Wish You Had More Political Choice? The Answer Isn’t a Third-Party Candidate.

Lee Drutman wrote about proportional multiparty democracy as a solution to the lack of political choice in Slate.

In countries with proportional multiparty systems, citizens are more engaged. They vote at higher rates. Partisans don’t hate each other so much. Legislatures are less geriatric. Citizens are happier.

And proportional multimember districts would make gerrymandering irrelevant. With single-member districts in a two-party system, line-drawers have tens of thousands of possible maps from which to draw the winningest one. But larger districts mean fewer lines. More parties mean less predictable voting. And multimember districts with proportionality mean that a party with 50.1 percent of the vote wins only half of the seats, instead of all (one) of them.

The good news is that the United States could easily move to proportional representation for the U.S. Congress. The elections clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section IV) gives Congress the power to decide how the House should be elected, a power it has used repeatedly. In 1967, Congress used it to require that states use single-member districts. This act, the Uniform Congressional District Act, was passed as a Civil Rights measure to prevent Southern states from using at-large bloc voting, a system that had historically disenfranchised Black voters.