Because counties don’t have equal population. In many cases they have vastly unequal population. in California, compare Los Angeles County, population 10 million, with Alpine County, population 1100. One of the cardinal rules of election districts is that they should have approximately equal populations.
Then why not lump smaller population counties together with others some of it’s neighbors? I could see splitting up a large and diverse county like Los Angeles into more than one election district based on population/zip code analysis, but some of the current districts do not relate to any existing political boundary at all.
as soon as you start using county boundaries, I predict that legislatures will start changing county boundaries for partisan purposes.
Plus, there’s the fact that county boundaries would rarely ever add up exactly to the norm required for state or federal districts.
As I pointed out earlier, congressional districts must have equal population. Every seat would require carving up counties. How do you do so fairly? Start at one edge and carve up counties in the middle? Why is that fair?
The more serious point is that the historical division of a state into counties, almost all of them dating to the 19th century with some earlier, have no relationship to modern day population trends. Cities sprawl in unexpected ways that don’t have any regard for county boundaries. They are next to useless for dividing populations.
I’ll go further. Nothing in our system is more obsolete than counties. Most states require county governments to provide the same set of services, which is obviously absurd in every state. How can an 1100-person county possibly do anything like a 10,000,000 person county? The disparities in county size would violate every rule of equal opportunity if they weren’t historic legal entities. The number of separate governments they engender is also staggeringly inefficient. Texas has 254 counties, more than the total in the entire northeast corridor, including Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, total population over 60 million combined. But nobody ever gives up local control voluntarily. We’d need a revolution to change anything. Fair redistricting is child’s play comparatively.
My only problem with a system along the lines of “have everyone vote for a political party instead of a candidate, and the seats are distributed in proportion to the statewide vote total” is, you will get a case where a particular part of the state isn’t really represented by anybody for “local concerns” as that party will choose its representatives from other parts of the state, and when people from there have a problem, everybody in the legislature will say, “Sorry, but that’s not my concern.”
Actually, there is a way around that, sort of; divide the state into districts (you can even have each party have its own set of districts, which have to be approved (mainly for population balance)), and have each party “nominate” one candidate per district as usual. When the election is done, have the parties select one candidate per district - for example, have the majority party select its representatives first, or choose based on the margins of victory (there will be cases where the representative got fewer votes than an opponent in that district, but isn’t this pretty much the point of doing it this way?). This combines the benefits of party-wide representation for things at a statewide/national level and those of having someone local for local concerns.
I tend to think that we can, if not fix, at least mitigate the problems of gerrymandering by putting some common-sense rules onto the drawing of districts.
Things along the lines of the distance between parallel boundaries within a district has to be over some minimum distance, and the minimum distance on one axis has to be some significant fraction of the minimum distance.
The idea being that gerrymandering couldn’t be used to do what they’ve long done in Texas and making strange districts that are predominantly rural and conservative, but with a little tiny narrow finger (sometimes as wide as a strip mall on one side of a road) that stretches into the inner city and encompasses a small slice of urban voters, thereby negating their voting power. (see the Austin-area congressional district map for an example)
This wouldn’t prevent the creation of districts overwhelmingly one way or the other, but it would hopefully prevent having strange districts drawn for the express purpose of screwing one group or another of people by way of screwing a particular party.
Place a grid over the state of equal squares. Give State Representatives by population and two State Senators to each equal size district.