this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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What if we just did a standard federal grid system?
As long as you had single-member districts, there will be a significant fraction of the voting population who have no one they can lobby who will listen. If I'm a Republican in a Democrat district, I don't have representation.
So what's the actual solution? Direct democracy?
I literally said the solution in my first comment? Multi-member districts. Each district has, say, five representatives and they're elected using some sort of proportional representation. Sequential Proportional Approval Voting is probably the best for the US. You can read up on the specifics of that method if you want, but in general any proportional method tries to take into account the fact that once a candidate gets into office, the people who voted for that candidate now have representation and some amount of satisfaction, so other people's opinions should be more heavily weighted when awarding the next seat. It's easiest to explain with party-based methods, but essentially, if the vote totals are 40% Team A, 40% Team B, and 20% Team C, then the winners should approximate that vote breakdown. In this case, 2:2:1. What it means is that minority populations are much more likely to have someone in office who faithfully represents them, but majority populations are still going to have the appropriate fraction of the seats in power.
First sentence is snippy. If you didn't want engagement then why did you bother responding?
Thank you for the information I'll dig into it on my way to work tomorrow.
That creates its own potential (unintended) problems. There's no one size fits all solution to gerrymandering.
Dave Wasserman did a really great job going through all sorts of potential solutions and the benefits and flaws.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/hating-gerrymandering-is-easy-fixing-it-is-harder/
Short answer, it's complicated. Long answer, read the piece, it's really good.