Hard to tell, and how do you guarantee 3 house seats for the Democrats until after the votes are actually counted? Redistricting is still a state’s right. Would the Supremes be able to pick a mandatory redistricting system that all 50 states would find acceptable? Your suggesting that all 50 states would be subjected to a federal court ordered redistricting to create “fair” districts based on a system devised by the Supremes. And to complete the process before 2018. Good luck with that. Any political party that loses elections would challenge that the federal system is not fair/constitutional/legal, which could lead to as many as 50 state court challenges. Completing all of this by November 2018 is a pipe dream.
Is it possible to solve this issue by 2020? Or 2022? And which one of the many redistricting systems would a majority of each individual states voters accept as being “fair”. People in big cities would find any system that gives more Congressional seats to big city constituents to be much better than any system which gives more seats to suburban, and rural voters. And vice versa.
Looking at the current districts isn’t going to provide much usable data for a future 50 state redistricting.
And why is that a problem? I certainly have more in common with my neighborhood than my city overall. Lumping all of a municipality into one (or more) congressional districts would presumably give that city more of a voice in Congress, but there are arguments to be made as to whether that is a good, bad or neutral thing (and those probably depend on what is being voted on).
As septimus points out, if a state split 51/49 it is possible the party with 51 percent would win every district.
While that is unlikely, what is certain is that the percentage of seats a party wins, given random distribution and fair districting, will rise exponentially as the percentage of vote rises. In sports, the relationship between points scored and allowed and wins is known as the Pythagorean relationship; how to calculate it varies from sport to sport, but in baseball it’s the simplest approach:
This is quite sensible, and yes, it works pretty well. A team that scores 60 percent of all runs in its games will NOT win sixty percent of its games; it’ll win almost 70 percent of its games. You do not expect 60 percent of the runs to arrange themselves in just the right number of games to win 60 percent of them; that team will score more runs in most of its games.
In politics, it should logically be a similar relationship, though the equation is likely different. If you get 60 percent of the vote you should get way more than 60 percent of the seats.
In a very rough form, consider what happens if a Presidentialy candidate gets 60 percent of the vote. Does he get 60 percent of the states? 60 percent of the EVs? Shit no; he gets damn near all of them. At that point the slight unfairness in EVs makes no difference; Presidents who have captures nearly 60 percent of the vote, like Reagan in 1984, Nixon in 1972, or LBJ in 1964, slaughtered their opponents, because those 60% of the votes were so distributed as to assure victory in most states.
Does this happen in the House? It does. In the 1964 election the Democrats captured 57.1% of the votes but 70% of the seats. In 1974, virtually the same numbers.
I think you’re both assuming that representatives must be chosen on a simple majority vote in a one-representative-per-district system.
But, if voter preferences are or tend to be spread homogenously, that is certainly not a system which you would put in place if your object was to secure representation proportionate to voting support.
Which goes back to the question that I raised earlier; I am aware that this is the system which the US has, but is there any constitutional or other overriding requirement in the US to use such a system? If the US wanted a more fairly representative electoral system, is there any impediment to adopting one?
It’s a problem of terminology when you claim that suburbs aren’t necessarily politically distinct, when by definition they are. Further, when you have politically-distinct suburbs, it’s because the residents of those suburbs have chosen to be politically-distinct, and what people choose is certainly relevant.
How is that anything but “loyalty to party rather than loyalty to electorate”? But it works nonetheless, because the system allows for a large enough number of parties that you can find one that fits you well, instead of just the approximations in the US system.
One idea I’ve toyed with is sortition, or Monte Carlo democracy. It wouldn’t work (at least, not directly) for something like the Presidency, but it should be well-suited for a large body like the House of Representatives: You select some number of citizens at random, and they’re your representatives. Or in a slight tweak, the random citizens each get to choose a representative (who might be themselves, or might be someone whom they think would do a better job than themselves). This way, the demographics of the House would exactly match the demographics of the citizenry, at least on average, in every regard, party, race, income level, gender, religion, whatever. Sure, you’d get the occasional crazy person, but their votes would mostly be drowned out by the sane folks, and besides, crazy people deserve representation, too.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. Given that cities (both urban and suburban) have separately incorporated on their own to form their own distinct political entity, I’d say the people of those regions are not outcomes of zoning and planning codes, but as outcomes of voter will.
The zoning boards and city planners are a function of the city itself. Separate city means separate functions. Your suggestion would result in the larger city subsuming the smaller suburban cities against the wishes of those who incorporated those cities.
In CA, the town of Alamo has held votes and rejected the idea of becoming a city. Added expense and bureaucracy were rejected. Also in CA, the city of Citrus Heights recently incorporated. The residents wanted greater say over the services that the people used, police, tax revenue, etc. These suburbs of SF and Sacramento respectively, are their own distinct political entities.
When Congress passed the current law requiring election by district there was concern by Congress that it would be unconstitutional if the courts ruled that creating districts was not a manner of holding an election. As far as I know it has never been tested in court since it would require a state to sue. Possibly if the voters had a proposition that required a proportional election and required the state to defend it in court that may work.
It’s relevant to local government, obviously. But I don’t see that it’s relevant at the level of the federal government. There’s no particular reason why federal electoral districts should align with local government boundaries.
It is loyalty to party rather than loyalty to electorate; that’s my point. This is the very thing that Quartz fears, and yet it’s the very thing that the UK first-past-the-post electoral system strongly inculcates.
Huh? It doesn’t matter whether an electoral system suits aspiring candidates; what matters is whether it suits voters, and whether it tends to return a result which reflects voters’ wishes. All of the parties are free to run candidates in the safe Tory seat of Dunning-on-the-Wold, but it is the candidate selected by the local Tory selection committee who will inevitably be returned to Parliament. Thus if you want to be MP for Dunning-on-the-Wold you don’t need to appeal to the voters; you just need to toady up to the Tory selection committee. Hence, this system reliably returns party placemen.
You’re problem with the presidency is that any kind of proportional representation is impossible. There can only be one president, so the voters who back one candidate will secure 100% of the representation, and the voters who back all other candiates, nil.
The best you can do in this situation, I think, is to devise a system which will tend to favour candidates with the broadest support - or, at least, will tend to balance size of support with breadth of support. The electoral college is an attempt to do this, if we understand “broad support” in a geographical sense. Another approach might be preferential voting, in which voters indicate their order of preference for all the candidates, and the candidates with the lowest preferences are successively eliminated.
I think you need to decide whether you want the people to be represented by Parliamentarians who are like them as regards age, gender, ethnicity, etc, or by parliamentarians that they actually want to be represented by!
It may not have been directly tested, but IIRC the Supreme Court has found that states’ inherent police powers don’t extend to Congressional elections, and their power to regulate them comes solely from Article I, Section 4. So if creating districts isn’t a “manner” of holding an election, states can’t do it either.
My personal preference would be for an open ballot selecting the top vote getters. For instance, imagine that my state has 12 reps: the state could divide itself into 4 districts, and in each district, the top 3 vote-getters would get a seat in the House. This would be more fair because only the fringiest of voters would not be represented.
However, this would only work in such a state. Maine only has 2 reps, South Dakota only 1, New Mexico 5, so making compound districts would be difficult or impractical for them. Thus, you would run up against the equal protection mandate in 14A: if the voters in those other states are prevented from having the benefits that the voters in my state get solely on the basis of their own state boundaries, my state will not be allowed to adopt a fairer system that is not available to those other states.
Would it be more fair for, say, a 55-45 Democratic district to have 3 Democratic representatives and 0 Republicans? That’s what that kind of system leads to.
Why would that happen? You have one vote on one slate: if there are that many Republicans, a Republican candidate will get enough votes to get a seat. More importantly, no district breaks that way. About a third of the electorate are unaffiliated – probably more but some feel compelled to pick a side. On an open slate, you would be more likely to get 1D, 1R and 1? Or maybe even 2? Which I think would be a net positive: make the parties earn their support instead of getting it by default.
Okay, I’ve never ever heard of that kind of system. I assumed you were just proposing a regular old blanket ballot (i.e. majority-takes-all).
And that could lead to some pretty weird outcomes. Say both parties put up two candidates, but one of the four candidates is much more well known and popular than the other three. You could end up with a situation where the minority party wins both seats because the majority party was penalized for having the most popular candidate.
It’s the other way around. The majority of “unaffiliated” voters are lying.
We don’t have PR in the UK. For Westminster, Tory candidates are chosen by the local constituency parties; AIUI Labour candidates can be imposed by the central party BICBW. Loyalty to the Party is, of course, often a significant consideration, but local constituency parties - especially Tory ones - have their own minds. Just look at the likes of Mogg and Hannan. You might also look at the Aberdeen Labour councillors who were expelled for forming a coalition with the Tories as another example of local independence.