Marshall Sutherland

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 17:29:55 -0400

dwatney@hub.farthinghalearms.com

I've been talking about non-geographic representation ever since I read The Probability Broach decades ago.

A Single District Fix for Gerrymandering

On June 13, on electionlawblog.org, Ned Foley, Professor of Law at Ohio State, posted a paper forthcoming in the Kentucky Law Journal titled “Self-Districting: The Ultimate Antidote to Gerrymandering.” In the article, he reminds us that districts do not have to be geography-based. A district can be a subset of a state’s entire population and can be formed by like-minded individuals who can voluntarily organize and form a political district that is not necessarily geographically continuous. A person’s neighbors may be in his political district or be in a different district in a self-districting plan. While this would not affect certain elections (e.g., the single US House race in Wyoming), in elections with many seats to be decided (e.g., US House elections in California or the houses of all state legislatures), individuals in currently unelectable political minorities (e.g., Libertarians and Greens) could band together to elected representatives in single district elections and win seats in legislatures. The self-districting aspect of this plan would do away with state legislatures’ power to draw political district boundaries.

#voting

voting

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 19:04:34 -0400

Marshall Sutherland

dwatney@hub.farthinghalearms.com

I finished reading the paper mentioned and found it very interesting. While interested in non-geographic representation for a long time, I never really had a solid plan in mind as to how to do it. The author lays out a relatively simple mechanism to do it.

His idea is to have groups/associations/whatever register and advertise themselves by who they want to represent. I'm sure political parties will register as groups, but maybe there would be a group to represent the elderly or a particular minority or women's issues or sexual orientation or profession. Any group that thinks it can get enough support equal to 1/X the amount of the eligible voters (where X is the number of districts).

First, there is an election to choose your group. Any group who gets more than 1/X votes gets a district (2 if more than 2/X, etc). The rest of the districts are left as unassigned. Those who voted for groups getting less than 1/X, those who did not vote, and randomly chosen voters from those groups with districts sufficient to reduce it's numbers down to a factor of 1/X, are put in the unassigned group. Any group (including the unassigned one) that qualifies for more than one district gets split geographically by computer algorithm into however many districts it qualified for.

Second, candidates and voters from each district run a normal campaign and election (preferably with something like ranked choice voting) to choose the representative for that district.

Obviously, the more districts involved, the better this system can represent the voters.

If this sort of thing interests you, give it a read.