Are geographic districts required by the Constitution? State and Federal laws certainly follow from this assumption, but could a state simply assign registered voters at random (per election, roughly in line with ballots being finalized) to each of its districts? Single-seated states already enjoy this luxury.
I believe the requirement to have single-member districts was introduced with 2 U.S.C. § 2c in 1967. The name for the previous practice was "at Large" election, and the text of the law[0] includes a reference to that practice as part of a transitional measure:
"a State which is entitled to more than one Representative and which has in all previous elections elected its Representatives at Large may elect its Representatives at Large to the Ninety-first Congress"
It is good to know who your representative is and for a representative to be able to visit their district and have community meetings so they can (in theory) represent the interests of the people in that community. If the district is spread across the state like avocado on toast, you aren't really representing anyone.
If you keep the group small enough per representative you can still hold community meetings. The internet adds more options for "central meeting places" even if the geography is absurdly large (say, a random sampling of Texas or Alaska) even if you can't find other ways to incentivize travel to in person meetings.
That said though, when was the last time any representative in the US was concerned about in person community meetings? It's a beautiful ideal, but in practice it seems nonexistent. The status quo, especially when you look at the maps of how some districts have been gerrymandered to incredibly abstract shapes is already broken from the ideal. Maybe it's time to shift the ideal? We have the technology to try new things that aren't necessarily beholden to geography today, among other ideas.
> The status quo, especially when you look at the maps of how some districts have been gerrymandered to incredibly abstract shapes is already broken from the ideal.
This is something we can fix though.
I know where our representative's office is. While I haven't gone to our representative for specific needs, I know people who have. Knowing our representative lives in our district and is local means I know he understands what our community is dealing with at least at some level.
While there are a lot of things broken with the current representative model, being regional is not the problem. (The stupid way they designate the "regions" on the other hand is)
I'm not saying being regional is the problem, but that we have an opportunity to question the definitions/assumptions behind "regional". A lot of our country's ideals of a representative district stem from concepts/assumptions that a representative's office should be no more than a brief horse ride away. Gerrymandering has insured that isn't the case in a lot of places today hence the assertion that the original ideals are unmet ("broken").
But what happens if we question the assumption directly? Is it okay to take public transportation into account? What about car travel? To get into useful extremes for illustrative purposes, what about air travel? How far in travel time is feasible/allowable, an hour's distance? Four or more, like some of the classic representative horse "ridings"?
It doesn't entirely matter where you stand with specifics to those travel methods/distance qualifiers: the point is that those are variables/knobs in the equation. If the outcome is better representation overall, knowing that your representative is less than four hours by car away, for instance, may still be sufficient to meet the useful parts of the "regional" ideal while providing more options to explore in optimizing representation (such as random sampling or some k-means clustering gradient) than the traditional "geographies need to be contiguous and no more than a simple horse ride big".
Technology also presents other opportunities to explore: Would you be happy if your Representative's "Office" was a Discord server of "the right size" (say, small enough that it isn't a cacophony, big enough that it isn't just in jokes and memes of two to three shitposters every day) and your Representative had mandated "Office hours" to "hang out/townhall" in a voice or video chat channel? I know that a lot of people might find the idea ugly or terrifying, but I find it an interesting ideal of a different more modern sort. You might feel more likely that your voice is directly heard, and a good Discord server can feel very "regional" even when the actual participants are scattered to the winds geographically. I'm not saying "Discord but for Politics" is necessarily the best idea either, just that it is a useful thought experiment in questioning what it means to be "regional" in 2021.
If someone is a 4 hour drive away, they don't have any feel for the community and are essentially limited to doing vague party line sort of things. I want my representatives to represent ME and the needs of our community, not just focused on generic issues that affect the whole state.
As an example:
Our representative managed to snag a chunk of funding for a local park here which will benefit the community. Without being local, would he have even known there was an opportunity to build the trails and help fund this?
