At long last, the filibuster — the second-most anti-democratic aspect in American government — has been cracked. The US Senate is still not a democratic institution in principle; it still gives dozens of times the weight to voters from small, rural states. But at least it's Democratic; that is, at least for now, the party that got more votes has demonstrated that it could pass legislation if it wanted to.
That's not true in the House of Representatives. There, Democrats got around 1.4 million more votes, but 33 fewer seats; so the minority Republicans are still in control.
Gerrymandering is part of the problem. In Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Alabama, Republican-drawn districts managed to elect 25% more Republican representatives than their fair share of the vote. In South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, the gerrymargin was even higher; in Louisiana and Indiana, it was almost as high. But the fact is that even with nonpartisan districting, Democrats would waste more votes running up the score in inner cities than Republicans would in their areas, adding up to a steady 4-6% advantage for Republicans.
So nonpartisan redistricting could help, but wouldn't fully solve the problem. What would? Proportional representation. Join me below the squiggle for a discussion of how this could work and how we could get it.
"Proportional Representation", or PR, means any system where a cohesive political group (such as a party) is guaranteed to get at least as many seats as the portion it makes of the population. That would mean that in a state with 9 representatives, at least 90% of voters would have a representative they'd helped elect. The current system can't even guarantee 50% get that.
There are various voting systems for getting PR, which make different tradeoffs between ballot complexity, voter versus party power, and locality and accountability of representation. For instance, many European countries use older PR systems such as "Single Transferrable Vote" (STV), "Mixed Member Proportional" (MMP), "Multi-member districts" (MMD), and others. But the best tradeoff comes from a newer system called PAL representation (it stands for "Proportional, Accountable, Local").
Here's how it works. The idea is to keep the voting simple; your ballot lists only your local candidates, and you can either vote for one or write in a candidate from across the state. Your vote is considered to be delegated to that candidate; if they don't win, they have predeclared what other, similar candidates it will go to. So if I pick Candice Candidate, my vote will first go to her; then to whatever group within her party which she's designated as "her faction"; then to all other members of her party; then to all surviving members of her second-choice party; and so on, until either it is used up in helping elect somebody, or all the seats are filled.
The threshold for winning a seat, in the 9-representative state mentioned above, would be 1/(9+1), or 10% of the votes. If no candidate reaches that threshold, votes from the weakest candidate are redistributed, in the predeclared order explained above. This process continues, with each ballot being redistributed according to the simple predeclared wishes of the candidate named on the ballot. When the last candidate from a given party is eliminated, all the ballots are redistributed other parties, as the delegee predeclared.
Once all the seats are filled, each winner is assigned a multi-district territory which overlaps with the winners from other parties. Thus a representative from a major party might be assigned to only 1 or 2 districts, while the sole winner from a minor party would cover the entire state. That way, any voter can easily figure out who is "their" representative, both locally and ideologically.
This system is simpler for the voter than the preferential ballots required by STV. It gives more individual accountability and less power to the party bureaucracy than MMP. It's more truly proportional than MMD. And it's more local (and less of an existential threat to legitimate, popular incumbents) than any of those.
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How can we get there? There are two major organizations working for voting reform in the US: the Center for Election Science and FairVote.
Which is better? I'm biased; I'm on the CES board. Certainly the CES is newer and (for now) still smaller and faster-growing. I'd also argue that they're better because they recognize that newer systems like PAL representation could be a better fit for the USA than the STV and MMD which FairVote favor. (A similar thing goes for single-winner voting reform, too; FairVote is so wedded to the weak reform idea of Instant Runoff Voting that they hid the acronym IRV in their name.) But either organization could use donations; I can assure you that your recurring donation of as little of $5 a month would make a big difference to the CES.
Besides joining one of those organizations, what's the game plan? Voting system reform is a state-by-state matter, and unfortunately that means the biggest wins are in states where Republicans ran the last gerrymander. Of those, there are 5 — OH, PA, MI, VA, and WI — which arguably have a majority of Democratic voters. Of those, only OH and MI have a citizen intiative process. Those states would be the focus for now. Of course, a statewide initiative in either of those places would be a huge undertaking. But 5 years ago, anyone would have told you that reforming the filibuster was a similarly impossible chore.
So let's get to work. Join us; become a monthly member of CES (or of FairVote).