This graphic explains one of the biggest problems in American democracy: gerrymandering, the process of drawing legislative districts that distort the will of the people.
Every ten years after the Census, state legislators redraw the boundaries for Congressional seats (and state legislative seats — you might be noticing a conflict of interest here). Imagine you’re a mapmaker hired by a political party to redraw the Congressional districts in the state to maximize your party’s advantage. You can pack supporters of the other party into a few districts, where they’ll run up massive margins but end up “wasting” a lot of votes, or you can split opposition strongholds into several districts friendly to your party, diluting their voting strength. In the simplified graphic above, you can see both cracking and packing employed — the two blue districts have been packed with blue precincts, while the middle red district has split up a block of blue precincts.
Because the Republicans did well in the 2010 midterms, they had control over the redistricting process in a lot of states, allowing them to draw maps that were very favorable to them. Some of these maps (such as those drawn by Tom Hofeller in North Carolina) have been struck down by courts as racial gerrymanders — the Voting Rights Act prohibits drawing districts that deliberately reduce the political influence of racial minorities via excessive cracking.
But the majority of these gerrymanders have remained in place, and the Supreme Court has held that partisan gerrymandering (drawing maps with the intent to advantage one political party) is something that Congress, not federal courts, must address.
The so-called “People’s House”
This graphic from The Economist illustrates the impact of gerrymandering:
The dots in red — the scenarios where the Democrats win more votes but the GOP wins more seats — fundamentally should not exist. While institutions like the Senate were designed to be anti-majoritarian to protect the rights of political minorities, the House of Representatives was designed to reflect the will of the people.
The fact that there is a 3/10 chance that one party can win control of the House despite getting fewer votes is a fundamental problem in American democracy caused by gerrymandering, among other things (we’ll get to those later). What should happen is that the proportion of the two-party vote that a political party earns should more or less match the proportion of House seats it receives.
Slaying the gerrymander
So how can we fix this problem? The mainstream solution is to take redistricting out of the hands of politicians and have maps drawn by some form of an independent body. This appears to be what Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) will include in his compromise voting bill.
But it still matters how the new districts are drawn because there are a lot of competing criteria that can be used — promoting competitive elections, maximizing minority representation, geographic compactness, and more. I think that the best option is trying to ensure that the partisan breakdown of a state’s House delegation matches the partisan breakdown of its electorate as closely as possible while steering clear of any Voting Rights Act violations with respect to majority-minority districts.
Here’s an example of what all 435 Congressional districts would look like if they were drawn to maximize proportionality from FiveThirtyEight1:
The problem is that it’s not that easy to draw proportional districts. For example, in Massachusetts, roughly a third of voters are Republicans, so a proportional standard would seek to create three GOP districts out of the Bay State’s nine. But Republican voters are so widely spread out that it would require an extreme pro-GOP gerrymander2 to even get one barely Republican district. The same logic applies to Democrats in West Virginia and Pennsylvania and Republicans in California with respect to proportionality in redistricting.
And because Democrats tend to cluster in cities while Republicans are spread throughout more sparsely populated rural areas, Democratic politicians tend to run up the vote in urban districts while GOP ones tend to carry rural districts by smaller but still solid margins. The effect is that the Democratic coalition is less efficiently distributed than the Republican coalition — it leads to more wasted votes.
These two factors — the difficulty of achieving proportionality in certain areas and the geographic efficiencies of the two parties’ coalitions — make proportional redistricting for single-member districts tricky to implement in practice.
For example, in North Carolina, Democratic state legislators used to draw maps that split black voters between enough districts to ensure the reelection of white Democrats. Unfortunately, this prevented black voters from electing black representatives by diluting their voting power across multiple districts. The GOP later backed the creation of majority-minority districts, leading to the election of more black legislators and helping Republicans by making the surrounding districts redder. In many states, especially those with racially polarized voting, achieving proportional results with single-member districts might require spreading minority voters around other districts, which would dilute their voting power in violation of the VRA.
To be clear, implementing some form of proportional redistricting (sans VRA violations) would still be a massive improvement over the status quo, and Democrats should absolutely pass it if they have the chance. But there’s a better option that’s mostly gone under the radar and doesn’t come with these difficult tradeoffs.
The Irish solution
It’s a lot easier to draw proportional maps if each district elects multiple representatives instead of just one. Ireland uses a system like this and generally gets proportionally partisan results. It’s kind of like the Senate, where every state gets two members. But there’s more than one representative per district (the total number depends on district size) and they’re elected simultaneously through a voting method called single transferable vote (or STV). I could try to explain how STV works, but this short video does a much better job than I could:
The Fair Representation Act, also known as H.R.4000, is a bill that would move the U.S. House of Representatives over to an STV system. I highly recommend reading this report by FairVote (an election reform organization) on the FRA, but I’ll summarize some of the key details:
District sizes can vary from one to five representatives.
Members would be elected by STV, with the threshold for election being
1/(N+1)
% of the vote, whereN
is the number of seats in the district.Any state electing five or fewer representatives will do so in one statewide district, states with more representation would have a combination of differently-sized districts.
Districts would be drawn by independent commissions to be contiguous, have equal population-to-seat ratios, be consistent with the VRA, ensure that no district has “historical, presidential voting patterns such that a party has a greater share of support than needed to be likely to elect every single seat in the district,” to minimize the number of four-member districts (and therefore 2-2 ties), and to maximize the number of five-member districts (for optimal proportionality in results)
There’s more in the report if you care to read it, but let’s move on to the two key benefits of H.R.4000.
Gerrymandering: solved
The first is that it would almost entirely eliminate the pro-Republican bias in the House. Look at this chart from the FairVote report:
The yellow line is essentially the same idea as the Economist chart shown earlier, illustrating the ability of the GOP to win a majority of House seats with a minority of the vote under the status quo maps. The light purple line is perfect proportionality — what we would get in an ideal world. The dark purple line is what things would look like under the FRA — still very slightly biased to the GOP because of the urban-rural efficiency mechanic, but very close to perfect proportionality! In other words, H.R.4000 would all but end partisan gerrymandering in one fell swoop.
It would also increase representation in Congress for women, black people, Asians, and Latinos by making it easier for these groups to elect the candidate of their choice even in districts where they do not make up the majority of voters due to the nature of STV.
Re: Joe Manchin & Kyrsten Sinema
My 10th grade U.S. history teacher, Mr. Landwehr, often reminded the class that most Americans are moderates. But in partisan primaries, moderate voters are split between the Democrats and the Republicans, diluting their influence, and leading to a systemic underrepresentation of moderates in Congress.
And because politicians tend to be much more ideologically consistent than voters, most members of Congress are much more ideologically extreme than the majority of voters who have more mixed views.
This is essentially my elevator pitch to Joe Manchin and company: passing the FRA would lead to the election of more moderates like them, making bipartisanship (something Manchin and company want more of) much easier to achieve. The STV system would encourage candidates to appeal to each others’ bases to win second and third choice votes, thereby reducing negative partisanship, allow moderate voters to elect their preferred candidate in a multimember district, and let candidates from different wings of the two major parties run in the same election without splitting the vote.
A reduction in political extremism would also decrease the number of representatives willing to do something like, hypothetically, vote to overturn the results of the presidential election hours after rioters had invaded the Capitol.
Meanwhile in the Senate
A quick update on the progress of voting rights in Congress:
Yesterday, former President Barack Obama came out in favor of the Manchin compromise — the Democratic Party is quickly uniting around the new proposal.
Also yesterday, Senate Republicans blocked a procedural vote on H.R.1 that fell along party lines — the GOP seems united against either bill.
The unanimous GOP opposition indicates that Joe Manchin is very unlikely to find 10 (or any) votes from across the aisle for his voting bill (as do the dynamics of issue salience and “Secret Congress”). But the procedural vote earned the support of all 50 Senate Democrats, so Manchin may be able to bring the few holdouts against H.R.1 onboard for his bill. It now comes down to whether Manchin and other moderate Democratic senators will sign off on filibuster reform.
Obviously mandating that single-member districts be drawn as proportionally as possible would be a major win for democracy, and requires everything going right to pass in the current Congress. But hopefully one day the Democratic Party, and maybe even some moderate Republicans, will see that the Fair Representation Act is the optimal solution to make the People’s House more representative of the American people.
You can use this tool from FiveThirtyEight to explore other ways to draw single-member districts with different goals in mind.
A friend of mine drew this map.