Here's some info on why U.S. dropped MMDs in national elections and why it would be advantageous for the U.S. to bring them back now.
Create multi-member House districts
Americans are accustomed to living in districts represented by one member of Congress. Most state legislative districts send one legislator to their capitols as well. But it hasn’t always been this way. For much of history, multi-member districts were relatively common at both the state and federal levels.
Congress mandated single-member districts in 1967 for the purest of motives. In that era of civil rights reforms, it had become clear that states could use multi-member districts to enforce white supremacy: By creating a few majority-White districts and allowing voters to vote for as many candidates as there were seats in the district, states could effectively shut out minority voices. [Thus poor voting system meant end to MMD when on other hand, a fair voting system where each voter has just one vote in a MMD, would mean fair representation and large multi-member districts.]
But a multi-member district in which, say, three or five representatives were instead chosen through a proportional system could avoid this problem. The reform wouldn’t necessarily favor either party, according to FairVote, with potentially 200 likely Republican seats, 201 likely Democratic seats and 34 swing seats. Few, if any, congressional districts would be represented entirely by one party, according to FairVote’s modeling, because enough supporters of the minority party live in most places to be able to elect at least one member within a multi-member district. Consider that “[i]n 2020, there were more Trump voters in California than any other state and more Biden voters in Texas than in New York or Illinois,” the scholars wrote in their recent open letter to Congress. “The vast — even overwhelming — majority of Americans don’t fit precisely into the ideology of their single-member congressional representation.”
Multi-member districts with proportional voting could yield a Republican elected from currently all-blue Massachusetts and a Democrat from deep-red Oklahoma. “What that really does is make sure that every district is getting more than one partisan view represented in its delegation,” says Danielle Allen, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University who co-chaired the American Academy’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. “When the two caucuses go to their separate rooms, Democrats and Republicans, the whole country geographically would still be there.”
This reform also would finally drive a stake through the heart of gerrymandering, because the multi-member districts would be too large to have their borders be manipulated effectively. And especially with an enlarged House of Representatives, there could be room for multiple kinds of Democrats or Republicans from the same district — not to mention candidates with other affiliations. Some reform advocates — like New America’s Drutman, who wrote a book titled “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America” — say the changes would allow for the rise of additional political parties, in part because they wouldn’t be viewed as spoilers in a perpetual Democratic-Republican showdown. Others foresee the two parties themselves becoming larger, less extreme tents. Either way, our democracy could recover some of its tolerance and complexity.
“It breaks the binary psychology that every election is this fearsome, zero-sum, all-or-nothing fight for the soul of the country, in which 50.1 percent could somehow create total power,” Drutman told me. “It basically captures this idea, which I think Madison intuitively grasped in Federalist No. 10, that the way to have legitimate political self-governance is to ensure that coalitions are never fixed. … It means that people are able to make deals with each other in different arrangements.”
[Actually 50.1 percent is not necessary to take total power.
in fact there is no certainty that the victorious party will have to receive more than half the votes.
in 2020 House election
In New York 22 district, Tenney was elected with just 49 percent of the vote.
In Texas 24, Van Duyne was elected with just 49 percent of the vote.
So with these unbalanced results in the separate districts, there is no certainty that the party that takes majority of seats take more than half the votes.
In fact
in 2020, overall Democrats took majority of seats with just 50.8 percent of the vote.
in 2018 overall Democrats took majority of seats with just 53 percent of the vote.
in 2016, overall Republicans took majority of seats with just 49 percent of the vote.
so obviously no guarantee that the victorious party has to take a majority of the votes, more than half the votes.
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