Stone Cold Stunner from SCOTUS to PA Republicans

[Toni]

What if there were no districts, and everyone voted for a single candidate out of all the candidates running in their state. Any candidate that could get X signatures gets on a single statewide ballot. Each voter picks one. If there are 18 districts, then the top 18 candidates who get the most votes win.
A natural feature of this is that candidates from the same party or who are highly similar to each other would be competing more directly with each other for votes. It would give an advantage to independents and those who stand out as unique yet still have appeal to a significant portion of the population. It would likely reduce attack ads, because its harder to attack 20 other candidates.
Candidates that appeal to 20% of the States population should get a seat in state with more than 5 districts, yet have no chance under any system with districts, unless that 20% happens to all live in the same place. Under my proposed system such a candidate could easily win.

Alternatively, if we are to have districts they should be drawn at random with the only criteria being to maximize the ratio of the area within them relative to the length of their borders. And they should be randomly redrawn every 4 years, so that any incumbent only gets 2 terms before they must re-win with support from a whole different segment of the state's population.

I live in a state with one single significant metropolitan area. The rest of the state is mostly rural, a lot of it is farm land, and a significant portion is wilderness with some small towns. An overwhelming portion of the state's population now lives in the central urban metropolitan area. However, the state does depend quite significantly on the outlying areas for a number of things and a not insignificant portion of the state's economy is outstate.

Add in that the state is very broadly divided into 3 to 5 distinct areas which each have their own concerns and needs. If the entire state voted with no district representation, the people in the cities would be vastly over-represented and their interests would dominate. Ultimately, this would lead to harm even to the majority as they would ultimately lose or spoil what they rely on from the outstate areas by voting for their short term needs. Easy example: the large metropolitan area has obviously more significant need for road and highway maintenance and construction.

Districts are always based on population size, so any district system will always give much more power to densely populated regions than sparse urban areas. If each person has only 1 vote in a 10 district State, then the urban areas will not win all 10 seats. The rural people can still unify behind particular candidates and give them enough votes to win. If there are 10 seats, they only need enough votes to beat the 11th place candidate who isn't likely to get much support from the Urbanites.

The only solution to the problem you are raising is to give more political power rural people over Urbanites, which is precisely what the GOP is already doing and how they are winning a higher % seats than their actual % of the state's population.

And the problem in NOT actually just gerrymandering by the GOP. The GOP will have an inherent advantage in any system that creates districts based on geography, unless it goes to great lengths to create just the kinds of complicated shaped districts we have now but with a pro-Dem bias.

Part of the problem is that major cities are more extremely "blue" while lots of rural areas are only slightly "red".
If we simply do regional districts, this means that most the "blue" votes in urban areas get wasted electing 1 candidate by 70% when they only needed 51%. But "red" votes in rural areas are able to win more seats because they win by small majorities.
IOW, if 60% of Illinois residents are Dem, but 80% of Dems live in Chicago, then the GOP will win most of the seats in Illinois.

BTW, I am not convinced of the no-district idea, but I don't think other approaches will solve the problem you are talking about or the problem that the Dems are under-represented in Congress.

One does not have to gerrymander.

It is entirely possible to draw districts in a way that actually represents the interests of the people living there, not the interests of the political parties. My state does it pretty well, although the last re-districting produced some head scratchers in my own district.

 

[Malintent]

"Districts" are from a bygone age... The electoral college the same.

Completely different tactics for choosing leadership is needed.

My thought is that all American's that choose to run for any public office, fill out a 100 or so question survey about their position on various topics. Those questions themselves would need a fair source...
Submitting the questionnaire prior to "voting" registers you as a candidate for office. That's it.. fill it out and you are running for president, for example.
People "vote" by submitting the same 100 question questionnaire at the appropriate time.
The winner of the election is the person that submitted the questionnaire that has the same responses to the questions as the majority of responses given by the "voters". The voters essentially give the "right answers" to the "test" and the person that got closest to 100% wins.

This way, people vote for ideas, not personalities.

Flame on! (what happens with all the ties?)

 

[Elixir]

"Districts" are from a bygone age... The electoral college the same.

Completely different tactics for choosing leadership is needed.

My thought is that all American's that choose to run for any public office, fill out a 100 or so question survey about their position on various topics. Those questions themselves would need a fair source...
Submitting the questionnaire prior to "voting" registers you as a candidate for office. That's it.. fill it out and you are running for president, for example.
People "vote" by submitting the same 100 question questionnaire at the appropriate time.
The winner of the election is the person that submitted the questionnaire that has the same responses to the questions as the majority of responses given by the "voters". The voters essentially give the "right answers" to the "test" and the person that got closest to 100% wins.

This way, people vote for ideas, not personalities.

Flame on! (what happens with all the ties?)

People would fill it out with whatever answers they believe will be most popular rather than the ones they actually believe in. Can you say "Family Feud"?

 

[Malintent]

"Districts" are from a bygone age... The electoral college the same.

Completely different tactics for choosing leadership is needed.

My thought is that all American's that choose to run for any public office, fill out a 100 or so question survey about their position on various topics. Those questions themselves would need a fair source...
Submitting the questionnaire prior to "voting" registers you as a candidate for office. That's it.. fill it out and you are running for president, for example.
People "vote" by submitting the same 100 question questionnaire at the appropriate time.
The winner of the election is the person that submitted the questionnaire that has the same responses to the questions as the majority of responses given by the "voters". The voters essentially give the "right answers" to the "test" and the person that got closest to 100% wins.

This way, people vote for ideas, not personalities.

Flame on! (what happens with all the ties?)

People would fill it out with whatever answers they believe will be most popular rather than the ones they actually believe in. Can you say "Family Feud"?

Survey says!..... "Freedom to Choose"! (ding, ding, ding, ding...)

Ya... similar to my thread on "why is this legal" relating to lying and politics... submitting such a questionnaire would be Fraud.

 

[Keith&Co.]

The voters essentially give the "right answers" to the "test" and the person that got closest to 100% wins.

This way, people vote for ideas, not personalities.

In addition to answers to the 100 questions, give voters 1000 points to distribute on the questions, for their importance.

Some single-issue voters will then put all of their 1000 points on the abortion question. This means they won't have that much impact on immigration, budgets, national health, or kneeling for the flag, but that's a choice they make.

In addition to getting the 'right answers,' they can also gauge the popularity of a given stance on that issue. If the candidates also were to weight their stances, it would help reduce the number of ties.

 

[Keith&Co.]

People would fill it out with whatever answers they believe will be most popular rather than the ones they actually believe in. Can you say "Family Feud"?

I really don't care what they believe, I care how they legislate. Maybe incumbents don't fill out their own answers, their voting record does?

 

[LordKiran]

"Districts" are from a bygone age... The electoral college the same.

Completely different tactics for choosing leadership is needed.

My thought is that all American's that choose to run for any public office, fill out a 100 or so question survey about their position on various topics. Those questions themselves would need a fair source...
Submitting the questionnaire prior to "voting" registers you as a candidate for office. That's it.. fill it out and you are running for president, for example.
People "vote" by submitting the same 100 question questionnaire at the appropriate time.
The winner of the election is the person that submitted the questionnaire that has the same responses to the questions as the majority of responses given by the "voters". The voters essentially give the "right answers" to the "test" and the person that got closest to 100% wins.

This way, people vote for ideas, not personalities.

Flame on! (what happens with all the ties?)

How about we base senate/congress elections on a sort of 'initiative voting' system? during the election cycle you and everyone else desiring a position can petition the entire nation to become a senator, people can then sign their support to candidates that best suit their individual interests. A candidate with at least 1 million supporters by the end of the election is made a senator, with the number of votes a given senate member has being proportionate to their number of supporters.

 

[hurtinbuckaroo]

SCOTUS says "No, we got it right the first time you asked us. Now bleep off.":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...c9f29a55815_story.html?utm_term=.6ba475b8ba3b

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

*sound of glass breaking*

 

[Hermit]

...it is important that representation is structured to actually be representative of all of the people, not just urban dwellers.

So much for "one vote, one value".

Going by the same logic the votes of Afro-Americans should count for even more than those of the rural voters. And won't anybody think of the billionaires? They are a smaller minority still!

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

...it is important that representation is structured to actually be representative of all of the people, not just urban dwellers.

So much for "one vote, one value".

Going by the same logic the votes of Afro-Americans should count for even more than those of the rural voters. And won't anybody think of the billionaires? They are a smaller minority still!

Indeed! Whites are terribly under represented in Government.

 

[Malintent]

ever since I learned more about Gerrymandering in general recently (over the past year or so), and saw a documentary on how software is used to min/max (game) the system, I recognized that these lines need to be drawn in an automated way, based on census data fed into the same software, configured for "geographically fair", rather than set for "max repugs".

I agree with you, but...

"Hating Gerrymandering Is Easy. Fixing It Is Harder"

How are any of those even potentially valid solutions? While districts certainly shouldn't be drawn to favor a partisan result, they additionally shouldn't be drawn to favor a competitive result or a racially proportioned result or anything else. They should be set by geographic boundaries which (as much as possible) don't take any of those considerations into account.

Just wanted to point out that I said GEOGRAPHICALLY FAIR... of the options the software provides, that seemed the most agnostic.