loading . . . There's a simple fix to stop Trump's election scheme: political scientist President Donald Trump's gerrymandering crusade has been a "disaster for our democracy," but according to one political scientist who spoke with the New York Times, there is a fix that could undo the damage.
Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at the New America public policy institute, and on Tuesday, the Times published a video interview with him conducted by journalist and author, Ezra Klein. The Times described Drutman as "one of the most persistent and thoughtful advocates for proportional representation," an idea that "might be the answer we need to turn to here" in the face of Trump's redistricting blitz.
"Proportional representation describes a family of voting systems widely used throughout the world in which the party gets seats in the legislature in direct proportion to the vote share," Drutman said.
Under a system like this, Drutman explained, states would implement larger congressional districts that each have a larger number of seats, rather than the current system, where numerous districts each get one. With proportional representation, an eight-seat district, for example, would send four Democrats and four Republicans to Congress if a district split the vote between each party 50/50.
"So you could imagine New York State, instead of being 26 districts, maybe being three districts, split between the north, the mid and the New York City area," Drutman explained. "You might have an eight-member district, a nine-member district and a nine-member district. And then parties would put forward lists of candidates. Say, in a midstate eight-member district, if Republicans get 50 percent of the vote, their top four candidates on their party list go to Congress. And if Democrats get 50 percent of the vote, their top four candidates go to Congress."
By contrast, he added, the current system awards 100 percent of the representation for a district to the candidate and party who gets at least a little bit over 50 percent of the vote. Proportional representation, then, is a much more "intuitively fair" way of conducting politics.
"There are a bunch of different ways to do proportional representation, and there are better ways to do it and worse ways to do it," Drutman continued. "But the big thing that people should know is that this is a system in which we are mechanically doing what we think is fair, which is that parties should get seats in the legislature in direct proportion to the share of votes that they get in the election."
He added later: "[The] thing that we don’t like about gerrymandering is that it’s highly disproportional. Take Louisiana: You have six districts, and you can draw them in a whole lot of different ways to maximize your advantage if you’re the Republican State Legislature. If you make Louisiana one six-member proportional district, there are no lines to draw. There’s no possibility for gerrymandering."
Larger states like California and Texas would still have multiple districts that could conceivably still be gerrymandered, Drutman noted, but proportional representation would still blunt the impact of those tactics by allowing in some representatives from the minority vote-share party. http://dlvr.it/TScRhq
