Even better: modify the fundamental nature of the House of Representatives such that a representative's voting power is proportional to the share of the vote they got.
Both of those are pretty major reforms, so absent those probably the best thing is to make sure the redistricting process is not controlled by a single party, and maybe imposing some restrictions on how complex the shapes can be.
Germany does that. They have districts, which get to send the winner in each district to parliament. But these only account for a part of the total seats available.
The others are filled up from a party list in such a way that the proportions are equal to the proportions of the votes.
That way you get the best of both worlds, you have representatives that have a connection to each district, but you still have the distribution in parliament that represent the actual distribution of the votes.
It is a feature, not a bug, that we elect an individual rather than a party. It is likewise a benefit that our distribution of representatives is weighted somewhat by geography and (indirectly) economics rather than purely by population. Should flyover country count less than coastal areas because farming automation has reduced agricultural jobs per acre compared with LA or NYC? Yes, certainly, but to what degree is the question. The industrial and agricultural importance of these areas means that we are better off when we give them larger representation per-capita than they might otherwise expect due to their meagre populations.
The current system is not without faults, such as gerrymandered districts and the various factors that contribute to us having a rigid two-party system. I suspect a lot of people on HN would rather throw it all out and have strict proportional voting and/or equal-population districts. However that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
> It is a feature, not a bug, that we elect an individual rather than a party
Not it is not. Politics is "team sport". Vetting individuals (look at Sinema's bleeding heart eyeroll to pure cravenness transformation) is hard. Vetting organizations is much easier.
> It is likewise a benefit that our distribution of representatives is weighted somewhat by geography and (indirectly) economics rather than purely by population. Should flyover country count less than coastal areas because farming automation has reduced agricultural jobs per acre compared with LA or NYC? Yes, certainly, but to what degree is the question. The industrial and agricultural importance of these areas means that we are better off when we give them larger representation per-capita than they might otherwise expect due to their meagre populations.
This is ridiculous. This is not the 19th century; Industry and Agriculture are big enterprises that are perfectly capable of being run on a national scale. If you want to promote them, do so based on the national interest with industrial policy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_policy. Land-based representation promotes backwards romanticism, not well-engineered modernity.
The Senate giving us stupid things like corn ethanol is not a policy success of unfair representation!
> However that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Do you really think tons of parliamentary systems around the world are hurting because they through out some sort of "baby" by adoption fair representation?
I live in a country where I pick a party to represent me in the national government, not a local person, and it seems to work just fine.
Large countries have different issues in areas that for you would be two or three whole European countries distant, and countries with larger populations have many multiples of your entire population to represent.
In stead, at a national level, a transition can be started and budget can be created to support the states that will be negatively affected. The way that budget is handled locally will then depend on local politicians who can be voted on and need to show that they're actually doing the right thing locally.
Right now, national level politicians can get reelected locally because they're just obstructionists that want nothing to ever change. They'll never actually have to do anything except fund raise and pretend to care about their constituents by blocking anything those constituents don't like. It's a great way for a couple of people to make lots of money while killing the country.
You might find it surprising that this actually happens in a country of 330M people and just 435 representatives, but it does. In part because only a small percentage of people need this service, but everyone benefits from having it as a contingency plan. Helping a single constituent can pay big dividends at election time as they tell their friends, family, and social media about your help. Likewise, not helping can cause great harm as you alienate your voter base.
At that point, who is to prevent parties from solely catering to urban area voters at the complete expense of rural voters? It's already seen as problematic that most public investments like infrastructure get directed towards urban areas, the term "flyover states" exists for a reason and we've been seeing for the last decade just how damaging that can be for a democracy.
[1] https://www.deutschland.de/de/topic/leben/stadt-und-land-fak...
Do you have an data to support this claim?
Interesting. I'd say all the very toxic politics is non-local. The local stuff might be more, but it's mostly mundane.
Which makes sense. My city and county representatives can't get away with passing something wildly unpopular that >> 50% of local people hate. While it's far from perfect, there is a reasonable amount of accountability with local politicians.
Federal-level politicians though, are so far removed from the people they purportedly represent and their election is so heavily gerrymandered that they are untouchable. They can get away with serving only special interests and passing laws which most people hate.
Political science supports the fact that most of the issues voters care about the most are actually national culture-war issues.
It also supports the idea that most of the issues that actually affect voter's day-to-day lives are state/local.
In other words, according to mainstream political science thought, voters don't care enough about what they "ought" to be caring about.
Of course, this is also placing a value judgment that the material things that affect voters lives (local zoning and property taxes, for instance) are more important than the cultural/moral things (like how race is taught in schools). And when you start telling people that what's actually important to them isn't what they think is important, you're trying to "rewrite" their values...
I'm not being serious, but at least in the UK one of the major defences of the British system whenever electoral reform is brought up is, "it's the oldest so it must be the best".
If this is actually true (which I am not sure about), it is a defect, not something we should entertain.
> why do need a system to carve up representation along geographical boundaries
Because people in the same geographic areas tend to have correlated interests
That seems more like ratifying a failure mode rather than fixing it. Having geographic representatives mean that area is less likely to get railroaded in various ways, because they have an advocate who's accountable specifically to them, rather than some diffuse ideological block.
Also, a lot of issues that voters care about are actually local issues made national through centralization.
I have an issue with a bullet ridden sign on the Erie canal that needs to be taken down. It's been that way for years and I'm tired of looking at it. I will first contact the canal corporation as it's their responsibility but if they do nothing the local assembly member for that district can make things happen.
Why is this your representative's job? It just baffles me. Why is this guy dealing with some sign?
The idea that government is broken so you rely on personal relationships to get around is fundamentally bad.
In the Netherlands, you would just take a picture of the problem and post it to the Gemeente (municipality) - in fact, they have an online map you can pin these complaints to, and it's public.
You get a case number, and you get updates until it's fixed, which is usually pretty fast.
If you aren't online, you can just walk in to the office and they'll help you do it.
Very much so, and there is evidence that proportional systems produce, among modern democracies, better satisfaction of the electorate with government, richer political dialogue with more axes of variation.
> Most issues that voters care about are not local issues
That’s very much not true, but in the US system, more local issues tend to be the focus of more local governments (not always, but usually.) At the same time, local impacts of national issues are important and need representation, but proportional representation can be done in ways which respect that.
> Why do need a system to carve up representation along geographical boundaries?
Several reasons: representation of local concerns, accountability of individual representatives to the general electorate and not just a party, and providing individual citizens at least one representative that clearly and concretely represents them particularly, not just their party of preference.
But you can do PR with local district representatives. Two key methods which do this:
Single Transferrable Vote (STV; the multiwinner analog of Instant Runoff Voting/Ranked Choice Voting) provides proportional representation by district in multimember districts, which provides coarse-grained proportionality overall while providing local representation, and mitigating the impact of specific districting decisions, since its very hard for them to have any significant effect on partisan representation overall.
Mixed Member Proportional, in which people have two ballots for a legislative body, one for a district elections (which can be single-winner FPTP, multiwinner STV, or just about anything else), and one for a party. The winners of the district elections are elected, but in the same body enough additional seats are added, from party lists, to achieve proportionality (within the tolerances specified in the system) overall, by reference to the party votes in the second ballot.
STV is the most straightforward and the one that would probably be least problematic for US state or federal legislative elections. (Federally, it would require a change to statute to either allow or mandate states to use it, because there is a statutory single-member-district mandate currently.)
I think one of the most important strengths of democracy is voting out people we don’t like, and MMP badly breaks that ability.
The argument for the list is when 5% of the population would vote for NZ First, and Winston Peters would get a seat because he put himself first on his party list. He would get over-representative power when a coalition government was required: in that specific situation he had a constituency. However in the larger parties (National, Labour) there are situations where people on their list get in on their party vote, even though the person is wildly disliked in the electorates, and would never get a constituency. During a past landslide Labour win, a bunch of nobodies wayyyy down the list (not expected to ever win) got in as members of parliament with zero constituency.
https://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html
https://archive.siam.org/news/news.php?id=1237
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/11/fairmandering-draws...
It's kind of a half-assed idea at this point. But I was thinking that, by forcing identically drawn boundaries, then it would force both parties to choose.
Now that I think about it more, it probably wouldn't work. Both parties would just grab squares that guaranteed their victory. It would end up ultra-gerrymandered.
I think the simplest definition of "fair" that most people would agree with (at least before being told who would benefit and the tribalism kicks in) would result in a distribution of representatives that roughly matches the distribution of the population at large.
That is, if the whole population of a state votes 60% for one party and 40% for the other, and there are a total of 10 representatives from that state, the fairest distribution would result in 6 representatives for one party and 4 for the other.
If by you saying it's "unfair" to Republicans by just having a final representative distribution that more closely matches the distribution of votes, then I'd argue that is indeed fairer and the current system is the one that's unfair.
There are several commercial GIS packages for this and a wealth of papers on the subject.
The great issue, in the US, as I understand it, is that for some entirely batshit devoid of rational reason ruling political parties oversee new districts on a semi regular basis. This fosters a culture of redistricting for personal party gain and ratcheting inequalities that follow.
Saner countries involve apolitical blind consultants for initials district proposals and have party nased challenges follow "I cut, you choose" type patterns to resolve conflict.
I'd argue for a "simpler" method: no district should be non-contiguous and it should be "round" (no weirdly shaped or long districts). Something like: area of the circle that fully encompasses the district cannot be more than 30% of the whole district area. (With some exceptions for coastal areas)
It's very hard to quantify that sort of thing algorithmically, like what region a town feels it is part of. And I do think it is important to take into account; part of the whole reason for districts, is for local character to be considered and reflected in the democracy.
"Fairness" being seen as the same as to majority > all would just result in what we've seen happen with our democracy experiments in places like the Mideast. The majority group just ends up using democracy as a cudgel against minority groups. Those minority groups of course don't just stand idly by and next thing you know the entire system is in meltdown and beelining right towards the next iron fist.
But in general this cost pales in comparison to the alternative system where by merit of having a simple majority, a majority group can impose their every whim and desire on the every minority group with absolutely no restraint. If you can solve both problems in some way, do feel free to share - and not only here. You'd have solved a core problem of political science!
Yes, they can, especially where the combination of FPTP with gerrymandered districts, unequal allocation (by population) of seats (in all three of the Senate and, because of granularity limits, the House and, as a consequence of both of those, in the Electoral College) makes it possible for a minority with the right geographic distribution to have majority control of political institutions.
Should each district be as competitive as the state, so each district roughly works out to be 55% - 44%, knowing that by definition the state's districts would be 9-0 for one party?
Should you instead have five districts clearly for one party, and four districts clearly for the other, knowing that by definition each district would have a huge incumbency advantage?
A lot of people would say they want the districts to be both representative of the state's population, and competitive, without realizing those two principles are in tension.
Each state has x districts drawn by an independent third party which must pass a certain threshold for compactness, and y seats not associated with a district.
Via any mechanism you choose (preference, ranked choice, FPP with parties, whatever) votes are assigned. Any voter in one of the x districts that does not get representation from their local member has their vote flow to one of the y seats.
The exact implementations have tradeoffs, but all are far better.
If you look at the journey from citizen opinion to passed bill, there's a reconciliation process, where those opinions are sorted and filtered to consensus and final vote.
Without proportional representation, more of that process happens earlier. More responsibility given to voters to burden some of that compromise process. When people complain about "lesser of two evils" when thinking of candidates in primaries, or doing calculus on who has a better chance in the general election, that's an expression of that process.
With proportional representation, voters have less of that burden, and have a better chance of electing someone that is closer to exactly what they want. But the burden doesn't go away - instead, that burden increases in the deliberative body itself. More factions and more division in the House.
I'm not trying to represent one approach as better or worse - just saying it's a trade-off, and it isn't the case that proportional representation is "better". From the citizen voter's perspective, maybe, but from the citizen that cares about the final outcome via House bills, it's not so clear.
"Yeah sure, your representatives will be more aligned, but then the outcomes won't be along strict two party lines and will be more aligned with those representatives".
It tends to a two party system which inherently can't represent people's views accurately. In the US you see people talk about white and black districts as if all white people think the same.
A proportional system means everyone's views are represented in the legislature and at that point compromises can be brokered.
I don't think that alone makes it undemocratic. Many systems implementing proportional representation elect a single person per geographic area but also create an overall balance based on the proportional vote. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_seat for instance.
https://www.math.cmu.edu/CNA/summer_institute/2018/projects/...
(simple proof is to turn everything into triangles.)
I'm no constitutional scholar though - maybe such a thing was debated
For every administrative region within a state (county, parish, city, village, borough, ward, etc.), a proposed congressional district must meet one of the following criteria:
1. The congressional district is completely contained within that region. 2. The congressional district completely contains that region. or 3. The congressional district contains no part of that region.
I'm not sure if the problem is that the polticians are afraid of giving up the power to control the districts, or if the extremely adversarial nature of American politics means that Americans mistrust their goverment and their fellow citizens so much they don't believe that the possibility of that government making non-partisan decisions even exists.
How do you calculate that? (not joking: i don't know where one looks for such data)
Plus that in general America seems to involve politics in decisions which are more usually left to officials to do in an, at least theoretically, non-partisan way. I don't know of any other country in which judges are elected by popular vote, or Ambassadors are appointed and approved by politicians instead of being professional government officials(this one I am pretty sure is unique).
The second link below is "fun": seems gerrymandering in France correlates to the French revolution.
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2021/10/21/the-tories-a...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/14/what-frenc...
One of the main difficulties is that we don't have much rigorous theory telling us how long to run the Markov chains.
Other tests and models have also been proposed in the challenges to gerrymandering. The supreme court just had to pick one. But what the court ruled in 2019, along strict partisan lines, is this:
The Court ruled that while partisan gerrymandering may be "incompatible with democratic principles", the federal courts cannot review such allegations, as they present nonjusticiable political questions outside the remit of these courts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rucho_v._Common_Cause
So just like how the supreme court ruled in citizens united that it wouldn’t put any limits on money in politics, it ruled in this case that it wouldn’t prevent politicians from redistricting in their favor. The supreme court is imho part of the problem of American politics, not part of the solution.
Now as for the SC being part of the problem, well, maybe it's an issue of assignments and term limits, but it is not as simple as not having one
In Rucho,
> Roberts made clear that partisan gerrymandering can be distasteful and unjust, but that states and Congress have the ability to pass laws to curb excessive partisan gerrymandering.
In other words, it's up to the legislatures to ban gerrymandering first before SCOTUS can rule on it.
As for Citizens United, the law granted the FEC to pick and choose who was allowed to exercise political speech:
> The Chief Justice wrote separately to explain why the Court went as far as it did. Essentially, Roberts explained what I’ve written in this article: that there was no rhyme or reason anymore to which entities were allowed to influence elections and which weren’t. According to the government, Michael Moore can but Citizens United couldn’t. The New York Times (a corporation) can but other corporations couldn’t. There were so many holes and exceptions to the law organizations had been essentially reduced to asking the government for permission to criticize it, and that is contrary to the essential purpose of the First Amendment. No more narrow exceptions given to one group but not another, the whole thing must go.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/michael-moore-trumpland-migh...
They even went as far as to claim the authority to ban books:
> A close reading of the transcript, however, reveals that General Kagan did not change the government’s answer. She suggests that someone who had their book banned by the FEC would have a “quite good as-applied challenge,” and suggests (wrongly, it turns out) that the FEC has never pursued books in any enforcement issue.
> This is not the same, however, as saying flatly that under no circumstances does the government have the authority, under the Constitution and the First Amendment, to ban books for political content. Instead, Kagan asserts only that the statute in question (203) does not currently cover books, while conceding that another (441b) does cover books — but she promises they won’t use it to go after books. Promise, pinky-swear!
(yes, that Kagan as well in case you were wondering)
https://www.ifs.org/blog/citizens-united-its-all-about-the-b...
In other words, it's up to the legislatures to ban gerrymandering first before SCOTUS can rule on it.
...so the very legislatures that practice gerrymandering to make sure their party stays in power should, after a sudden revelation that this practice is distasteful and unjust, decide to forbid themselves from doing it? Yeah, that sounds very likely!
In this case, Congress would have the power to do so if state legislatures will not (and for that matter, some states have).
You're saying that SCOTUS shouldn't act until the people rigging elections in their favour... Voluntarily stop rigging elections in their favour?
I'm not sure if that argument is just nakedly partisan, or is simply one that doesn't make a lick of sense.
It's right up there with 'criminals should preside over their own trials' and 'the watchmen should watch themselves'.
Waiting for a constitutional amendment on anything in this century is like waiting for Santa Claus. He's not coming.
So when SCOTUS says they are bound by the law and Constitution to not make certain decisions, a lot of people now rightly ask: are they really? Because it seems that they can move with great alacrity to twist the law when it suits the political aims of their party.
They may have correctly followed a legally justifiable theory that led to their decision, but there were also other equally, if not more, legally justifiable theories they could have followed to reach the opposite decision.
For example, a theory that would incorporate the idea that a badly acting legislature cannot be the only one to depend on to curb the badly acting legislature when the bad behavior’s goal and effect is to shape the very mechanism that provides the only check on their behavior, ie voting.
The best criticism of the ruling, imo, is that it should have been decided under the freedom of press clause. The result was correct, but if it was decided under that clause it could have avoided the campaign contribution implications.
Only what the law actually says is justifiable in law.
> For example, a theory that would incorporate the idea that a badly acting legislature cannot be the only one to depend on to curb the badly acting legislature when the bad behavior’s goal and effect is to shape the very mechanism that provides the only check on their behavior, ie voting.
On what legal basis is this based on?
But then we have Roe, which was settled, until it wasn't.
That doesn't seem to support the idea that
> For example, a theory that would incorporate the idea that a badly acting legislature cannot be the only one to depend on to curb the badly acting legislature when the bad behavior’s goal and effect is to shape the very mechanism that provides the only check on their behavior, ie voting.
has to be one of those theories.
> In other words, it's up to the legislatures to ban gerrymandering first before SCOTUS can rule on it.
The gerrymandered legislatures, you mean?
The idea that the states can cheat in elections how they will, even federal elections, and there is no recourse - do you not see that even if this has the color of law, it is in fact _wildly unjust_?
> As for Citizens United, the law granted the FEC to pick and choose
Given the FEC's extremely limited budget, the fact that they can only enforce a subset of violations is completely necessary.
This is true of all agencies, police organizations and the like.
---
These two are crappy decisions that are bad for the country and bad for the average citizen.
The people who defend them never do so on the basis of justice or fairness, because on that matter they are indefensible. In their hearts, they think, "Our evil side will be able to win and win and win forever if we set the rules to 'Cheat Mode'".
It's not good, and it's certainly not ideal, but it's much worse for the courts to be usurping powers they don't have.
> Given the FEC's extremely limited budget, the fact that they can only enforce a subset of violations is completely necessary.
> This is true of all agencies, police organizations and the like.
The FEC specifically gave exemptions selectively to certain organisations. Not 'they didn't have the resources to pursue this' but 'they said it was ok for Michael Moore to do this but not Citizens United'.
> In their hearts, they think, "Our evil side will be able to win and win and win forever if we set the rules to 'Cheat Mode'".
I'm so glad you're able to glimpse into my heart of hearts and determine what I think for myself.
This is false. The recourse, and the correct course of action, is for state citizens to be shown convincing evidence that gerrymandering is unjust and bad (which isn't hard to provide) and elect better representatives. Representatives elected via gerrymandered elections still do actually have to be voted for by members of those districts, and so a sufficiently large grassroots effort will likely succeed.
> Given the FEC's extremely limited budget, the fact that they can only enforce a subset of violations is completely necessary.
This is selective enforcement. I hope you agree that that's bad.
> These two are crappy decisions that are bad for the country and bad for the average citizen.
No, they're decisions that are consistent with the constitutional system of the United States. They have undesirable outcomes because of the laziness of voters, but they are principled and correct.
Subversion of the tripartite system of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government to try to obtain a better outcome is obviously unsustainable and extremely abusable - a clearly terrible idea, advocated for only by those with a partisan desire for some specific changes to be made, and not because the justices are actually doing a bad job (so far).
Growing up a member of large semi feral child population there was one simple rule that kept the peace.
"DIVIDER GETS LAST CHOICE."The most plausible solution being pushed right now is the one advocated by Lee Drutman and Fix Our House, proportional representation via large multi-member districts:
It's more plausible than others because it doesn't require amending the U.S. Constitution. I'm not convinced you couldn't still gerrymander a bit to tilt this system one way or the other, but it's way more robust than what we have now.
My ideal system has the same basic design, a combination of local and proportional representation, and would look like this:
(1) Redistrict algorithmically using a simple algorithm based on population density alone, minimizing a relatively easy-to-understand objective function (e.g., average distance of people to other people in their district). The goal of this algorithm is not to be "best" or "fairest" in any sense, but to be robust to attacks like John Roberts's frightening line about "sociological gobbledygook." Once you have subjective measures of fairness, you open things up to political maneuvering (and accusations thereof).
(2) Assign multiple members of Congress to each district. An election for a district involves picking n candidates via instant runoff voting.
(3) Members don't get 1 vote. They get a vote proportional to the fraction of people that voted for them in the election.
That way, if you have a 4-member district, with the top 4 vote-getters being a Democrat with 45% of the last-round vote, a Republican with 43%, a Libertarian with 7%, and a Green with 5%, they each get 0.45, 0.43, 0.07, and 0.05 of a vote, respectively.
(4) Do this for the Senate too, ha ha ha. Senate still serves a purpose in this fantasy: it's a longer-time average of public opinion with less time spent running for re-election.
The "almost" is there only because there's probably some threshold below which votes are wasted - and the wasted votes need to be reassigned to the other candidates somehow, which makes it not exactly proportional. But in practice it's not a big enough incentive to gerrymander.
The problem with democracy is that any bugs in the process are how people who can fix them are elected, so there's negative incentive to fix them and positive incentive to abuse them even more. I'm of the opinion that a well-functioning democracy needs revolution every century to fix the accumulated trash.
I would argue to throw out the constraint that each district must contain the same number of people. There is no reason for that other than the fact that "one man, one vote" sounds good when you hear it. It makes just as much sense as applying the same constraint to senators.
Representatives are supposed to represent a common interest group, not Democracy In The Abstract. If two people are a part of the same community with the same interests, why wouldn't they share a representative? The right approach is to identify natural districts first and then not care whether they're the same size.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/
The short version: Everyone agrees that gerrymandering is wrong and bad, but it's not 100% clear what the "right" result is. Is the right result proportional representation? Is the right result having more competitive districts? And what about minority influence?
One thing they brought up which used to make the whole thing more complicated is that some civil rights laws also make requirements (or used to make requirements anyway) about the makeup of districts: namely, that if you could, you had to make a district which gave Blacks a significant influence in at least one district. But doing that requires "packing", which is one of the pair of techniques (along with "cracking") used in a partisan gerrymander.
Lots of states have recently implemented a variety of responses to gerrymandering; in a few years it should be clear which approach(es) work best.
Makes me wonder, is there a fairer, algorithmic way to carve up a geographical area into election districts so we can apply the same solution to every state?