CT Blue

A David Roberts (drgrist) tweet directed me to this article, which I thought I would pass along. I believe I’ve made similar suggestions in this blog (I know I’ve verbalized them), but for the life of me I can’t find the posts. Here’s the gist of it:

Executive summary: The lack of fairness and accountability in Congressional elections is drawing welcome attention. Democrats in the 2012 elections won only 46% of House seats despite winning more votes than Republicans .More than three out of five races were won by landslide margins of at least 20%, women remain deeply under-represented and the number of centrist and independent legislators declined again.

But most analysts overlook the real problem: the 1967 law mandating that states elect U.S. House Members in single-member district, winner-take-all elections. A lack of voter choice, the distortion between voter intent and outcome, and the reduction of centrist legislators has relatively little to do with the redistricting process of 2011 compared with the very fact of districting itself. The fundamental cause of partisan bias in the House is that Democrats are relatively concentrated in urban areas, and the fundamental cause of the lack of voter choice in most elections is that most areas of the country have a clear partisan lean. Gerrymandering is problematic, but is not the root of our electoral dysfunction.

Confronting the reality that winner-take-all rules are at the heart of the problems with our elections points us to the only reform solution: the adoption of fair voting systems. These American forms of proportional representation are based on voting for candidates in larger districts with more than one representative. By allowing like-minded voters who make up 20% of the vote to elect at least one of five seats, those seats will reliably represent the left, center and right of every district – resulting in a truly representative Congress.

(via FairVote.org)

There are numerous ways to set this up. Here in Connecticut, with five representatives, the parties could run slates of candidates. If, say, the Democrats got 60% of the vote, they would get 3 Congresspersons. We’d be net losers here, but overall, we’d be net winners. Running slates, rather than individuals, would tend to make personal negative advertising more difficult. People would be voting the party, not the candidates. More than likely this would make races more issue oriented. It would be a little like getting rid of the electoral college; the parties would have to appeal to the entire electorate, not simply to a favored slice. This system would also make a vote for a minor party meaningful. If a party could garner some meaningful percentage of the vote, it would win a seat at the table.

I had forgotten that, as the article points out, at-large districts were banned by Congressional enactment in the 60s. Connecticut was one of the states with an at large district. Simply legalizing them would probably be enough to allow states to implement a proportional system, but it wouldn’t work unless it was done everywhere. I imagine states like Wyoming would have to have mini-congessmen, with each getting to cast a fraction of a vote.

The sad fact is that this country is rapidly becoming ungovernable. The Founders were smart guys, but they weren’t perfect, nor did they anticipate scientific gerrymandering. The out of proportion influence of the small states has always made our claim that we are a democracy ring somewhat hollow, but recent developments make them farcical.