Suppose you have a state with five districts and the state is 60% Brown Party and 40% Black Party.
If you draw five districts that are each 60% Brown, you get five Brown representatives even though 40% of the state is Black.
If you draw districts along party lines then you get three Brown representatives and two Black representatives, but the districts are totally uncompetitive and the representatives from both parties can steamroll everybody because none of them ever have any chance of losing their district no matter what they do.
There are also several other options, and most of those are even worse.
It used to be that geographic proximity caused a lot of similarity in needs/votes. But now our votes are more alike when our "tribe" is alike - e.g. professional, rural, urban poor. Plus few people ever see their local representative except on national TV. So maybe the time for geographic districts has passed.
To get real minority interests some representation, and to solve the geography problem, I'd like to see a state say they've got 10 representative positions, and you're all going to have a vote (or maybe 10). The top 10 vote-getters are then chosen.
> It used to be that geographic proximity caused a lot of similarity in needs/votes. But now our votes are more alike when our "tribe" is alike - e.g. professional, rural, urban poor.
But that stuff is still aligned with geography. A rural district is full of the rural poor. An urban district in San Francisco is full of professionals. You can draw the lines in a way that causes this not to happen, but if that's your concern it's easier to draw them a different way than change the whole system.
> To get real minority interests some representation, and to solve the geography problem, I'd like to see a state say they've got 10 representative positions, and you're all going to have a vote (or maybe 10). The top 10 vote-getters are then chosen.
This has all kinds of different terrible problems. Obvious example: If you're still using first past the post then you still have vote splitting and then opponents can dump anyone they don't like out of the legislature by convincing someone similar to run against them so that they both lose.
But if you switch to range voting then you can fix it without getting rid of districts:
Suppose you have a state with five districts and the state is 60% Brown Party and 40% Black Party.
If you draw five districts that are each 60% Brown, you get five Brown representatives even though 40% of the state is Black.
If you draw districts along party lines then you get three Brown representatives and two Black representatives, but the districts are totally uncompetitive and the representatives from both parties can steamroll everybody because none of them ever have any chance of losing their district no matter what they do.
There are also several other options, and most of those are even worse.