A Centrist’s Platform — Moving Away From Purely Geography-Based Representation

(Note: parts of this post are taken from a post I made last summer.)

Last week, I mentioned that in a winner-take-all, one-representative-per-district system, ending gerrymandering and moving towards a politics-blind method of drawing district boundaries would ease my concerns of two-party duopolistic power, with politicians beholden to themselves more than the citizenry they are supposed to serve.

There are two problems with the scheme I described however: 

First, to the extent that geographic constituencies need to be defined in order to improve the odds of particular groups of interest being represented, a politics-blind redistricting plan would likely erode those groups’ potential influence.

Second, it does nothing to my theory that two-party rule is an artifact of how we determine political representation.

In this day and age, I have to wonder whether it still makes sense for legislative representation to be based solely on geography.   As more of us forge connections that aren’t necessarily constrained by geography, you have to wonder if geography is the best basis to allocate political power.

For example, even though I live in northern Connecticut, I’m at least as interested in the affairs of folks in Boston and New York (the two cities I telecommute to), in southern Alabama (due to family ties), or in assorted other jurisdictions around the country (due to the nature of my work).

However, many of my political concerns — potential government involvement in catastrophe insurance on the coasts, bolstering the changing economy in Alabama’s Wiregrass region, or traffic/transportation related issues around Boston and New York — probably won’t rank terribly high on a list of priorities for my Connecticut-based Congressman.

So why must we be limited to the idea that we can vote for one candidate who happens to reside in the same general geographic region as we do?

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that we live in a jurisdiction represented by 10 legislators, 10,000 voters, two major parties (”D” and “R”) and two minor parties (”G” and “L”).  Today, that legislature would likely take its members from 10 districts (A-J), where election results could look something like this:

Candidates R-A, R-B, D-C, R-D, R-E, D-F, D-G, R-H, D-I, and D-J are elected, giving us a legislature made up of 5 R’s and 5 D’s.   In aggregate, the legislature would look sort-of-kind-of like the political leanings of the entire jurisdiction (if the L’s are assumed to be like R’s, and the G’s are assumed to be like D’s), but it does have the unfortunate side effect of many voters potentially being unserved by the representative from their district.   Minor parties are completely unrepresented in the legislature.

If I could wave a magic wand, I’d be very tempted to revise the world so that in this example jurisdiction, we’d maintain 10 legislators, but have only half as many geography-based districts.  Voters could still vote for only one candidate, but candidates may run in multiple districts.   The ten legislators would be made up of the top vote-getter in every jurisdiction, plus the top five vote-getters who weren’t otherwise elected.  (And, in the event of retirement/etc., the replacement would come from the next-highest vote-getter, etc.)

So, my example jurisdiction described above, might end up looking like this:

With the votes cast, we have ten representatives elected:

We have 4 D’s, 4 R’s, and both the G’s and the L’s were able to gather enough votes to elect a candidate each by running one candidate each across all five districts, rather than splitting their votes.  Thus the legislature is more representative of the political makeup of the jurisdiction than under a traditional one-representative-per-district scheme.

Also, you have more potentially satisfied voters, since more folks had “their” candidate elected, thus reducing the problem of citizens feeling disenfranchised because of the “don’t blame me; I didn’t vote for him” syndrome.

One criticism that you might have with this example is that fewer candidates ended up running for office, and almost everybody was elected, making this not much of a contest.  However, I think this is more of an artifact of presenting a simplified example than an honest flaw.

It’s true that the major parties would likely get into some heavy-duty statistical analysis to develop strategies of who should run in how many districts to optimize their results.  If the parties were able to maintain their duopoly of power, then this would make it difficult to have a legislature that was appropriately responsive to the people.

However, the ability for a particular candidate to gather votes from multiple districts opens the doors for third parties to play a role, as well as special-interest offshoots of the major parties.

For example, for some voters race or ethnicity matters.  It’s easy for me to imagine an “African-American Democrats” caucus or a “Latino Republican” faction running candidates across multiple districts, to obtain votes from interested voters.  This has the happy side-effect of potentially alleviating systemic racial discrimination, the combating of which has been the cause for some mighty funkily-shaped districts under the current system.

Perhaps a Conservative Christian group would splinter off from the GOP to offer up its own slate of candidates, as could a LBGT special interest group.  Even Cindy Sheehan could work to get herself on the ballot countrywide to get a seat in Congress, rather than opting to pick a fight with Nancy Pelosi in an ultra-liberal district.

Because of the potential for rather specific groups to get candidates elected, and because of the reduced influence of geography, I can see porkbarreling being slightly less attractive, as well as perhaps a bit of an erosion in the tendency of the legislative sessions degenerating into a sequence of party-line votes, regardless of the range of opinions held by the folks being governed.

And, because voters could conceivable elect officials from anywhere, you’d eliminate another gripe I have with the way Congress currently operates.  Today, if there’s a bill being considered in committee that I’d like to comment on, as an ordinary citizen, I have to hope that my local representative is on the committee.  If he/she isn’t, then I may be out of luck since the members of the committee have no real incentive to listen to me.   However, under this system, I should be able to attract the attention of at least a few committee members, since they could conceivably be interested in my support next election, regardless of where I live.

This is not a change I’d ever realistically expect to see happen.  I suspect that too many people in the country are too entrenched in the idea of having a single representative from the oddly shaped box that was drawn on a map that just happens to contain their home. And, of course, our politicians have no desire to see such reform, as it rather intentionally erodes their lack of accountability and their entrenchment of power.

But I can dream, can’t I?