Multi-Member Congressional Districts

[Slander and/or Libel]

I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but I had an idea a while back for how we might fix (or at least ameliorate) the gerrymandering issue, and I figured this was as good a place as any to hash it out.

The idea is this: states would split up into multi-member districts consisting of 3-5 representatives per district, at the discretion of the state, and with certain requirements that the districts be demographically self-similar to the state at large (within some bounds, of course).

Obviously states with 5 or fewer representatives are easy: the entire state is one multi-member district. With 6 representatives, the state must split up into two three-member districts. With seven representatives, one three-member and one four-member district. With eight representatives it'd start to get interesting, as the state could opt to split into two four-member districts or a three-member and a five-member district.

For instance, Illinois, with 20 votes, would have the following possibilities:

3-3-3-3-3-5
3-3-3-3-4-4
3-3-4-5-5
3-4-4-4-5
4-4-4-4-4
5-5-5-5

Maybe a Single Transferable Vote, or some other voting system. I'd be open to hearing about others, though I had envisioned as STV.

The advantage of making sure that the districts are roughly demographically self-similar to the state is that once you carve one out, the remainder of the state should still be demographically self-similar to the state as well, meaning the process could likely hum along almost automatically.

Thoughts?

[Slander and/or Libel]

Forgive my newness, I just realized this would probably be better suited to be in the Political Geography and Demographics subforum.

[Slander and/or Libel]

I think the thread is fine here, and it's interesting that you picked IL as an example. Up through 1980 IL had multimember districts for the state House. The elections involved modified cumulative voting. Each voter had three votes and could cast them for three candidates with 1 vote each, two candidates with 1.5 votes each, or one candidate with 3 votes.

That's interesting! I just picked Illinois because it was large enough to have an interesting number of possible permutations, but small enough that it was easy for me to figure out on the fly.

I could get behind this, although I think it would be harder than you think to craft laws governing how to make the districts "demographically similar". Still, large multi-member districts would go a long way towards alleviating the problems of gerrymandering.

As for the voting system, I think STV would definitely suit American politics better than a party-list PR system.

The part about the districts being demographically similar is the most hand-wavy part of the plan, to be sure. But my thought was that mandating multi-member districts would eliminate some of the problems of gerrymandering, but allowing them to be of varying size eliminates (or ameliorates) the problem of possibly splitting up communities of interest; limiting the districts to 5 members at maximum is arbitrary, but I figured that after some point multi-member districts with too many members might start to get unwieldy. Mandating that they be 3-5 members would still keep a decent bit of local flavor, I think.

Of course, I think this could probably work a decent bit better if the size of the House weren't set statutorily at 435, but that's another topic. Actually, out of curiosity I once ran a little simulation on the House using the rule (proposed by a friend of mine) that in a redistricting, no state which gains population should lose representation. Using the same apportionment method currently used, going back to the beginning of the country, such a rule would imply a current House of Representatives with something over 3,000 members. Not the 10,000+ potentially allowed by the Constitution, but still a good bit more.

[Slander and/or Libel]

Very interesting. I had no idea that this system was already in practice somewhere.

[Slander and/or Libel]

Strange oversight on my part. I may have seen 18 and added two as though we were talking about EVs. The math still stands though.

[Slander and/or Libel]

Yeah, that's the sketchiest and least thought-out part of it, to be sure. But my vague notion was that something like an STV system would change the dynamics of what it would take to achieve minority representation in accordance with the VRA.

[Slander and/or Libel]

Like I said, the self-similarity is the sketchiest part of my idea, and the one I'm least wedded to (and least sure what I really meant by it entirely, to be honest).