The easiest way to end district gerrymandering? Eliminating districts | Save democracy by holding a single, winners-take-all vote for congressional seats in every state

> A congressional redistricting nuclear arms race is upon us, and when it’s over, we could be living in a hyper-partisan nuclear winter. But there’s a way to end the arms race: eliminate the arms — in this case, the congressional districts that have grown so hilariously gerrymandered that they can’t be anything but unrepresentative.

> After all, there’s nothing sacred about them, and they’re not mandated by the Constitution. Let’s get rid of ’em.

> In the early days of the republic, House delegations were often elected at large rather than by district. As late as 1966, Hawaii and New Mexico each elected their two members in statewide elections, with candidates choosing to run for Seat A or Seat B. Mandatory districting was imposed by Congress (not exactly a disinterested party) in 1967, mainly as a way to keep the courts from imposing at-large elections in states with racially gerrymandered districts.

> But there’s a simpler and far more economical solution than multiple candidates vying for multiple seats simultaneously: hold a single vote for all the seats. How many members of Congress is, say, Pennsylvania entitled to? Seventeen? No problem: Have one election, no primaries, and the top 17 vote-getters go to Washington as the state’s representatives. It would result in wildly more diverse delegations, representing a wider range of ages, races and political beliefs than we have in Congress. (Six states — Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming — are entitled to just one seat in the House, so they already choose their representatives on a statewide, at-large basis.)

> Eliminating partisan primaries would save most states millions of dollars in election costs. (Why the states — i.e., the people — foot the bill for each party’s primary elections is a question for another day.) Holding a single, winners-take-all vote for congressional seats would also break the two parties’ steel-tight grip on Congress. Though about 40 percent of all Americans identify as neither Republican nor Democratic, every seat in the lower chamber of Congress is held by a member of one of those two parties. (Two members of the Senate, Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, are independents who caucus with Democrats.)

> Rural voters wouldn’t lose “their” representatives under this system any more than urban voters would. In fact, all voters would be more represented, not less. For example, each Pennsylvanian would go from having three representatives in Congress (a member of the House and two senators) to having 19. And each member could cultivate a statewide constituency based on political orientation, social beliefs and moral reasoning rather than geography.

> Congressional districts within each state are required by law (not by the Constitution) to be roughly equivalent in population. Electing all the representatives at large would make all the districts in each state the same size. More important, it would end the redistricting wars that once bedeviled us only after the decennial census but now seem destined to become a permanent and ugly fixture of American politics.

> If each state chose its representatives in a single statewide election, the result would be a House of Representatives truly representative of the people. Smaller parties would finally stand a chance of winning a seat at the table. The two major parties would be forced to enter coalitions, which would require compromise and moderation — qualities sorely lacking in the lower chamber. Would it end gridlock? Maybe not. But at least the gridlockers would have been chosen more fairly, more democratically and, not incidentally, more economically.

> Critics will insist that the U.S. House of Representatives is no place for the 17th-place finisher in a statewide election. Perhaps. But could the resulting Congress be any more dysfunctional than the current one? As for ranked-choice voting or multimember districts, these would only complicate an already complicated process. A single-vote, winners-take-all system would remove party politics and geography from the process. Representatives would represent people with shared ideologies, not some artificially constructed “district” where half the voters feel their representative is not representative of their beliefs.

I like the spirit, but not crazy about districts with much more than five members

Multimember single vote is how the LDP “rigged” elections until the 90s in Japan.

I actually like the idea of districts. I think there’s something to be said for representatives being beholden to the needs of a specific set of people. I think the direct connection to people should be increased. That would require more representatives. One generalized possible way that this could look is to have tiers of representatives, with each layer representing a larger number of people.

Since it’s theorized that people can generally have up to 150 personal relationships, it could make sense to start at that level. A neighborhood could be considered around 150 people. A community could be considered around 150 neighborhoods and 22,500 people. A region could be considered around 150 communities, 22,500 neighborhoods, and 3,375,000 people. A state would comprise around 150 regions, 22,500 communities, 3,375,000 neighborhoods, and 506,250,000 people. In the case of the US, this would be the entire country.

The first layer or representatives could be directly elected by the people of the neighborhood. It should be a requirement that the representative have their primary homestead in the area they represent. These representatives would have very minimal duties, expected to occasionally meet with one another and nominate two candidates from themselves for community representative. People of the community would then vote to select one of those two as their representative for the community. Community representatives would have minimal executive duties for their community, in addition to being expected to meet with other community representatives to legislate for the region and nominate two candidates from themselves for regional representative. People of the region would then vote to select one of those two as their representative for the region. Regional representatives would have significant executive responsibilities for their region, in addition to being expected to meet with other regional representatives to legislate for the state and nominate two candidates from themselves for state representative. People of the state would then vote to select one of those two as their representative for the state. The state representative would be the highest representative office in the country, i.e. the president. They would have significant executive responsibilities for the state and no legislative responsibility. If there were a world government, they would be the legislative representative for the state.

This type of tiered democracy has quite a few advantages. First of all, it’s highly likely that each person directly voting for a representative personally knows the person they’re voting for. This makes it easier for them to understand who the person is and to trust them. It limits the influence of parties and also makes it more difficult for manipulative actors to pull the wool over your eyes about who you’re voting for. It also means the representative is more likely to care for the people they’re representing and know what really matters to them. The job of these “close friends” would be to vet the next group of people for you and bring to your consideration the most trustworthy and competent options. However, another advantage of this system is that the people still get a final say over who will be the higher level representative, even though they’re already vetted by “close friends.” A final advantage of such a system is that there would be millions of representatives of various levels. This would make it much harder to buy the system, as you would have to pay off a lot more people than you currently do.