There’s a current thread debating the borders of voting districts. So I thought of what may be too radical a solution.
Let people pick their own. Take a state like Ohio, for example. Based on its population it has 18 districts each with one representative. People are assigned to a district based on where they live.
But suppose they could pick their district? All eighteen districts would overlap and cover the entire state and every registered Ohio voter could pick whichever one he wanted to be registered to vote in.
This would allow people to essentially pick whatever constituency they felt best represented them on whatever basis they primarily identified themselves as. If a large group felt its primary defining characteristic was ideology or gender or race or age or economic status they could band together and elect somebody they felt represented them.
What would be the basis for choosing one district over another on initial setup? Who gets to define how each “tribe” is identified? How would you equalize population between them, or would that not be a concern?
One issue would be population balance between the districts. Ohio, to continue with my example, has a population of about 11,500,000. Let’s say there are 5,400,000 registered voters. That means that each district would have an average of 300,000 voters in it.
But if voters were allowed to register freely then some districts would be more popular than others. District #1 known for its broad moderate popular stance might have 500,000 registrees. District #2 with a more fringe reputation might only attract 100,000 registrees. On paper, this looks like an imbalanced situation because both groups have the same representation despite the disparity in their “populations”.
But I think it’s a self-correcting problem. What would happen is that some of the people in the District #1 would notice the low population in District #2. If 150,000 people switched from #1 to #2, they would be the new majority in the District #2. No constituency could afford to become too narrow or it would be subject of being overrun.
In the first year or so, it would probably be fairly random. But I think district identities would quickly emerge. If nothing else, each would have a distinct representative after the frst elections and that would cause people to settle in on the districts whose representatives they like.
It’s self-selected.
As you can see, I just wrote a post on this issue.
Presumedly, you would want him to get re-elected. But if you felt really confident that his re-election was secure, then you might decide to switch to another district to nudge them in a direction you prefered.
I think that the entire idea of congressional districts with geographic boundaries is a fundamentally silly and outmoded one.
But that’s neither here nor there.
Add a ballot issue to all elections asking the voters if they want to keep their current boundaries. Let pro- and anti-redistricting candidates explain their reasoning in the months prior to the election. Mandatory redistricting can only occur to if a district’s population is 50% or more higher than all others, or 50% or more lower than all others (i.e. the most populated and least populated districts by significant margins).
This suggestion seems quite interesting. (I think systems slightly related to this have been and are in use, for example when guilds appoint members to councils. Party-list seats are slightly akin to the suggestion. Thailand’s Senate has seats representing academia and other groups, though these are appointed not elected, and Senate has little power anyway.)
A big problem with U.S. Congress today is that, although most voters are middle-of-the-road, Congress ends up polarized into two non-compromising factions. OP’s suggestion might exacerbate this problem. OTOH it might somehow provide a route to “end-run” around the present deadlock.
Offhand, the one thing I’m wondering about this, wouldn’t it make safe districts even safer? We can already observe people’s behavior, they tend to congregate around like minded individuals. Wouldn’t this proposal allow those like minded to band together, which is their tendency anyway, and carve out districts where the extreme fringes are encouraged and protected? Imagine what politics would be like if Daily Kos picked one representative and Glenn Beck listeners another, while those in the middle ground tend to get ignored since the extremes are able to mass together and overpower the moderate. Sounds like it’d result in even more partisan crap than we already have.
Personally, I think districts should be based on actual voters rather than # of people in general. Poor urban districts, for example, may have 100,000 voters while areas of richer elderly would have 300,000 voters even though both represent the same population. Which means for some areas, it’s easier for a determined block to gain large influence compared to other areas with more voters. So districts should be based on actual people voting to restrict this. Since we already redraw the districts every decade or so, it wouldn’t any harder to keep up with changing voter trends than it is to keep up with changing population centers.
I would think it would mitigate against polarization. The ability of voters to “move” to a more agreeable district would make a 51/49 strategy self-defeating - you’d simply lose the 49% of your district. A representative would have to make some effort to serve all of the voters in his district rather than just a safe majority and that would work against polarizing politics. At least within districts anyway.
Yes, it probably would create safe districts. Which I don’t necessarily see as a problem. If some extreme party or individual can gain a following of several thousand people, then I suppose they have as much right to be represented as a more moderate viewpoint does.
But in my opinion, the fringes will not dominate. I think the fringes on both ends are still just fringes. They can compete against each other but not against the middle. If you only have a choice between a conservative and a liberal, you have to pick one of those ideologies. But this plan would offer voters more choices so I think we’d see more people being elected from the middle.
I don’t think so. Those plans seemed designed to give power to candidates who come in third or fourth or fifth. In my plan, the candidates who get elected would still be the ones who were the choice of the majority.
What happens when the census results show that the state’s representatives need to increase or decrease? You pretty much have to redistrict, then, and someone’s got to be doing the redistricting.
Simpler solution which I know was used in Arizona for its first few Congressional elections - at-large reps. Say your state has 6 seats. Vote in the general an the top 6 vote getters are the new representatives.
Most people live in states with more than 6 reps. It’s apparently a stretch for people to acquaint themselves with two or three candidates contending for their vote, currently. An election like you describe would result in huge numbers of votes being cast more or less at random.
What would “serving the voters in his district” mean if all districts were (geographically) the whole state and (potentially) any portion of the population? How would the role of reps be different from the role of senators, relative to their districts? That is, leaving aside election concerns and functions in Washington–wouldn’t every rep, in his district office, effectively have to treat every citizen of the state as his constituent?
I assume everyone still got one vote, yes? I also assume the parties could run multiple candidates. If so, it seems like this system would require too much gaming to be effective.
For example, suppose 75% of Arizonans are Republicans. You should end up with four or five Republican representatives. But what happens if one of your Republican candidates is much more popular than the others? 60% of the voters might vote for him and the other five Republican candidates might split the other 15% of the vote, getting only three percent each. The Democrats on the other hand might divide their support more equally and their six candidates might each get four percent of the vote. (The remaining one percent voted for Nader.) So a state with a massive Republican majority will end up sending five Democrats and one Republican to Congress. This definitely does not reflect the will of the people. This was the kind of situation that screwed up the 1800 Presidential election.
In theory every voter in the state is a potential constituent. But in practice the voters who register in his district are going to be the Representative’s actual constituents. They’re his rice bowl.
Under geographical districting, constituents are pretty much fixed. Virtually nobody moves out of a district because they dislike their Congressman. So a Congressman can consider his total constituency as a captive audience. All he has to do is keep 51% of them happy and he can ignore the other 49%. (And Senators can work the same way because their constituents are going to leave the state to vote for somebody else.)
But that won’t work with floating districts. A representative who ignores any of his constituents will lose them to another district - unlike now, it would be easy for people to “move” for voting purposes. So a representative has to keep all of his constituents happy not just a majority of them.
One possible benefit that might arise from this system is a reduction in pork projects. As you pointed out, representatives would have their district spread out all over the state rather than located in one region. This would make it more difficult for representatives to target pork to their district.
:smack: