I recently read an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor that argued for increasing the size of the House of Representatives to keep pace with the growing population in the USA. They sighted the difficulty of representing more and more citizens, the disparity in population from the smallest to the largest districts (almost 2X), and the ballooning cost to get elected as district size grows.
These are some good thoughts, but I feel like a 435 member decision making body is already struggling to remain effective, I can’t imagine how it would operate if the chamber was significantly larger.
I propose taking a different approach to providing more fair representation in the “people’s chamber”. My approach is built on changing the voting method for electing representatives to Proportional Voting.
Here is a brief Proportional Voting overview: In PV each voter selects their first choice candidate, then a second choice, etc… Say you have 20 candidates running for 10 seats. A candidate is elected when they get 10% of the vote. It is unlikely that voters first choice votes will be evenly split over the 10 candidates, so after evaluating the first choice votes you will likely have elected several candidates (possibly pulling in more than 10% of the vote) but have many more candidates that are only part way there. So the second step in PV is to drop the lowest candidate & release all those votes to their next choice while also releasing a fractional vote from each voter whose candidate gathered more than the minimum 10% of the vote. The fraction released determined by what is required to keep them at 10% (for example if a candidate received 20% of the vote, then each voter that voted for this candidate would then have a 1/2 a vote move down to their second choice candidate). This continues on until you have the top 10 candidates… who are then elected.
So my proposal would be that you would do the following:
- Establish the proper size of a congressional district (# of voters/435).
- Then form clusters of area that would cover roughly 10 districts. These clusters could span multiple states. Also a very populous state could have more than one cluster. There would be no notion of geographical boundaries or individual districts within each cluster.
At each election, the voters use PV to select the top 10 candidates to represent their cluster.
My proposal does allow the ratio of citizens to representative to continue to grow and this will be a problem, but I think that is a more tractable issue than allowing the size of the House chamber to grow.
The big change is that we return to a much better match of “one man, one vote” process because each representative will represent practically the same number of people.
Using PV, a candidate is elected when the attract 10% of the vote in their cluster compared to needing to get 50% of the vote in a geographic district today. So while clusters will be larger than today’s district, the PV voting approach will allow people to rally around a candidate that matches their outlook. These groups could be farmers, environmentalists, racial groups, women, etc… and these interest groups could span a bigger area making it more likely that farmers or a racial group actually get representation. Providing meaningful representation to minority groups on national topics. Because it takes 10% of the voters to elect any candidate, I think that eliminates issues that some other countries using PV have with tiny splinter groups.
This approach also eliminates the whole notion of redistricting… the shifting of district borders based on population changes, which ends up being all about politics and often hurts representation for minority groups. The cluster system would still need to be occasionally modified but because it operates at a much higher level I think there would be many fewer problems. Simply saying that all clusters must either be composed of multiple adjacent states (on state boundaries) or the cluster must be fully contained within a state composed of one or multiple adjacent counties (on county boundaries) would seem to virtually eliminate the redistricting problem.
So that is the approach I would recommend taking for keeping the House truly representative of the people of this country.