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Several US states have in fact had a various times at-large representatives (most notably Hawaii and New Mexico since the time they were admitted into the Union). In 1967, the Single-Member Districting Mandate (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c) was passed to mandate geographically based single-member districts. One reason it was passed was because of fears that southern states would use at-large districts to dilute the black vote. The other is that at the time, Indiana was under court-order to elect all 11 of its representatives at-large unless it could come up with a satisifactory districting plan. This was an attempt by Congress to claw back some power from the judiciary after the 1962 Baker case declaring the one-person/one-vote principle that districts must be of roughly equal population. I think that it is an interesting debate and definitely doesn't get talked about enough (or at all!) in school.

This is very interesting. Why was it thought that at-large districts would dilute the black vote? Blacks were a minority in every southern state, I believe, so naively one would think that they would stand to benefit from at-large districts and suffer from gerrymandering. The only way I can think this might not happen is if the plan were to only have a very small number of the representatives (like one) be at-large, but presumably the relevant proposal should be to have all representatives be elected on an at-large basis (?)

This is because an at-large system isn't the same as a proportional representation system. In an at-large system, 51 percent of voters can still control 100 percent of the seats. This is because each voter gets one vote per seat. For example, if a hypothetical state had 5 Representatives elected on at at-large basis, and 51% of the state favored one party, they could win 51% of the vote for each seat, and win every seat.

It may be true that no state had a Black majority in the 1960s, but several states did have a Black majority until the 20th century. From Wikipedia:

Three Southern states had populations that were majority black: Louisiana (until about 1890), South Carolina (until the 1920s) and Mississippi (from the 1830s to the 1930s).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_minority

Interesting. I had always thought that moving to a proportional system would require a Constitutional amendment, which seems like a virtually impossible bar to clear, but if that law is constitutional, would Congress also be able to mandate that all states elect their representatives at-large using proportional representation?

Germany has a very clever system of electing representatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Germany#Vo...

1. You vote both for an individual in your district and for a party.

2. Individuals win via a plurality of their district, like in the US

3. The rest of the Bundestag is filled up from party lists so that as much as possible the final proportion of parties matches proportion of party votes.

Applying it to your example and doubling the representative count, there would be 10 directly elected Democratic representatives. The rest would be distributed proportionately among Republican, Libertarian, and Green.

In practice you don't actually get the directly elected seats all coming from one party, so in reality you end up with a roughly 35%/30%/20%/15% breakdown in the end.

That way you can have some direct representation of your region, which I'd assert has some utility, without sacrificing proportional "accuracy".

(I'm skipping a couple subtleties here, but that's the gist as I understand it.)

Doesn't this create a two tier system where the directly elected representatives hold a proper mandate and those on the party list are relegated to the back seats of power?

On the flip side, having each representative tied to a particular locality makes sense from a service delivery standpoint. If there are potholes in your street, you contact the city council member from your district. And if they aren't responsive to your needs, you vote for a replacement. I think it's a mistake to think that locality doesn't matter just because of improvements in transportation and communication.

At the risk of devolving the thread into political flamebait, the issue isn't geographic vicinity or physical and metaphorical disconnect. It's a financial disconnect: the money funding representatives comes outside the constituency. All of the other issues you described stem from that.

See: The refusal of representatives to hold town halls. They literally don't represent their constituents anymore.

This is a different issue. No reason we can't also fix gerrymandering. Also, while outside money certainly is an issue, there is still research showing the limited effectiveness of money in politics. It only goes so far, whereas siloing opposing voters can be at least as effective, and more permanent.

Agreed. There's been some movement towards better voting systems, but proportional voting seems consistently to be bottom of the barrel of priorities.

http://www.fairvote.org/ - Promotes IRV, and I think they were in favor of proportional representation, but I can't seem to find the pages now (go figure).

http://www.equal.vote/ - Promotes a customized score voting system, which seems more solid than IRV from my reading, but no mention of proportional representation.

It's too bad, really, I'd be hugely in favor if something like this came up in a CA statewide ballot/proposition.

Proportional representation is definitely a big part of FairVote's agenda. They have a bill in Congress right now around electing members of Congress from multi-member districts using STV -- of which IRV is the single-winner variant. It is called the Fair Representation Act:

http://www.fairvote.org/the_fair_representation_act_has_been...

All it takes is an amendment to a state constitution to change how one of the houses of its legislature is elected. Sounds lovely. Can even do this by direct democracy ballot initiative in a handful of states, let's do it!

This is simply not true. The us constitution demands geographical representation of the House. State constitutions can not change this only us constitutional amendment can.

Edit: After rereading the parent again I think he might be talking about the state house not us house.

There is only a requirement that the voters of the state elect members of the US House. How that is done is not specified.

until the Justice Department gets involved and insures minority candidates have adequate chances based on the Voting Rights Act. This creates a problem where one party is effectively eliminated from a district while the opposite party may be weakened outside of it.

That it is subject to regulation by Congress is specified in the Constitution, and Congress has acted under that power and mandated single-member, geographic districts.

It's not the Constitution but rather a federal law that was passed in 1967. FairVote's Fair Representation Act, which was introduced in Congress this year, seeks to change that for example.

Actually, it is an act of Congress that mandates single-member geographical districts (1967 Single-Member District Mandate). Several states over the years have had at-large districts, and it has been a debate since at least the 1842 Apportionment Act. The debate has gone from one focused on federalism (states should decide how to elect reps) to equal protection (black people should get not get drowned out by racist southern states. flip side, gerrymandering is easy to do, hard to prevent). Nothing in the US Constitution prevents at-large House reps.

Geographical representation means that Congress critters have direct responsibility to a well defined set of constituents. So you can't make up for closing a factory on one side of the state by making new friends on the other side of the state.

Furthermore, you have to decide which reps stay on when an election reduces the number of reps. Who makes that choice? In parliamentary systems, the party does. But in the US, elections are (mostly for the worse, imho) ultimately about the individual representative: voters have a chance to say 'THIS guy is an asshole' and vote him out, instead of giving the party discretion as to whether to drop the entrenched asshole or kick out the newcomer...

You wouldn't decide that at the next election?

> I never understand why at large proportional voting systems are never even considered.

Party-list proportional systems reduce the accountability of individual representatives to the general electorate, transferring that accountability to those setting the party list.

You can get much better proportionality than single member districts provide without abandoning direct accountability (e.g., by using STV or a similar system in districts of, say, 5 representatives.)

Districts are popular when they work because local concerns may be divergent from state concerns, particularly in localities where the politics are at odds with the state as a whole, such as (conservative) eastern Oregon or (liberal) Atlanta, Georgia. While Oregon or Georgia might elect a contrarian representative in a PR election, such representative might not be as satisfying of a choice to residents of those districts.

I think the easiest "trial run" for proportional voting in the US is using two-winner elections (preferably Schulze but maybe traditional STV) to elect Senators, because this doesn't require any changes in representation. Unfortunately this is subject to game-theoretic problems because it tends to make the Senatorial output of a state less polarized (California might have one Republican and one Democrat instead of two Democrats), which could result in a political swing towards those states without proportional Senators (Wyoming might still elect two Republicans with FPTP).

> I think the easiest "trial run" for proportional voting in the US is using two-winner elections (preferably Schulze but maybe traditional STV) to elect Senators

The easiest trial run would be at the state level. Making each states Senators part of the same class instead of being from two of the three separate classes would require a Constitutional Amendment, since it would change the terms of some sitting Senators to something longer or shorter than the Constitutional 6-year terms.

It also (presuming Senate terms aren't changed besides what is necessary for transition) would mean each state would have six years between elections for the Senate rather than alternating 2- and 4-year intervals.

> Unfortunately this is subject to game-theoretic problems because it tends to make the Senatorial output of a state less polarized (California might have one Republican and one Democrat instead of two Democrats), which could result in a political swing towards those states without proportional Senators (Wyoming might still elect two Republicans with FPTP).

This can be mitigated by increasing the number of Senators per state; even 3/state would probably make it a non-issue, it would make 2/1 splits common initially, so you wouldn't have most states even with the others 2/0.

Indeed. This is what FairVote has been fighting for in the past 5+ years, and it's already making some progress:

http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation

Sounds like a great way for a state to make itself politically irrelevant at the national level.

Most states already are irrelevant. Your vote in US elections don't count unless you live in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, or Wisconsin.

That's only true of the presidential election. Senators in states other than those can often go either way, and in the House it's pretty much district-by-district whether your vote matters.

Maine and Nebraska use a proportional vote so it matters there in some districts. Also Arizona, New Mexico, Missouri, and Georgia are usually battleground states.

Maine and Nebraska assign the votes corresponding to House seats to winners in each Congressional District, they do not use a proportional system.

No, it counts, it's just those states have recently been competitive. But being competitive or not is just the aggregate effect of individual votes; and which states are competitive or dominated by one party or the other changes over time, sometimes quite rapidly. (Some of us can remember when, in Presidential elections, California was viewed as a Republican presidential lock.)