| David Daley | CNN |
This is not the end of the road by a long stretch. This is the summer of our gerrymandering Armageddon.
Make it more proportional
If you simply used ranked choice voting in congressional primaries, so many of those primaries that are non-competitive seats and the primary determines the winner, you might have nine or 10 different people running in that race, and you end up with a winner chosen by a fraction of a fraction of voters. With ranked choice voting, working as an instant runoff, you would at least come out with a candidate who won a majority of votes in the primary. That would be a big help. But when you combine ranked choice voting and multi-member districts, if we were to transform the house and make it more proportional in each state by getting rid of single-member districts, moving to larger multi-members districts, you would take away the power of district lines to choose winners and losers once and for all. And this solves two problems, right? You talked about the geography problem earlier. We have a lot of states, I’m in one right now, Massachusetts, in which we have a nine-zero Democratic delegation, even though there’s plenty of Republicans here. You can’t really draw a Republican district in Massachusetts. It’s just the way people live. If you had a more proportional delegation, if you had three districts of three, and you elected with ranked choice, you would have two Democrats and one Republican from each of these districts. And you would, likewise in Tennessee, have two Republicans and one Democrat. You would open up representation nationally. And it’s New England Republicans, it’s Southern and Midwestern Democrats, who can be the bridge builders, who can try to find consensus. We have lost that in the House. We’ve lost it in our politics. Our governing has suffered as a result.