According to Fish wrote an article about this on July 5. The New York Times published an article about this proposal on July 7, written by Reiham Salam and Rob Richie: How to Make Congress Bipartisan, that goes into a lot more detail.
The title of this article is very misleading; there’s nothing at all about it that would “make Congress bipartisan.” Here’s an excerpt:
Step 1 is to elect House members with ranked choice voting in primary and general elections, a system proven in a dozen cities and adopted in Maine for congressional elections. Voters are able to rank candidates in order of choice, and their votes go to second choices if their first choice is in last place and loses.
Step 2 is to establish congressional districts with multiple representatives. Smaller states with fewer than six seats would elect all seats statewide. In bigger states, independent commissions would draw districts designed to elect up to five seats based on traditional criteria like keeping counties intact. Multi-winner districts were used in some House elections as recently as the 1960s and remain common in local and state elections.
And, here’s the key part (emphasis mine):
Voters would rank the candidates on their ballots. In the first round of counting, any candidate with one-sixth of the vote plus one would win a seat, while the last place candidate would be eliminated and her votes redistributed among the remaining candidates. This process would continue until all five seats were filled. The complex math of the process is in service of a simple principle: ensuring that a majority group elects the most seats, but not more than its fair share.
The important thing to understand here is, Rep. Beyer’s proposal is a lot more than just a simple ranking of candidates; it’s a way of implementing proportional representation.
This system is commonly known among electoral reform geeks as Single Transferable Vote (STV); here’s a Wikipedia article about it.
I’m very familiar with this idea. in 2004, the Canadian Province of British Columbia established a Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. It deliberated and held public hearings for nearly a year, and ultimately decided that STV was the best choice. A referendum was held on it in 2005, and it received nearly 58% yes votes. This was short, however, of the 60% required for passage. A second referendum was held in 2009, and this time, it only got 39%, primarily because it was rat-f**ked by the New Democratic Party.<sup>1</sup> I actively campaigned in favour of the proposal both times.
As Salam and Richie stated, it’s the redistribution aspect that makes this a great idea. The Wikipedia article explains it a lot better than I can, but the idea is, there are rounds of vote counting. After each round, candidates getting 20% or more of the vote (assuming a five-member district) are elected, and the candidate finishing last is eliminated. The votes of the voters who voted for that last-place candidate are redistributed, and the second or third choices on their ballots are counted instead.
Another major benefit of Rep. Beyer’s proposal is, it would greatly reduce the impact of Gerrymandering.
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<sup>1</sup> It’s important to know that any serious electoral reform proposal will be a fat target for FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) efforts.