gerrymandered.
A single district electing say 20 people via a single transferable vote would be far more representive. The problem isn’t district boundaries, it’s first past the post.
The only thing I can think of is to start with the districts we have and then produce an algorithm that uses a random number generator to redraw lines. The algorithm can fuzz the current boundaries making a district larger or smaller or it can choose to split a district or combine two districts. Just keep randomizing the districting for each election starting with the output of the last time it was randomly fuzzed.
Sometimes the randomness will work in favor of one party, sometimes against it. In the long term, it adds in some non-partisan non-determinism, which is probably good for justice long-term.
That's likely to reduce diverse representation vs. single-member districts. If there are e.g. 8 seats a party could run 8 identical candidates and they'd all get the highest approval ratings for the combined district if one of them would, and other parties wouldn't get any.
Or, give each representative voting power proportional to the number of voters in their district. That way, no need for the added salary and chaos of 200+ more representatives, and you can get perfectly proportional representation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS62N5b5L7Y
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