Just decrease the size of a congressional district to some reasonable number, the problem becomes more manageable. The cases where natural and manmade boundaries don’t do an adequate job could have a geometry as a measure of whether gerrymandering is happening, then it will just get fought out as it does now, but it won’t make as much of a difference.
Only problem with this is that it inherently requires increasing the number of representatives in a House whose size is already somewhat unwieldy.
What difference does it make if you have 435 people wasting time and money or 4350 people wasting time and money?* That’s if things just stay the same otherwise. I think the debate may become more robust, and representatives will have to learn to negotiate within their own states as well. It would also become pointless to have them in Washington so much and they can spend most of their time at home like they ought to. The House is just a polling place anyway, there’s no real deliberation going on there.
*Ok, it will be ten times the money.
BTW, a less extreme version of my “fuzzy” suggestion would be to simply add a question to the census: “Do you think you are in the proper congressional district? If not, which of these neighboring districts do you think you should be in?”. You would then use that information to redraw the districts at the time of the census, as per the suggestion.
We need representatives for the representatives. If we create the 4350 seats that TriPolar suggests then they can pick 435 from they ranks to go on up to Washington. I haven’t worked out how the selection process will work but I’m leaning toward something with balance beams and mudpits.
Only in the sense, explored by Arrow, that all systems are inherently unfair, so your point is?
Taking your example, the Greens (1 seat) got the balance of power, and the NPA got 6 seats and nothing.
Which represents a success of the system, since the minority parties should expect to be in effective power very rarely, in proportion to their vote, and get nothing the rest of the time.
The USA has different problems, but the problem of minority representation has been exagerated by turning all seats into safe seats. Take away the safe-seat redistricting, and you automatically reduce the need for fair-minority districting.
BTW, I reject the idea that safe districts should get longer terms in the USA. Safe seats should get shorter terms. The voters have less effective power each vote, so they should vote more often to compensate. The rep gets a safer seat, so he shoud face the votors more often to compensate. This will reduce the inflated incentive to seek safe seats, which is the correct and desired response.
Yeah, mudpits. That’s the best solution.
This has already objected to above, many times:
It doesn’t provide local representation
It underrepresents minorities
Unless you can address these concerns, your suggestion won’t get out of the starting gate.
See above two points: how does your scheme address these issues?
This fails because some districts will end up with more voters than others, unpredictably. The later suggestion that it merely be a question and that the answer be used in subsequent redistricting is more workable.
At another board some months ago, we discussed Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in which he proposes that representation based on geography was one of the least sensible of ideas.
One alternative that we bandied about was basing representation on age instead. Maryland is entitled to eight representatives in Congress, so take the role of eligible voters and divide it by age into eight groups of equal numbers. So District 5 might be defined as those born between July 2, 1963 and Dec. 18, 1969 instead of by those living in southern Maryland.
Redistricting because of population gains or losses is never a problem and the state legislature can’t diddle with the process either.
You’d probably have to combine this with some kind of law making voting compulsory, as in Australia and some other countries. Otherwise the popular vote for the House and the actual balance of power in the House would be wildly different, due to much lower voter turn-out among young people.
I’m not sure how this would matter. Each representative would still be representing an equal number of people, whether they vote or not.
There are MANY ways to do at-large voting so simply dismissing it is a bad idea.
Let’s take Colorado with its 7 Representatives. Each party can run up to 7 candidates. The parties can choose to go after the local vote or statewide political philosophy. The party can run one candidate from the major cities and representing larger area e.g. the Grand Junction rep “represents” NW Colorado. You mention minorities. Colorado is 70% Anglo, 20% Latino, 5% Black and 5% Other so how do you divide up the 7 Representatives equally?
The point being that allowing at-large voting gives more flexibility. Even your statement is self-contradictory. Should elections provide for a candidate that represents Latinos or Blacks or Asians as a whole or should the Reps all represent local concerns because unless you allow for enclaves of ethnic groups close to district size you really can’t get both. I will also point out that the idea you need districting to protect minority vote come from using districts to dilute the vote of minorities - something at-large voting does not have.
The problem with at-large and virtual districts is that they don’t represent geographical areas which is what was intended. Now maybe that should change, but it doesn’t address the question at hand. Possibly it could be applied in very large cities, where the representatives for the entire city population are elected at large. But doing so across states doesn’t make much sense, and with the large size of a congressional district it might result in less representation of minority social groups. A large majority group could simply distribute their at-large votes and end up taking every seat.
My solution of smaller districts solves the problem.
Please point out the contradiction. Admittedly, district-based voting only allows representation of minorities if minorities tend to cluster to districts. That’s not an internal contradiction of my statements.
But you’re right that there are many kinds of at-large voting schemes. In a scheme where we get N representatives, but each voter can vote for significantly less than N candidates, we lose the disadvantage for minorities.
In any case, simply ignoring the many claims that minorities are underrepresented is a disservice to your point of view. I helped you out by giving one example where the problem can be avoided. You gave an example, but didn’t really show how the issue can be avoided. The limit on the number of candidates and their ways to run their campaigns by itself doesn’t solve the problem, if everyone gets 7 votes to fill 7 seats, because the majorities can successfully elect majority candidates (and they’d all realize that and they wouldn’t target specific subsets).
The key is the voting scheme, because that dictates what kinds of campaign strategies would be effective.
Next time, though, I won’t make your argument for you.
Please walk us through that. It isn’t at all obvious to me. On the contrary, it seems like it exacerbates the problem, due to having to select lots more boundaries.
Compulsory attendance is a good idea in general, since it seems to bias the vote towards the centre rather than the edges. Main-stream party members make up the majority of the edges, so they wouldn’t agree that it’s a good idea.
But if you actually wanted a really good turnout, you can get it by reducing the power of members elected by a poor turnout. You can do this by reducing the number of electoral college votes they get, or the number of members elected by a multi-member electorate, or the length of term, (or other methods).
This gives political parties and elected members an incentive to get the total attendance up.
If you don’t do this, political parties and candidates have an incentive to prevent opponents and swinging voters from voting. Since both parties have an incentive to discourage swinging voters, you tend to get a situation where candidates are elected by party members. This leads to extremism in political representation.
Intended by whom? At-large voting was allowed from the Constitution until 1836 and then again 1850 to 1862. So one could argue the founding fathers intended at-large voting.
That is the contradiction since it does not reflect all of the US so you cannot criticize at-large voting for meeting both of your criteria when district voting cannot do the same.
Let’s say that election day is November 7. What would stop a state from having the real election on October 20th, and then only putting the winner on the ballot on November 7 so that every Congressman gets 100% of the vote and has “super” status?
One can always postulate trickery … and countermeasures. One might stipulate that the election with most total votes cast be used. Or the election where the eventual winner got the least of any of his vote totals. (Anyway, a candidate wouldn’t get 100% if some voters selected no one in that race.)