This one reform could fix our broken elections

Lee Drutman co-wrote an article with Aziz Huq for The Dallas Morning News on making the case for multimember districts.

The paradox at this moment is that both parties are trying to win a narrow victory that would force the other side to concede. But in a political game of centimeters full of close calls, it’s natural to want to “work the refs” — in this case, the court, which has become more powerful as a result.

To see why this is so, notice that the court can play a spoiler role for democracy only because we have a closely contested, hyperpartisan two-party system organized around single-member districts. Either these are gerrymandered to be safe, or they’re fought to razor-sharp margins. Small vote shifts then have seismic reverberations. Lawyers are standing by. Either the maps were drawn unfairly, the votes were counted unfairly, some voters were suppressed, or something else illegal — or so the record dockets of election litigation alleges. Our single-district system invites the judicialization of elections. Judges, not voters, then decide who wins.

How do we take this power away from the courts and the partisan legislatures? The solution is as simple yet transformative: A mode of proportional representation, with multimember districts, would solve the problem in one blow.

Our proposal, in the spirit of C.S. Lewis’ “deeper magic,” rests on a founding-era choice now largely forgotten: Congress has sweeping power under Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution to determine the form that elections take, including whether we use districts or multimember systems. Previously in our history, Congress forcefully wielded its authority under the Elections Clause of Article I to direct how elections are organized. We’ve just forgotten this.

Congress can break from our broken single-member districting system by imposing a new system of proportional multimember House districts. Ideally, these districts would have five to seven members. These seats would be allocated in proportion to the party-vote share in the district. Say Republicans win 60% of the vote in a five-seat district. They get three of the five seats. This can be done through an open-list system, already widely used around the world. Voters just pick and rank candidates from the party lists.

There is a good deal of fearmongering over the idea of proportional representation. But notice that it’s not so far from our current system: Parties get a share of seats directly proportional to their share of votes. It’s just a larger district. Increasing district size just eliminates the winner-takes-all dynamic of our current districts, where almost half of the public reliably has no influence on candidates.

A five-member district also means that smaller parties representing, say, 20% of the district could also compete meaningfully. More parties means less binary, zero-sum politics.