By what measure? It’s not clear to me that a representative is going to be that much more effective because their district has 300K people and not 500K people. Either way, they have a crap-ton of constituents.
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Related satire:
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That’s an interesting thought though. Census is based on April 1, 2020. At that point deaths were definitely disproportionately in New York. I hadn’t really thought about that until just now.
…I have.
The House represents the people, the Senate the state/local governments. Pull the house elections out of the states and make them national with a mix of districts, some could be geographically bases some could be at large or represent other cohorts.
Or to more accurately represent the distribution of power the voters selected a choice of colored dots and billionaires and corporations buy into the election for an opportunity to place their people into the spaces representing the dots. The buy in would be a meeting held privately to negotiate the distribution or power. The selected rep would have to where clothes that match the color of the dot so the citizen voters can have bragging rights and feel connected to the running of the government.
Sounds just about right - just add “repeal the 17th Amendment”
Does anyone else remember the mid/late 1980’s TV series “Max Headroom”, where one of the premises for the future was that political control was based on, and shifted with, TV ratings?
Or, just sell the right to vote. Every citizen gets one free ballot. Anybody (or any corporation) can buy additional ballots.
If the $14 billion is right for the 2020 election, it seems we could sell ballots for $100 each. The price would probably be higher since this is so much more direct then buying commercials.
My big wish for a while has been to reduce or eliminate the idea of geography-based representation.
Today, none of my elective officials have an incentive to listen to me, as data and modeling will show that I am unlikely to ever vote for them, much less contribute to their re-election campaigns. (My views don’t align well with the major parties.)
However, in an environment where representatives ran on an at-large basis, with the top 435 (or however many) vote-getters being elected, then there would be a decent chance that I and others with similar views could pool enough support to get representation, despite being scattered around the country.
I think that modeling it out, such a system would result in a higher proportion of voters having a representative invented to be responsive towards their interests than in the current system.
That’s a cool idea but I think you’d run into a real issue when certain geographies didn’t have anyone elected from their region. For example imagine if none of the elected representatives were from Texas? Texas would probably try to secede again.
I wouldn’t worry about that. If people in TX thought so strongly that they need to be represented by a Texan, they would only vote for Texans.
Mathematically, I can see where so many Texans might split the Texas vote the first time we tried this that none of them would make the top 435.
I think the Texans would rapidly come up with a plan to prevent that from happening again.
Folks who place priority on locality could vote for someone local.
However, in this day and age, given the advancements in communication…for federal issues at least, geography is an increasingly poor proxy for political interests.
The bigger potential problem with the system I described is the risk that an outsized proportion of folks could vote for one or two candidates, opening the door to some fringe groups having an opportunity to have outsized representation. Political parties would have to coordinate intra-party campaigning to ensure this wouldn’t happen.
Another way to address “representation from my state” concerns would be to shit to “superdistricts” or candiates running on an at-large basis across the state. For example, if looking at what is today a collection of 5 congressional districts; perhaps there is one district with 5 representatives.
Yet another alternative would be to do away with voting for individual candidates (who serve as proxies for parties) and actually just vote for political parties. The parties would use lists of candidates, with the top n candidates from their lists being elected, where n is calculated based on popular vote totals. Parties would have to handle any desired geographic diversity in putting together their lists, lest they face the consequences from voters for whom that matters.
That’s certainly true. But, recognize that any 0.23% of the voters could get their special interest into Congress. We might have a literal flat-earther in Congress. Or, more likely, a number of winners who ran on the platform of banning evolution from public school curriculums.
This could be interesting. Passing legislation would require building a coalition of widely scattered rep. But, the cost of building that coalition may be adding something to bills that is really important to 1% of the population.
I could see a partial move in this direction that might involve combining four current districts into one district with four reps.
That’s fair, definitely an interesting idea to think about.
Yep. That’s one of the risks inherent in a representative democracy: the people have to be responsible in selecting their representatives…and the people sometimes do a really lousy job in that regard.
The superdistict concept is the one that has a more realistic chance of happening, as it fits within the current Constitutional structure. However that “more realistic” chance is like comparing an iceberg’s chance in hell to a snowball’s chance. It’s not going to happen, because the entrenched political powers have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
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I think you need to let everyone vote for more than one candidate, ranked. If their first choice gets more then enough votes, than their second choice gets some of that vote. And so on.
It works better at the state level, where you could realistically vote for as many people as there are representatives in your state’s delegation. No one is going to cast an educated vote ranking more than 50 candidates.
So… Maybe CA needs to be split up for this to work. And perhaps TX, NY, and FL. I think it would be realistic for the rest of the states.
I think there would be issues for states smaller than the ones you list. I’d say probably 5 or so candidates is about the max you could possibly hope for people to be intelligently informed about, and even that is optimistic.
Now if you’re going to just have people vote for parties and then have the parties decide then fine. But if you and I are in the same party and you wish to vote for Bob and then Jean and then Pat but I prefer Pat and then Bob and then Jean and those votes are recorded differently in a way that matters… I think 5 is about the most you could possibly hope for people to be informed about.
I think that if you had super-districts represented by at least three and probably not more than five representatives, you’d fix a lot of the structural issues in the House of Representatives.
Such districts would probably have 2n+2 or 2n+3 (n=number of representatives from the district); asking voters to rank-order their top 4 or 5 choices would be doable…aside from the institutional resistance to change.
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Actually, thinking about this a little more… I’m not certain that the normal algorithms for ranked-choice or instant-runoff voting in a superdistrict scenario would work as intended.
Consider: Connecticut has 5 seats in the House. If CT’s delegation mirrored the politics of the population, one might expect the delegation to be 3D, 2R; or 2D, 2R, 1other.
So, for the sake of argument, let’s say that you had the following candidates:
D1, D2, D3
R1, R2, R3
Other1
(I will resist the temptation to speculate on what “Other” might be, or introduce multiple third parties.)
Assume also that you have 1,000,000 voters casting “first choice” votes as follows:
400,000 D1
150,000 R1
150,000 R2
100,000 R3
100,000 Other
50,000 D2
50,000 D3
…you would end up with a delegation of 1D, 1Other, 3R…which wouldn’t be representative of the state’s political preference.
You’d need to do some kind of overall preference voting to have the desired effect: For example “indicate up to four candidates you would like to represent you”, with an individual giving 1/n votes to to each of the n candidates they indicate.
Edited: comment below is no longer relevant
(That doesn’t add up to 1,000,000 and I assume that D1 + D2 + D3 should be greater than 50% in a blue state like CT.)