Districts (a Political Issue)
We have numerous representative bodies at the local, state and national level. The members of most of these representative bodies are elected to represent a specific political district. Those representative bodies whose members are elected in districts include town councils, state legislatures and senates and our national House of Representatives.
The requirements and methods used to determine the boundaries of these political districts vary from state to state and town to town. At a bare minimum, the population in each district should be approximately the same as in the others based on the last census. The districts should also be contiguous and compact and as appropriate for the given representative body, communities, towns and counties should not be split up.
Another important consideration when dividing up an area into districts is the needs of the people who will be living in each district. In general, the people living in rural versus suburban versus urban locations may have very different values, needs and outlooks from one another. Those in each location would be better served and represented by someone who lived in and understood their location and who shared their values, needs and outlooks. Therefore, every effort should be made to create districts that only include these similarly minded people who live in a similar location.
However, what should be done versus what can be done or is done are often very different things. First, people with similar needs cannot always be divided into the right number of individuals to go into each separate district. Second, our rural, suburban and urban areas are often intermixed and not easily divided into separate districts. Third, the people who are creating the districts may use other criteria like a political agenda when they create the districts.
When district boundaries are created to gain political advantage, we call that Gerrymandering. This term originates from 1812 when Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts signed a bill to create a state senate district that was shaped like a salamander. The word Gerrymander comes from combining “Gerry” and “salamander”. However, attempts to draw district maps for political advantage go all the way back to 1788, and they have continued ever since.
When a political party is in control of redistricting, they can Gerrymander the districts to create more districts that are favorable to their party's candidates. They will often do that by dividing up counties and jurisdictions to create more districts that lean more their way and create just a few districts that are heavily dominated by individuals who would vote for the other party. This can sometimes create some odd-looking and contorted districts and can lead to the election of some representatives who hold more extreme views.
Let's look at a simple example. Take a state where voters are closely split between favoring or leaning towards each of two political parties. If party A is currently in control of the state and gets to redraw the congressional districts, then they could do so in a way that could keep their party in power. For instance, with 10 congressional districts, party A may be able to create 9 districts where they have a 55 to 45 percent advantage, and 1 district where party B has a 95 to 5 percent advantage. Therefore, instead of ending up with about a 5/5 split between the parties, party A can get a 9/1 split in their favor.
In a district that is dominated by one party or the other, only candidates from the dominant political party may try to run for office. The reason for these uncontested races is simple. A candidate for the other major political party may have little, if any, chance of winning in the general election. Therefore, no candidate of that other party even tries to run. Of the more than 500,000 elected office holders in the United States, it is estimated that about 70% of their elections were uncontested.
When we have an uncontested general election, we could get there in either of two ways. There may only be one candidate of the dominant political party who runs. In that case, this candidate does not even really need to campaign at all. There may also be multiple candidates from the dominant political party. This means there will need to be a primary election. The candidates will then need to campaign for the primary, but the winner of the primary election would then be unopposed in the general election and would therefore be elected without any further campaigning.
This gerrymandering leads to at least three major problems.
First, in most places, only members of a given political party can vote in that party's primary election. This means that most voters do not get a choice in who is elected. In other words, if we are not a member of that party in our district, we are deprived of our vote, and the dominant political party can pretty much dictate who can get elected. We need a way to ensure we all get to vote for who will represent us, so primary elections must be open to all of us and not limited to members of the given political party.
Second, it has been found that more members of a political party who have extreme views and who are more adamant that things should be done their way will bother to vote in a primary. Therefore, a candidate with more extreme views often has a better chance of winning in the primary election. When these extreme candidates run unopposed or run in districts where their political party dominates, then they would or may also be able to win easily in the general election.
When these extreme candidates get into office, they would be able to help pass laws based on their more extreme views, which would not be in line with what most of us, their constituents, wanted. Thus, we will not only end up with minority rule instead of majority rule, which is not democratic, but we will also end up being forced to live our lives in accordance with more extreme laws that most of us do not like.
One way to combat this trend towards more extreme candidates is for another political party to run moderate candidates in these otherwise noncompetitive districts who might appeal to more voters than the more extreme candidates. Not only should the other party's moderate candidates have a better chance of winning in the general election, but this could lead to more moderate candidates in general.
Third, over time, if a dominant political party can continue to control redistricting and voting laws, it can become entrenched so much that it would be very difficult to overcome. This could continue even if we, the voters, shift heavily towards the other party.
It has been said that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Therefore, if a political party were to gain too much power, it could become corrupt and even devolve into an Oligarchy or a Dictatorship. Unfortunately, we have seen a trend in that direction, especially since the 2016 election. We must therefore do whatever we can to prevent any one party from ever gaining too much control.
With our two-party political system and gerrymandering, we have come to have a mismatch between our values and beliefs as voters and the values and beliefs of our representatives. One way to see this is by charting the distribution of voters and representatives based on how far each leans left or right in their political views.
The following chart shows an approximation of the overall distribution of voters. It shows a normal distribution with most voters clustered around the center. That is, most voters have more centrist or moderate views on most issues.
The following chart shows an approximation of the overall distribution of our representatives. It shows a bimodal distribution with most representatives clustered around the left and right. That is, most of our representatives have more liberal or conservative views on the issues.
As you can see by comparing these two charts, we have an overall mismatch between our views as voters and the views of our representatives. That is, those of us who are more liberal or conservative have far more than our share of representatives that share our views and those of us who have more moderate views are greatly underrepresented.
In some districts, their voters may lean more left or right than what we do overall. In those districts, we may have more of a normal distribution of our representatives rather than a bimodal distribution. Hower, that normal distribution would still lean much farther to the left or right than the voters in those districts.
One way touted to combat gerrymandering is to put redistricting in the hands of an independent redistricting commission. The idea is that an independent commission will create fair maps. In theory this sounds like a good idea, however in practice, this does not completely solve the problem. It may only make things a little less unfair. To see why, we need to look at some of the factors that go into creating redistricting maps and how they affect how competitive and fair the districts will be.
The first factor that affects the districts is how far the state leans towards one party or the other. That is, is the state evenly split between favoring each of the parties or does it lean heavily towards one party or the other. With the state evenly split, we could possibly create a map where all or most of the districts were competitive. However, if the state leans heavily towards one party or the other, then at least some or even all the districts may need to be created that lean that way as well.
The second factor that affects the districts is how evenly distributed the supporters of each party are. That is, are people distributed such that each neighborhood has approximately the same percentage of supporters for each party as any other neighborhood or have people self-sorted so that different neighborhoods heavily lean one way or the other. With an even distribution, it would not matter much how we divide the state up into districts. On the other hand, with more partisan neighborhoods, it gets much harder to create competitive districts.
The third factor that must be taken into consideration when creating districts is how much of the population may lean one way in one election and the other way in another election. That is, what percentage of the population can be swayed and what percentage of the population is fixed on one party or the other. With a lot of people who can be swayed and a lot of competitive districts, the number of representatives from each party could change dramatically from one election to the next. This can help to keep any one party from gaining too much control, but it can lead to big shifts in policy.
If the electorate in a state is evenly divided and evenly distributed between the parties, we will end up with all the districts being competitive. In this case, even small numbers of voters being swayed one way or the other could lead to a landslide victory for one of the parties. In another election, we could then have a landslide victory for the other party.
If the electorate in a state is evenly divided but self-sorted, we could still create all competitive districts, or relatively non-competitive districts that are evenly split between those that lean one way and those that lean the other way. With all competitive districts, we end up with a similar situation as when the state was evenly divided and distributed. With non-competitive districts, both parties will end up with the same or close to the same number of representatives most of the time. In this case, it might take a big swing in the electorate to change the relative number of representatives from each party.
If the electorate in a state lean heavily towards one party and is evenly distributed, we will end up with all the districts being non-competitive. In this case, the party with the majority could get all the representatives and end up with those in the minority without any voice in the government.
If the electorate in a state lean heavily towards one party and is self-sorted, we could end up with all the districts being non-competitive or some mix of competitive and non-competitive districts. If all the districts are non-competitive, the party with the majority could get all the representatives and those in the minority would end up without any voice in the government. With a mix of competitive and non-competitive districts, the majority party could get some minimum number of representatives and the rest being split depending on how much of the electorate is swayed one way or the other.
In most states we have an electorate that leans a little or a lot towards one party and is self-sorted. This is due to a lot of people self-sorting not only within a state, but also between states. This situation makes it easier to create gerrymandered districts. Even with an independent redistricting commission this situation makes it harder to create competitive districts.
On the other hand, creating competitive districts is not really the answer. Not only could we get wild swings in which party wins in the district and wild swings in policy, but the people supporting the losing side might not have much if any voice. That is, the winner may only mainly represent the interests of their party and those who voted for that representative.
When we come down to it, the only way to create fair representation, with our two-party political system, is to create gerrymandered districts, but instead of having the goal of favoring the majority party, the goal would be to favor the minority party. That is, a map must be created with enough non-competitive districts for the minority party so that each party will get approximately the number of representatives that matches its percentage of the electorate.
However, I cannot see the majority party in any state creating an independent redistricting commission whose goal would be to create gerrymandered districts that would help the minority party. Therefore, a law or constitutional amendment would be needed at the federal level to require this.
Nonetheless, even if this were done, it would not fix our issue with each party electing extremists. It might even make this issue worse, since this solution would still leave out the electorate from the minor political parties and the independents. Therefore, to make this work we would need to have open primaries so that we all would have a vote in selecting our representatives.
One alternative for electing our representatives would be to switch to party-list proportional representation like they use in many other countries. In these countries, they have multi-member districts and voters vote for a party instead of a specific candidate. Each party that gets at least some minimum percentage of the vote would get to fill a specified number of seats based on the party’s percentage of the vote. Which candidates fill those seats depends on whether the country uses a closed list or open list system.
In a closed list system, the party would create a list of candidates that had a pre-determined order. The seats would be filled starting with the candidate at the top of the list and continuing down until the specified number of seats had been filled. Usually, the party leadership decides who is on the list and in what order they are on the list. To get away from the party leadership having too much control, the party could have a primary that would decide the order based on how many votes each candidate received.
In an open list system, the party would create an unordered list of candidates. In this case, voters would vote for a party and their preferred party candidate. The number of votes the candidates got in their party would determine the order in which the seats would be filled. This system would allow voters the better say in who gets seated without the need for a primary election.
This method of conducting elections has some advantages and disadvantages over our current electoral process. However, the only significant advantage is that you can get a divide of the representatives between the parties that better represents the political split. For our national House of Representatives, this would only be the case in larger states that had a few or more representatives. In the smaller states, this would not be as helpful, especially in the states that have only one representative.
The disadvantages include that only candidates belonging to a party could run, and you would need much larger districts or greatly increase the number of representatives. It would be possible to overcome the need to belong to a party, if a party was created specifically for candidates who wanted to run independently. The problems with larger districts include how to decide who represents who in each part of the district and the possibility that no representative lived nearby. The problems with increased number of representatives include the cost of paying for more of them and their staff, and the reduction in the voice of each representative.
At the national level, the fact that the United States is divided into 50 different size states and a few territories, makes in very difficult to create multi-member districts in each. To make this work in the United States we would need to divide the country into districts regardless of state lines. I believe that most states and the two major political parties would be against this and party-list proportional representation in general. In this case, I would agree with them that this may not be a good fit for our elections here in the United States.
Although the usual methods of doing party-list proportional representation might not work well in the United States due to the way we are split into states, there may be a way to use it to make our elections better. The idea would be to have proportional party representation within each state but still vote for party and candidate in each district much as we do today. This would work much like the open list system of party-list proportional representation method but with candidates who would be local to and voted for in each district.
With this alternative method of proportional representation, we could still run the election pretty much as we do today. However, before we declared any winners, we would first determine what proportion of the votes each party got and how many seats each party should get to give them that proportion of the Representatives. Some appropriate rounding would be done to ensure that each party got a whole number of seats and that the total number of seats was correct.
We would then create an ordered list of the candidates for each party based on how well they did in their respective races and the appropriate top number of candidates for each party would be declared the winners. With just candidates for the two major political parties running, the selection of winners is straightforward. However, some candidates may be declared the winner even though they lost in their district. If the districts are gerrymandered correctly, this should be rare. Otherwise, this might be common.
If the races in some districts have 3 or more candidates, then this could get a bit more complicated but only in certain instances. The key is that if a party does not run candidates in enough races, then they will not get any seats unless one of their candidates really does well in a race. That is, if a party does not get any seats, then that simplifies the calculations. If they do get seats, then they must have run enough candidates that did okay or at least a few candidates that did very well.
If this alternative method of proportional representation was used, then it would change the political calculations of the parties. Currently, a lot of races go uncontested, since those districts lean so much toward one party that no one from another party could win. However, with proportional representation, the parties would want to run a candidate in every district, since any votes they do get would go towards their total vote count and could get them more seats.
The parties would probably still want to gerrymander the districts but instead of each trying to get more districts that favored their party they would each try to bring more of their supporters together. The idea would be that the parties would want their supporters represented by someone in their party. The districts that were more competitive would see more switching of their representation between the parties depending on the total shifting political ideologies in the state, county or town.
On the plus side, this method of proportional representation would eliminate our problems with gerrymandering. It also would give each party a fairer amount of representation within each state and nationally. That is, the number of representatives for each party would better match the political ideology of each state. However, this only works for cases where multiple representatives are being elected like with state legislative and senate seats and with bigger states that have many representatives to our national House of Representatives.
If there is only one national House of Representatives seat to be filled, then it might still work pretty much as it does today. If there were two seats, then the two top parties might always get one seat each. In addition, this would get more complicated to try to declare who won in each district as the number of political parties increased.
The best way to visualize how this method of proportional representation would work and what problems may come up would be with a few examples. We will use a sample state that has a legislative body that has 25 members. All 25 seats would be up for election during each appropriate election cycle. In each of the following examples, we will assume that the number of leading candidates for each party did not match the number of seats each party should get based on the proportion of the total votes that each party got. We will make this assumption because in cases when the number of leading candidates match what they each should get then there is nothing more to do.
In our first example, we will start with just 2 parties to keep things simple. Of the total votes after the election, let’s say party A had 55% and party B had 45%. With some appropriate rounding, this means party A should get 14 seats and party B should get 11 seats. For each party, we would now order the races based on how well their candidates did in their districts. The top 14 candidates for party A would be declared the winner and the top 11 candidates for party B would be declared the winner.
In the above example, the candidates’ districts in the parties’ lists would be in reverse order which means there would be no issue with declaring two candidates the winner in the same district. However, some of the candidates may be declared the winner even though they got fewer votes in their district than their opponents. This may bother some people, but the key is that these races would have been much closer than the other races and it would have been needed to ensure that each party got its proper proportion of the seats.
In our second example, we will have 4 parties. Of the total votes after the election, let’s say party A had 51%, party B had 39%, party C had 9% and party D had 1%. With the appropriate rounding, this means party A should get 13 seats, party B should get 10 seats, party C should get 2 seats and party D should get no seats. Again, for each party, we would now order the races based on how well their candidates did in their districts. We would then try to declare the winners based on the top candidates in the lists of each party. However, there may now be a problem.
In the above example, all the lists cannot be in reverse order. Only two of the lists may have the candidates’ districts in reverse order, but it is possible that none of the lists do. Therefore, taking the appropriate number of top candidates may or may not result in all the districts being awarded to a single candidate. When it does not, some districts may be awarded to the candidates for two different parties, and some districts may not be awarded to any candidate.
For example, one way that party C could earn their 2 seats is by running candidates in just 10 of the 25 races and averaging about 20% of the vote in each case. The problem arises when the 2 best preforming party C candidates are in districts where candidates for either party A or party B did well enough to be near the top of their party’s list.
There are probably many different methods that could be used to deconflict this problem. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a way to guarantee that the deconfliction would always be fair to the parties, to the candidates and to the voters. If the deconfliction resulted in each party getting the number of seats it earned, then it should be fair for the parties but may not be fair for some of the candidates nor for the voters in some districts.
In the above example, it is also possible that a candidate for party D could have won a plurality of the votes in that candidate’s district. If that was the case, then we may want to adjust the rounding to ensure we do not deprive that candidate of that seat. If we did that, then the rounding would need to be adjusted accordingly and one of the other parties would lose a seat.
Although this method would still be more equitable overall than our current method, it still has its problems. This method can get complicated and may not be easily understood by many of us. In addition, some districts may end up being represented by someone who is not as representative of the district’s political ideology. In the final analysis, although I think this method would be better than what we have today, I think we can and must do even better.
With partisan elections, it may always be the case that we have problems with the way we are represented no matter how we draw our political districts. When we change the way we draw our political maps, we would simply switch to having different problems. In the worst case, all the representatives would end up being from one party, even when the electorate did not lean heavily in that party’s favor. In the best case, we would get a fair split of representatives based on how the electorate was split, but we would still end up with a lot of representatives with more extreme views than their constituents.
Even with independent redistricting or proportional representation, a lot of people would still end up being represented by someone who cares more about what their party wants than what is in the best interest of their constituents. Even if representatives do care about what is in the best interest of their constituents, their views on the issues may still be quite different than a lot of their constituents' views. In fact, the political parties are still going to give us a lot of extreme candidates, who would be out of sync with most of their constituents no matter which candidate gets elected.
Even if we could create all or mostly all competitive districts, they would still be unfair. The first issue is that a small shift in the electorate could mean a big shift in who gets elected in each district such that one party could gain an outsize advantage in its number of representatives. The second issue is that a large minority in each district could still get a representative who cared more about his or her political party than they did about them.
There are only a couple of ways to give people representatives who truly care about all their constituents while keeping the political parties. Both would require creating districts that were gerrymandered so that only like-minded people were in each district. That would mean each district would only have members of the same political party or only like-minded independents. One way would require everyone to move so that they were self-sorted into the correct districts. The other way would be to use some exceptionally extreme gerrymandering that would wrap in and around individual homes and apartments.
Given that it would be almost impossible to create fair districts with political parties, the only answer would be to switch to having a Nonpartisan Democracy with nonpartisan elections. This would automatically give us open primaries where we could select candidates who would better represent the views, interests, concerns and needs of most individuals in their district. Districts could then be drawn as they should be by independent redistricting commissions, where they would strive to make them contiguous, compact and contain similar types of locations and similar-minded individuals.
One way to start might be to create districts around all the major urban areas. We would do this because the people in these urban centers would most likely have views, interests, concerns and needs that would be a little or a lot different than people living in rural areas. Depending on the number of people living in each urban area, these districts may need to include more or less of their surrounding suburbs.
Where possible, we would also want to try to create districts for some of the major suburban areas since the people there would most likely have views, interests, concerns and needs that would be a little or a lot different than people living in urban and rural areas. The rural areas and remaining suburban areas may then end with some long and odd shaped borders since their lower population densities would require much larger districts that might need to wrap around some of the urban and suburban districts.
Although our National Senate is a representative body, its districts are unique and have their own set of problems. First, our National Senate districts are fixed and defined as our states which means we at least do not have any Gerrymandering issues. Second, each state gets 2 senators who are elected to six-year terms which means we need to take more care to ensure we elect good senators since they will hold office for a long time.
The first problem is that the states (districts) have vastly different populations. For instance, the population of California is more than 39 million, while the population of Wyoming is just under 600 thousand. That means that someone living in Wyoming has more than 65 times more clout in our National Senate than someone living in California.
Given the makeup of our smaller states versus our larger states, this distorts the political makeup of our National Senate which makes it less representative of who we are. We also are potentially deprived of some individuals in the larger states who would have been good or great Senators. For instance, a qualified candidate in Wyoming would have a more than 65 times better chance of being elected as a senator than an equally qualified candidate in California.
The second problem is the fact that senators have six-year terms, and that we only have one hundred senators. This means that if one of our senators is not doing a good job for us, then we may be stuck with that senator for up to six more years. With only one hundred senators, it also means it only takes a few bad apples to cause a lot of problems with our National Senate.
When our Constitution was enacted, the above issues were probably not that big of a deal. First, the difference between the smallest population and the largest population was only about 8 times. Second, our national government was not as important as the state governments.
The first thing we need to change is the number of Senators each state has. We could give each state and the District of Columbia one initial Senator, and then allocate additional Senators based on a state’s population. However, we may not need to go all the way towards making the number proportional like with our Representatives. We just need to make it a bit fairer, like making the difference between states no more than 8 times as it was when the Constitution was written.
The second thing we should do is to increase the number of Senators, but maybe only by an amount that would make it easier to make the ratio of constituents per Senator fairer. In addition, we should reduce Senate terms to four years or make it easier to recall a Senator who is not doing a good job for us.
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