I want to talk about HR 3057- the Fair Representation Act, which has been introduced in the Congress by Congressman Don Beyer of Virginia. This proposal would end the current system of members of the House of Representatives being elected in single-member districts with first-past-the post elections. Instead, all states with up to five Representatives would choose them statewide, and larger states would be divided into districts with between three and five members. Elections would be by ranked-choice voting (a.k.a. single transferable vote). This is the system that has been used for a century to elect Ireland’s Dáil and the Australian Senate.
I’ve long been a supporter of electoral reform and I believe this could be revolutionary to our republic. Maine has taken a good first step with the use of ranked-choice voting; I hope this will just be a starting point. Using ranked-choice voting in general elections for state offices would require a constitutional amendment and I hope they’ll go all the way and use multi-member districts for one house of their legislature. Recently, I wrote a letter to my congressman in support of this and I urge you to do the same.
A couple more thoughts- one possible objection to this is the increased cognitive load on voters, who have to rank candidates for multiple positions. If you have party primaries, which the bill allows, each party would nominate a number of candidates equal to the number of seats in the district. You could give the voters the chance to rank parties with the candidate ranks allocated according to the order in which they won the primary- similar to Australian Senate elections. I’m not too sure the bill allows states to do that. The bill also allows for an equivalent to a top-two system, with a jungle primary after which a number of candidates equal to twice the number of open seats proceeds to the general election.
Why would states give up so much control to the Federal government? I did some googling, and the only links seem to be Don Beyer’s postings. Nothing in the major news sources. This looks like a snowball in hell to me, but if I were to weigh in it as an intellectual exercise, I’d go back to the question I asked at the beginning. I’m strongly in favor of federalism, and this looks like the opposite of federalism to me. Better to try and tackle gerrymandering.
Currently, Congress mandates single-member districts, so I don’t see why multi-member districts would be a stretch. While I agree this is unlikely to pass now, what happened in Maine may act as a catalyst to spur further reform. Ending gerrymandering would only be a marginal improvement- it’s important to try for greater reform, as Lee Drutman explains in today’s New York Times.
I’d say the main drawback is the tradition of constituent service. Regardless of ideology, most representatives want to do a good job in helping their constituents with issues they have with the federal government.
And, although some representatives have shied away recently, having someone familiar with the local area holding town halls with local constituents is a good thing as well.
I strongly support increasing the size of the House of Representatives. The UK House of Commons has 650 members, larger than than the House of Representative and the Senate.
One major problem with this consolidation is that it effectively quintuples the cost of running a campaign.
Running for the Senate is far more expensive than running for a House seat, by a factor of 5 to 10 depending on what gets counted. This is logical: it costs more to reach more people over a larger area which probably includes a number of major metro areas.
With multi-member districts 3-5 times the size of the old ones, the costs of a campaign will increase a minimum of 3-5 times. I’d say even more, because each candidate is now effectively running against a minimum of 5-9 candidates, and probably more if you think this gives third parties more of a chance.
The bias therefore increasingly goes to already rich candidates or those with backers with deep pockets. Entry-level candidates in House races have a chance today to compete locally in front of constituents who have some familiarity with them. Senate candidates have to introduce themselves to an entire state and so draw from a vastly different pool. In a multi-member race, nothing is strictly local any more. Media exposure is biased over political experience and expertise.
This scheme essentially takes the aspects of current politics that are most destructive and elevates them to the one single factor that would decide House elections. Why would anybody think this is a good idea, except for deep pocket ideologues who want to an easier path toward manipulation and control?
If it was a smaller number of constituents it would be easier to change their behavior. The districts with overwhelming one party loyalty will be hurt the worst by the change. Where there’s more of a split the reps will have to be responsive to everyone in their district to stay in office. And wherever a state increases it’s percentage of minority party reps as a result the two sets of reps will have to cooperate more to serve state interests.
And yes, it could decrease the problem of gerrymandering too. But it could also just create the same situation in greater numbers as one party twists and skews the lines to ensure no district has a majority of state-wide minority party voters. It’s up to the courts to do something about gerrymandering.
The experience in Ireland is that the system tends to foster a very high level of constituent service - some would say excessively high. Since individual potliticians are competing for votes with others from the same party, they cannot compete on the basis of party or ideology, so they tend to so on the basis of constituent service.
Of course, this wouldn’t necessarily map directly on to the situation in the US, where electoral districts would be very much larger. But there’s no a priori reason to think that the system would reduce levels of constituent service. On the face of it, it incentivises constituent service.
I think you’re missing the fact that a Senate campaign costs more mainly because you need more votes to be elected.
If (say) five one-member districts are amalgamated to form one five-member district, you don’t need five times as many votes to be elected. Anyone who gets more than one-sixth of the votes will be elected, and if you can get that at one end of the district, you don’t need to campaign very much, or at all, at the other end. In fact parties will factor this in when compiling the slate of candidates they present - Joe is well known in the suburbs, Mary has great appeal in the western rural areas of the district, and Bob will attract support in the mining communities to the north. Or whatever.
It’s true that the system does give third parties more of a chance, but I’d count that as a plus, not a minus, since it increases voter choice, and the range of views that will be represented in the legislature.
A comment on the ranked-choice system being a part of this proposal: I’m a huge fan of ranked-choice voting, but multi-member electorates are absolutely not the place to start with using it. Not because of “cognitive load” (people LOVE ordering things in ‘most favorite to least favorite’ order - half the crummy data-stealing applets on Facebook are based on exactly that fact) but because although the VOTING is simple, the COUNTING is decidedly not.
After a Senate election it’s often a week or two before the last few Senators are known because you can’t eliminate people until all the votes are in, including postals and remote areas. Little differences in voting order of the minor parties can have quite large run-on ripple effects which are often key to who gets the last spot (occasionally some quite surprising outliers). We’re used to it here - but if you implement ranked choice in multi-member electorates as the first experience anyone has of the system, everybody will be going ‘the hell? what IS this crap?’ and you’ll lose your chance to implement it where it would actually be useful - the Presidential race, for instance.
That should be less of an issue in the US, where the election is held in early November but the successful candidates aren’t going to take office until the following January. Thus a delay of some days in identifying the last few members of the House need not be a big deal. Ireland uses ranked-choice voting with multi-member electorates; it is generally clear by the close of the first day of counting what party will have a majority and 90%+ of the successful candidates are known. All seats are normally filled within 3 days of counting.
Problems are exacerbated in the Australian Senate elections partly because of the above-the-line voting system, which encourages all parties to nominate as many candidates as there are seats to be filled, rather than as many candidates as they might realistically hope to have elected (which vastly multiplies the number of candidates on the ballot) and partly because the enormous and remote nature of some of the electorates, which means that physically gathering in the vote to count it takes time. But this points to a virtue of the system; every vote matters. If you know the results without bothering to count the votes in full you’ll have a quicker result, but at the cost of a system where individual votes are less relevant. If you live in remote area and the results can be announced with confidence before your vote is counted, what does that tell you about the value of your vote or the significance of voting?
This looks good in theory but will not work in practice. The idea behind this is to lessen the effect of gerrymandering. Most House seats today are designed to give one party an overwhelming advantage. Remove that and the result is far more competition. It essentially creates balanced districts where all races are close. If races are close, then getting the last few votes to put you over the top becomes exponentially more important and exponentially more expensive.
It also has the potential to destroy local representation. All states with five or fewer House members will vote statewide. Oregon has five representatives. Metro Portland has more than 50% of the state’s population. Where do you think most of the candidates and money will be concentrated? Those 17 states that will be affected (not including the seven with one rep who already vote statewide) will see House races turn into Senate races. As a resident of New York I can tell you how the Senate works. Senators come from New York. Kirsten Gillibrand is an exception. She was appointed to fill Hillary Clinton’s seat and won a permanent seat as an incumbent. Before her, it had been decades since Upstate had a Senator. Welcome to our nightmare, Oregon.
I must confess to being a bit confused by this. The proposal is, in part, to eliminate the effects of gerrymandering. But, the greater import of it is to generate proportional representation within each of the now larger districts. I share your concern that it may raise costs of campaigning, but again, in a five-member district you only need 16.7% of the vote to win one of the seats, and some of that can come from transfer from eliminated candidates or transfer from candidates that exceed the electoral threshold.
Again, if 40% of Oregon voters are outside of the Portland metro area, they have the ability to elect two representatives from that area if they choose to. It’s a form of proportional representation. For the New York example, NYC has (based on me glancing at a map) 11 members of Congress. You could put most of it into two five-member districts and it would be isolated from the remainder of the state.
Here’s a quick example of how our current system is unrepresentative- Massachusetts has nine House seats. They are all filled by Democrats, even though about a third of voters regularly vote Republican in presidential and contested congressional elections. If that state were divided into three three-member districts, it is likely that each one would elect two Democrats and one Republican. A majority of voters should elect a majority of representatives, but I don’t believe they should be able to elect all representatives.
To add on to John Mace’s post. When Congress passed the law mandating districts there was some concern that such a law was unconstitutional since an election by district may not be a “manner” of holding an election. I suspect that due to standing it would have to be challenged in Court by a person running for the House of Representatives or a state that wants to change their election laws.
At-large elections have historically been considered permissible, but the dilution of the voting power of racial minorities would likely be a more prominent concern to modern courts.