A Better Representation System for the House of Representatives
The U.S. House of Representatives is one of the worst political chambers in the world. Perhaps the biggest problem with the chamber is gerrymandering, where politicians draw districts that benefit their own political party. In the House, that means whichever political party is in charge of a state government when the state redraws its congressional districts — every 10 years, after the census — gets to gerrymander the map to their heart’s content. Some states, often by referendum, have adopted independent redistricting commissions to draw their districts so that politicians will not intentionally gerrymander them. Democrats are trying to pass a bill that would require this for all states.
However, even if every state had independent redistricting, with a seemingly fair objective like making compact districts, Republicans would likely still have an advantage in the House of Representatives. This is due to numerous factors, described thoroughly by Dave Wasserman, but the most basic one is the geography of Democratic and Republican voters. Since most Democrats are situated in really blue urban districts, it is very easy to draw them into a few very blue urban districts, while Republicans tend to be spread out among rural areas that are not as red, and are therefore harder to cram into a few districts.
We Need A New Representation System
The fundamental problem with all of this is the United States’ representation system in the house of representatives: first-past-the-post with single member districts. This system, where the United States is cut up into equal-population districts that are each represented by a single person, is not the only option for a chamber of congress. The two most popular alternatives which better represent the country while still having electoral districts are Single Transferable Vote (STV) and Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP).
STV, used in the Australian Senate and for regional elections all across the world, has districts that are each represented by multiple people. These people are elected by voters listing their favorite candidates, in order, in such a way that the ratio of candidates from different political parties elected models the ratio of voters from political parties. For example, assuming every candidate is generic, a district that has 10 representatives and has voters that are 73% Republicans and 27% Democrats should elect 7 Republicans and 3 Democrats.
This helps ensure that districts with voters that are overwhelmingly from one party get better representation (so that a very blue district would elect more Democrats than a slightly blue district), but it has some problems. Firstly, gerrymandering would still exist in STV, especially if districts have a small number of representatives (3-member districts, for example, are about as easy to gerrymander as regular 1-member districts). Having more representatives per district would help mitigate this issue, but this would require voters to learn more about the candidates running. It is simply unimaginable to have well-informed voters when they have 10 options and have to elect 5 of them.
MMP, used most notably in Germany, comes with its own set of pros and cons. In MMP, voters have single-member districts elected through first-past-the-post, as in the US. However, they also vote for the party that they want to take power in the chamber. If the proportion of representatives from parties representing districts does not match the proportion of parties that the voters directly voted for, then the under-represented parties gain representatives that don’t represent any specific district. For example, if a party wins 52% of the votes from the party vote but only representatives from 42/90 districts (47%), then that party would gain 10 more seats so that the party would hold 52/100 representatives in the chamber. This system has the advantage of very precisely estimating the voters’ partisan intentions, bypassing gerrymandering entirely.
One issue, however, is that it necessitates the formal adoption of parties in the United States, which are not codified in any way into the U.S. constitution. Another problem is that it would encourage strategic voting. For example, if a district has a very conservative Democrat running in a red district, that candidate would ordinarily lose. However, since voters know that their district vote does not matter to the overall partisan makeup of congress, voters may instead decide to vote for the Democrat so that the coalition of the Democratic party is more conservative. Perhaps the largest problem, however, is that if a party is on the edge of gaining an extra seat, there would have to be a nationwide recount, a process which is not only infeasible but impossible under the current structure of elections that are more regional.
A New System: Proportional Multi-Vote Representatives
Disclaimer: I have not done much research, so I may not be the first to propose this system.
All of these systems function under the assumption that each representative in congress would have an equal say. Suppose we reject this assumption. Suppose we create a system where representatives have a certain number of votes in congress, proportional to the amount that they won their election by. Every chamber and committee vote would see representatives with more votes have more of a say.
This is the system that I propose, which I call Proportional Multi-Vote Representatives (PMR). Under PMR, each district would have a certain number of votes to allocate among their representatives. These votes would be allocated proportionally to the percentage of the vote that each candidate gets in the election. Each district would be free to elect as many representatives as they like who meet the threshold for getting a single vote, with the obvious exception that a district cannot have more representatives than available votes.
So how many votes should a district get? There is a tricky balance. On the one hand, the more votes each district has, the more representative the voting system is. On the other hand, the more votes each district has, the more likely a recount will occur due to the candidates being very close to the threshold for getting another vote in congress. Having more votes will also increase the chance of a third party getting more votes than the threshold and therefore represented. This may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your beliefs, but I tend to dislike it; I am sympathetic to the idea that people with views out of the mainstream should not be the swing votes in congress.
The amount of votes that each district should have is also very much dependent on whether universal independent redistricting reform is adopted. Without independent redistricting, the number of votes per district should be larger, so that intentionally gerrymandering is very hard. It is also worth noting that PMR also allows for districts with different populations that have different numbers of votes in congress, though it is probably best to keep uniform numbers of votes per district. As you can see, there is a lot of flexibility in PMR, and it can be up to policy analysts how many votes each district should have.
In addition to this flexibility, the advantages of PMR are numerous. Most importantly, it almost completely destroys the misrepresentation that comes from single-member districts, as the amount of Democratic votes from a district, for example, reflects how blue the district. It also has other advantages. Under PMR, Republicans in NYC and Democrats in Rural Texas would finally have representatives that listen to their concerns. PMR would also make parties more reluctant to run scandal-plagued candidates. Any candidate that underperforms, even if he or she still get a majority in their district, gives the party in congress less votes to work with. This same mechanism also causes candidates to try to better adapt to their district, and win by wider margins than just the partisanship of their district.
PMR is not a perfect system. It could be that representatives don’t feel as much pressure to represent their communities’ interests if there is no immediate threat of being kicked out of office. PMR would also likely lead to less turnover and therefore fewer new faces in congress. These small imperfections are more than made up for by the benefits of Proportional Multi-Vote Representatives. Perhaps if we adopt this system, the US house could change from being a cautionary tale of misrepresentation to a shining beacon of modern democracy.
