Earlier this year the
U.S. Supreme Court decided that political gerrymandering claims were “nonjusticiable,
saying that there was no ‘constitutional directive’ nor any ‘legal standards to
guide’ the Court. Quoting an earlier plurality opinion on the issue, the Court
said that ‘neither § 2 nor § 4 of Article I [of the U.S. Constitution] “provides
a judicially enforceable limit on the political considerations that the States
and Congress may take into account when districting.”’” [1] One
might think that Equal Protection would have been a good place to start, but
here we are with henhouses left to the care of the foxes.
It could be suggested
that an obvious remedy might be to make gerrymandering impossible, by requiring
that members of the U.S. House of Representatives be elected on an at-large
basis in every state. But there is a problem. While in “our early history,
state congressional delegations were generally elected at-large instead of by
districts,” in 1842 “Congress required single-member districting and later” in
1872, “added a provision for equally populated districts ….” So at-large
voting, except in states which have only one representative, would be contrary
to law.
Now there actually is a
good reason for prohibiting at-large voting for members of the House of
Representatives. While gerrymandering is an effective method for marginalizing
minorities, or even majorities, at-large voting would be a cure worse than the
disease. If every voter was permitted to vote on his state’s entire delegation,
minorities could be shut out completely, even if that minority constituted as
much as 49% of the vote.
But there is another way
to rid ourselves of districts, and, hence, gerrymandering, without such a
baneful result. Instead of having voters cast as many votes as there are House
seats from their states, require that they select only one candidate from the
list. Those candidates receiving the most votes would be seated. If two or more
candidates qualify for the bottom position, there would be a run-off. If the
result is that there are not enough candidates receiving votes to fill up the
delegation, a second election can be held to accomplish that end. Critical to
this method, which I will dub the “single-vote-at-large method,” would be the abolition of primaries, which would have the effect
of eliminating candidates within political parties who might get broader
statewide support in a general election.
It really is a peculiar
prejudice that we have that tells us that political interests align with
territory. A farmer, as a farmer, in the southern part of a state is more
likely to have similar interests with a farmer in the northern part than with a
manufacturer living next to him. Members of racial minorities will have similar
interests regardless of their geographic location.
And let us not be
over-awed with any objection that selecting one candidate from such a large
slate would be too confusing for voters. All this method requires of voters is
that they pick the one candidate most appealing to them. While it is true that
in a large state, like California, there will likely be an insurmountable
obstacle to becoming adequately informed about the positions of every
candidate, it is for the candidates to make themselves known; and the internet
has made this possible without too much of an investment. Besides, no one goes
to the polls with perfect knowledge, and with this plan the odds will increase
that a voter will find a candidate suitable for him proportionately to the size
of his state’s delegation.
This plan also has the
benefit of being less complicated than other extant suggestions like cumulative
voting or ranked-choice voting. With cumulative voting, electors have a certain
number of votes which they can spread around to different candidates or give to
one of them. To the extent this protects stockholder minorities in corporations
where this method is often used, it would require a prodigious amount of
organization to work as it should in a political election of any great
territorial extent. Ranked-choice voting is in vogue nowadays, but it is not at
all clear that the average voter has a good idea of how he would rank candidates
after he selects the one he prefers. As he goes down the list, there will be a
temptation to be arbitrary, which will not truly yield the information sought
for.
This single-vote-at-large
method appears to your humble servant to be not only the simplest answer to the
gerrymandering problem, but also the method most likely to yield a result that
comports with the actual interests within a state. We need only rid ourselves
of the superstition that geography has a predominant role to play in reflecting
the actual interests existing in society.
