There’s a spectrum of ways to reform the House using proportional representation. Two key factors are how many representatives a multi-member district would have and how winners of House seats would be proportionally allocated.
In 2021, Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia led a group of other House Democrats in reintroducing a proposal that’s been floating around Congress since 2017. The Fair Representation Act would require states to use ranked choice voting for House races. It calls for states with six or more representatives to create districts with three to five members each, and states with fewer than six representatives to elect all of them as at-large members of one statewide district.
Doesn’t matter when one side is actively trying to destroy the system
I am not grokking this.
So lets say I am in a hypothetical 5 person district with ranked choice voting. Lets say there are 2 Million GOP Voters and 1 Million Democrat voters
Would the GOP run 5 candidates and the Democrats would run 5? Would I order the candidates once or would I do that for each seat?
No matter how I am thinking about it, the 5 GOP candidates would get the 2 million votes and the 5 Democrats Democrats would get the 1 million and it would still be a completely red district even though we want it to be 66% to 33%
You would rank them once.
If we were taking the top 5 candidates in a FPTP election, once a candidate receives 16.66% of the vote they would be guaranteed to get a seat because it’s impossible for 5 other candidates to also have at least 16.66% of the vote. So the election threshold in this election is 16.66%. In general when selecting n winners, it is 1 / (n+1).
The scoring takes place in rounds and every round either a candidate will earn a seat or a candidate will be removed (votes can be reallocated to them in later rounds so they’re not permanently out).
When a candidate exceeds the election threshold they win a seat and their excess votes are then redistributed to the other candidates. Suppose Rep1 wins the first round by 1 million votes over the election threshold. Their excess votes are redistributed based on what the voters’ next preferred candidate is. E.g. Of the voters who voted for Rep1, 70% had Rep2 as their next choice and 30% had Rep3 as their next choice. So Rep2 earns 700,000 votes and Rep3 earns 300,000 votes. Then the next round of scoring begins.
If no candidate reaches the election threshold that round, the votes from the lowest scoring candidate are eliminated and their votes are redistributed based on the voters’ next choice similar to how the excess votes from a winner are redistributed (except now it’s 100% of their votes). Then onto the next round.
If we assume that everyone votes down party lines, then every time votes are redistributed (whether because a seat was won or because a candidate was eliminated that round) the votes would only be redistributed to someone of their same party. If Democrats have 33% of the vote, then when a Republican wins a seat the excess votes just get redistributed to other Republicans. When a Democrat candidate is removed from a round their votes just go to the next Democrat candidates. The Republicans aren’t taking away any of the Democrats’ slice of the pie. Inside that blue slice there might be several rounds of shuffling votes around until one of them reaches the election threshold but none of the Democrat votes would ever get redistributed to the Republicans.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
“It has effectively extinguished competitive elections for most Americans, and produced a deeply divided political system that is incapable of responding to changing demands and emerging challenges with necessary legitimacy.”
And that increased competition could push political parties to be more willing to compromise and negotiate, says Didi Kuo, a fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Courts hearing redistricting lawsuits at the time were considering ordering states with contested maps to use multi-member districts and hold statewide at-large elections as a temporary fix — a scenario that many lawmakers wanted to avoid.
While the high court upheld its past rulings on a key remaining section of that landmark law, the loss of other legal protections against racial discrimination in the election process has made it harder to ensure fair representation for people of color around the country.
And the system that we have now, in many ways, adds to that disillusionment," says Alora Thomas-Lundborg, strategic director of litigation and advocacy at Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.
For communities of color, proportional representation could, in theory, set up a House of Representatives that is more reflective of their shares of the U.S. population, which is becoming increasingly diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, Thomas-Lundborg adds.
The original article contains 1,406 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The problem is we expect only one or two people to represent thousands, if not millions, of people. And then for those representatives to somehow agree when representing their base. There needs to be more overlap in representation, or it’s just going to continue being a free-for-all team game where no one really agrees with each other unless they’re trying to use each other for their own gain.
