*** 5/16/26 - two artices re proporional representation as fix for Gerrymandering problem ........
Buzz Sawyer
and some members are starting to get on board. But now, as the public understands
the consequences of our faltering democracy, more people are talking about it, Drutman said.
A Fix for Gerrymandering Both Parties Could Love
Takeaways by Bloomberg AI
America’s political landscape has become a stinking mess. More and more states are joining the race to the bottom to gerrymander away the power of their voters. But we don’t have to hold our noses any longer — there’s a fix in sight. And it doesn’t even require a constitutional amendment.
It’s time to shift to the system most of the world’s advanced democracies use: proportional representation. It’s a power-sharing arrangement in which parties get seats according to their vote share.
It would work like this: Instead of dividing states into single-member districts where the winner takes all, a state is either divided into regions or left as a whole. Voters elect multiple representatives in each large district in proportion to the number of people who vote for them. Parties present voters with lists of candidates and voters choose the candidate, not the party. Independent candidates are listed separately on the ballot as if they were their own party. And seats are awarded based on the proportion of votes each faction gets.
In a five-seat congressional district, for example, if Party A gets 40% of the votes, it gets two seats awarded to the two most popular candidates from that party list. Republican-led states would follow the same rules as Democratic-led ones, resulting in a surge of representatives from opposing parties from each state in Congress — some number of Republicans might represent Massachusetts, for example, and some Democrats might represent Oklahoma.
Voters, under this system, have much more power. That’s something we are losing rapidly as authoritarian thinking creeps into the political conscience of the nation’s ruling class, silencing dissent and snuffing out democratic norms.
It would also be a stark contrast to the competition-suffocating districts being implemented across the country now. In November, the new maps are likely to produce the lowest number of competitive congressional races in history — less than 8%, according to data journalist G. Elliott Morris.
If we continue along this path, we will be “fundamentally undermining the idea that we live in a democracy where people’s votes matter,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the think tank New America and one of the leading voices in the electoral reform movement.
In Florida, for example, 41% of voters are registered Republicans — but under the current map passed last month, Republicans could get up to 86% of the congressional seats. In California, where 45% of voters are registered Democrats, the congressional map could give Democrats 92% of the seats.
“The single-member district system has outlived its usefulness,” Drutman told me. “Given the diversity of this country, given the pluralism of this country, and given the vulnerability of the single-member-district system to maximalist gerrymandering, what is it that we’re trying to preserve by keeping it?”
Under the winner-takes-all system today, the only way voters can express dissatisfaction with the party in power is to vote for the opposition. It’s an unsatisfying option for many voters, especially the 45% who identify as political independents or the majority of Americans who are not happy about the redistricting arms race. But with proportional representation, there would be room for new parties to grow and new coalitions to form.
It’s also a relatively easy fix. Congress would have to amend the 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act and repeal the requirement that requires states to use single-member districts for congressional apportionment, Drutman explained. The best time to do it would be before the next redistricting cycle, which is supposed to be in 2032, after the next decennial census. And since it will mean that many in power could be put out of a job, he added, the public has got to demand it.
Proportional representation won’t solve all our problems, Drutman told me, but democracies that use proportional representation do a better job of managing racial and ethnic diversity than those that don’t. That’s because parties must compete for minority voters “rather than capture them.”
Political scholars and nonpartisan organizations like FairVote and Protect Democracy have been working on these ideas for years. There’s already a proposal before Congress and some members are starting to get on board. But now, as the public understands the consequences of our faltering democracy, more people are talking about it, Drutman said.
“I call for Congress to authorize multi-member congressional districts with proportional representation systems to prevent partisan shut-outs and drown-outs across the country,” Maryland Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin declared on the day after the US Supreme Court neutered the Voting Rights Act.
In 2024, Carolyn Silverman and I wrote about how 82% of the American population has been sorted into states controlled by a single party, inhibiting political choice and eroding representative democracy. Since then, Republicans in more states have been careening closer to authoritarianism, adopting laws that undermine fair elections and suppress opposing viewpoints.
With proportional representation, we can start repairing that damage. There’d be no more Congress members waltzing into office without competition. No more disenfranchising minority voters. No more bizarrely shaped districts. No more maps that split neighborhoods apart. No more tipping the scale to keep older officials in power. No more extremist posturing to win primaries. And when it works for Congress, it can also work in state legislatures.
It would be like a national political cleanse — the systemic detox we want, and the reboot we desperately need.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/this-big-idea-could-fix-americas-gerrymandering-madness.html
This Big Idea Could Fix America’s Gerrymandering Madness
It is hard to overstate the seismic effect on the U.S. political system of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. It gutted Voting Rights Act protections for minority representation in legislative bodies that had slowly but surely enabled Black voters to climb out from beneath the legacy of the Jim Crow South. At the same time, Callais (in combination with earlier Roberts Court decisions banning judicial interference with partisan gerrymanders) actively, even aggressively, encouraged instant and recurring legislative gerrymanders wherever a political party — more often than not, the GOP — had the power to carry one out.
In the short term, Callais revived flagging Republican hopes that gerrymanders could so drastically tilt the playing field that the GOP could maintain control of the U.S. House in November even if it loses the national House popular vote by a significant margin (as it probably will). But the longer-term effects will be even more significant. Unless current GOP state government trifectas are disrupted, it’s clear Republicans will go on a remapping binge prior to the 2028 and 2030 elections, then again after the 2030 census reapportions congressional seats (likely to the benefit of the sunbelt states they dominate). In particular, majority- and plurality-Black (and in some places Latino) districts will be decimated without mercy. And it’s equally clear Democrats will retaliate wherever and whenever they can, just as they did so very rapidly in California and Virginia this time around.
A gerrymandering arms race will likely become a regular feature of American politics every year or two. And the victims will be not just the minority voters who will be denied representation but minority-party voters in both red and blue states who could suffer de facto disenfranchisement for years.
Worse yet, there will be no simple way to reverse this devolution. Callais didn’t just gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965; because it’s a federal constitutional ruling, it would prevent implementation of any congressional effort to reenact similar legislation. There’s already talk among prominent Democrats of trying to put the genie back into the bottle via court-packing, which could reshape the current Supreme Court or intimidate it into a less reactionary stance. But that’s the longest of long shots, requiring not just a Democratic trifecta in Washington but one that lasts long enough to prevent a quick reversal.
If Democrats want to mitigate the baleful effects of Callais and stop a downward spiral into a Congress and state legislatures ruled ruthlessly by partisan majorities, they need to think very big. And as it happens, there is one reform that is adequate to the task and suddenly relevant and realistic. It involves abandoning the current single-district, first-past-the-post election system in favor of an arrangement that makes gerrymandering impossible and, as a huge added benefit, addresses the growing and dangerous disgruntlement with the current party system.
The idea, as laid out by longtime advocate Lee Drutman of New America, is a system of multimember districts elected by proportional representation, as is the practice in approximately 130 countries, including most of Europe. Drutman explained how it would work at The New Republic, using Kentucky as an example:
Kentucky would be roughly two-thirds Republican, one-third Democrat. So in a proportional system, that would be two Democrats and four Republicans. But because of the way that the district lines are drawn, Democrats are all pushed into one district, more or less—one safe district for Democrats and five safe districts for Republicans.
Now, what makes that possible? The fact that there are a bunch of different lines that you can draw. Now, imagine an alternative world—perhaps our future—in which Kentucky is just one six-member district. Everybody votes in the same election as you do for Senate, and parties put forward lists of candidates. So Republicans put forward a list of candidates, Democrats put forward a list of candidates. Democrats get 33 percent of the seats—the two most popular Democratic candidates on that list go to Congress. Republicans put forward a list of candidates—the four most popular Republicans go to Congress.
So that’s proportional. That’s what we think of as fairness. You don’t have to draw any district lines, and candidates run on party lists, and parties get representation in Congress in proportion to the share of votes that they get—which is a very intuitive sense of fairness.
There are no districts, and thus no gerrymanders, and no one (assuming there are enough seats to share) is disenfranchised. Interestingly enough, a proportional representation system of this sort would both strengthen the parties by giving them power over candidate lists and eliminate the major-party duopoly, since minor parties with enough votes would earn representation without having to win a district. And indeed major-party factions unhappy with party leadership could form their own parties, making coalition governing both feasible and sometimes essential.
Drutman would go further to reform statewide elections by national adoption of “fusion voting,” currently utilized in New York and Connecticut, allowing candidates to run on multipleparty ballot lines. This system allows for more choices for ideologically inclined voters, but at the same time encourages multiparty governing coalitions.
All this sounds like pie in the sky, if not “un-American,” right? Actually, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that mandates either single-member congressional district or first-past-the-post balloting. A 1967 congressional statute requires single-member districts. Legislation to repeal or replace it would arguably be easier to enact that some blatantly partisan Court-packing scheme or a ban on partisan gerrymandering that might not pass judicial muster.
It’s possible that Callais’s impact is so dire that it would make such radical reforms suddenly possible and perhaps even palatable across party lines. When it comes to gerrymandering, we are clearly entering the “hyper-partisan doom loop of escalating division and polarization” that led Drutman and others to embrace proportional representation and fusion voting. Donald Trump is the perfect expression of the prevailing style of politics, and Democrats who fear and despise him should think hard and think big about how to escape the poison.