I like this. Perhaps via some kind of additional member system like the Scottish Parliament (giving a mixture of constituency and at-large representatives, to keep things broadly proportional).
Would they still have to be done at a state level?
i.e. does Wyoming even warrant one at-large congresscritter unless the overall size of the house is increased?
Going by overall population and 435 reps, there should be ~750000 people per seat (which is idiotic if you expect them to actually be able to represent your individual concerns, but that’s another matter).
Wyoming at-large is currently 563,626 people. So even with only one representative, that’s too many (while Montana is under-represented with their one).
So, in 2016, the Republicans got 49.1% of the vote, and 55.4% of the seats (241).
The Democrats got 48% of the vote, and 44.5% of the seats (194).
You could create an additional 65 at-large* seats, (pulling a number out of my arse to make the maths easy, you could look at historical records to see what the worst disparity between popular vote and seats was and add a fudge factor) and allocate those according to a list, to even things up a bit.
Scribbling on the back of an envelope time…
The Republicans would get 5 more seats, so they’d have 246 out of 500.
The Democrats would get 46 more seats, so they’d have 240.
Set a threshold of 1% of the total vote to qualify for seats, give the Libertarians 6 seats.
(maths fail here, I need to take account of the votes for the parties that didn’t make my threshold)
This would really help the larger third-parties. 1% could get a few top-up seats in Congress for the Greens and the Libertarians, and they could build from there.
*as mentioned above, though, I don’t know how that would work with the States, maybe you could get agreement for regional at-large seats?
I still see it being done at a state level, since the US is still (nominally…) a republic consisting of states.
I would be okay with states that have a small population - below the current ratio of (US population / 435) - having a bit larger voice in national politics.
But what you propose is an interesting notion. I must think some on it
I don’t see how a representative can do a good job at representing the interests of rural Californians today.
Something like California’s District 8 spans 28,650 square miles and everything from full blown desert to the Sierra Mountains. It would be a full time job for a representative to simply meet constituents over such a massive amount of area.
Taking care of local problems is basically impossible when local is 1/5th of the area of the California.
Frankly, quite a bit of our problem is that our legislature is simply too small. There was a time where we had 1 legislator for every 30,000 people. Today we’re at 1 for every 733,000 people.
Unfortunately, to get down to even 1 for every 100,000 would require a House of 3,189 members.
Well, there’s a lot of channels I’ve noticed which pretend to be the official channel for views, snipping up episodes old and new and posting the bite-sized snippets. (The exact behavior YT is trying to combat by requiring a certain number of channel views before they are eligible for ads)
I was suggesting people would have better representation if we were at 100K per representative since it would be easier for a representative to visit all of their constituents with physically smaller districts.
We used to increase the size of the House after every census. We’ve been stuck at 435 since 1912 when there was 1 representative for every 210,583 people.
So you set up a system where you don’t need to be. i.e. a proportional system of some description. If you have constituencies plus top-ups, any gains you get from gerrymandering you lose from the top-ups.
I never liked the idea of losing my link to my constituency MP.
Then I realized that most of my constituency MPs (from all three major English parties) have been bastards and no fucking use to me when I contacted them anyway.
Then I moved to the US, noticed I share my representative with 700000 other people and decided that the idea that they represent my local concerns is absurd. That’s what my state reps and senators are for (of course, politicians at that level are only marginally competent).
