There’s a spectrum of ways to reform the House using proportional representation. Two key factors are how many representatives a multi-member district would have and how winners of House seats would be proportionally allocated.
In 2021, Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia led a group of other House Democrats in reintroducing a proposal that’s been floating around Congress since 2017. The Fair Representation Act would require states to use ranked choice voting for House races. It calls for states with six or more representatives to create districts with three to five members each, and states with fewer than six representatives to elect all of them as at-large members of one statewide district.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“It has effectively extinguished competitive elections for most Americans, and produced a deeply divided political system that is incapable of responding to changing demands and emerging challenges with necessary legitimacy.”
And that increased competition could push political parties to be more willing to compromise and negotiate, says Didi Kuo, a fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Courts hearing redistricting lawsuits at the time were considering ordering states with contested maps to use multi-member districts and hold statewide at-large elections as a temporary fix — a scenario that many lawmakers wanted to avoid.
While the high court upheld its past rulings on a key remaining section of that landmark law, the loss of other legal protections against racial discrimination in the election process has made it harder to ensure fair representation for people of color around the country.
And the system that we have now, in many ways, adds to that disillusionment," says Alora Thomas-Lundborg, strategic director of litigation and advocacy at Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.
For communities of color, proportional representation could, in theory, set up a House of Representatives that is more reflective of their shares of the U.S. population, which is becoming increasingly diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, Thomas-Lundborg adds.
The original article contains 1,406 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!