America’s political landscape has become a stinking mess. More and more states are joining the race to the bottom to gerrymander away the power of their voters. But we don’t have to hold our noses any longer — there’s a fix in sight. And it doesn’t even require a constitutional amendment.
It’s time to shift to the system most of the world’s advanced democracies use: proportional representation. It’s a power-sharing arrangement in which parties get seats according to their vote share.
It would work like this: Instead of dividing states into single-member districts where the winner takes all, a state is either divided into regions or left as a whole. Voters elect multiple representatives in each large district in proportion to the number of people who vote for them. Parties present voters with lists of candidates and voters choose the candidate, not the party. Independent candidates are listed separately on the ballot as if they were their own party. And seats are awarded based on the proportion of votes each faction gets.
In a five-seat congressional district, for example, if Party A gets 40% of the votes, it gets two seats awarded to the two most popular candidates from that party list. Republican-led states would follow the same rules as Democratic-led ones, resulting in a surge of representatives from opposing parties from each state in Congress — some number of Republicans might represent Massachusetts, for example, and some Democrats might represent Oklahoma.
Voters, under this system, have much more power. That’s something we are losing rapidly as authoritarian thinking creeps into the political conscience of the nation’s ruling class, silencing dissent and snuffing out democratic norms.
It would also be a stark contrast to the competition-suffocating districts being implemented across the country now. In November, the new maps are likely to produce the lowest number of competitive congressional races in history — less than 8%, according to data journalist G. Elliott Morris.
If we continue along this path, we will be “fundamentally undermining the idea that we live in a democracy where people’s votes matter,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the think tank New America and one of the leading voices in the electoral reform movement.
In Florida, for example, 41% of voters are registered Republicans — but under the current map passed last month, Republicans could get up to 86% of the congressional seats. In California, where 45% of voters are registered Democrats, the congressional map could give Democrats 92% of the seats.
“The single-member district system has outlived its usefulness,” Drutman told me. “Given the diversity of this country, given the pluralism of this country, and given the vulnerability of the single-member-district system to maximalist gerrymandering, what is it that we’re trying to preserve by keeping it?”
Under the winner-takes-all system today, the only way voters can express dissatisfaction with the party in power is to vote for the opposition. It’s an unsatisfying option for many voters, especially the 45% who identify as political independents or the majority of Americans who are not happy about the redistricting arms race. But with proportional representation, there would be room for new parties to grow and new coalitions to form.
It’s also a relatively easy fix. Congress would have to amend the 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act and repeal the requirement that requires states to use single-member districts for congressional apportionment, Drutman explained. The best time to do it would be before the next redistricting cycle, which is supposed to be in 2032, after the next decennial census. And since it will mean that many in power could be put out of a job, he added, the public has got to demand it.
Proportional representation won’t solve all our problems, Drutman told me, but democracies that use proportional representation do a better job of managing racial and ethnic diversity than those that don’t. That’s because parties must compete for minority voters “rather than capture them.”
Political scholars and nonpartisan organizations like FairVote and Protect Democracy have been working on these ideas for years. There’s already a proposal before Congress and some members are starting to get on board. But now, as the public understands the consequences of our faltering democracy, more people are talking about it, Drutman said.
“I call for Congress to authorize multi-member congressional districts with proportional representation systems to prevent partisan shut-outs and drown-outs across the country,” Maryland Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin declared on the day after the US Supreme Court neutered the Voting Rights Act.
In 2024, Carolyn Silverman and I wrote about how 82% of the American population has been sorted into states controlled by a single party, inhibiting political choice and eroding representative democracy. Since then, Republicans in more states have been careening closer to authoritarianism, adopting laws that undermine fair elections and suppress opposing viewpoints.
With proportional representation, we can start repairing that damage. There’d be no more Congress members waltzing into office without competition. No more disenfranchising minority voters. No more bizarrely shaped districts. No more maps that split neighborhoods apart. No more tipping the scale to keep older officials in power. No more extremist posturing to win primaries. And when it works for Congress, it can also work in state legislatures.
It would be like a national political cleanse — the systemic detox we want, and the reboot we desperately need.
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