In which I explain why I’m radicalized on legislative districts:
We talk about the need for nonpartisan redistricting of state legislatures and the U.S. House, and Republicans see it as a way by which they slightly loosen their intense grip on power in many states. We talk about greater competitiveness in elections as a virtue to pursue.
But nonpartisan redistricting is a band-aid on the egregiousness of first-past-the-post methods of voting, including two-round FPTP elections, whether for single- or multi-winner at-large elections. Nonpartisan redistricting of single-winner FPTP elections has to be incredibly precise to accomplish the goals of minority representation and partisan competitiveness.
Even with the proposed Fair Representation Act, which combines nonpartisan redistricting with ranked-choice voting and multi-winner elections, the job of nonpartisan redistricting is made somewhat easier with fewer, larger super-districts, but the premise of even having districts becomes questionable beyond a mere demand for geographical representation.
Why should geographical representation matter for legislative elections anymore? The long-running argument is that geographical representation through districts helps the legislature pay attention to legislators’ particular corners of the polity. But the laws which these legislators write have reverberations – direct or not – upon the entire polity.
I’d argue that we should simply bypass the need for districts altogether, and have all legislators elected statewide and at-large through party-list proportional representation, in which voters vote for their preferred party, and parties become members of the legislature by how much of a percentage of the vote they receive.
Such a method removes geographical jockeying for legislative power from the table, and places the focus squarely upon legislating for the entire polity. No more redistricting, no more fear of partisan competitiveness, no more zero-sum single-winner two-round legislative elections, no more pitting rural and urban areas against each other through structural capture of elections.
Most Latin American nations have made party-list PR work as presidential republics, and have mostly switched to party-list PR since 1908. Few have switched back to majoritarian legislative elections, even with brutal, bloody interruptions to constitutional orders by military coups. It works well, and most of these countries who retain party-list PR don’t have this “eternal” question of carving up geography and property as a tool to gain and retain partisan dominance, nowhere near how bad we have it.
This is what I mean by evolving past the need for legislative (and congressional) districts, beyond redistricting, beyond single winners, beyond electoral colleges of any type, and beyond first-past-the-post elections. Throw it all out.
The Fair Representation Act’s combo of RCV+multimember districts+nonpartisan redistricting is just a compromise.
