Time to dump electoral districts?

[BSdetect]

Just assign seats according to the total state vote.

Let's find a better way to connect voters to reps.

End the current gerrymandering as soon as possible.

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. "a better way to connect voters to reps" - that's the one advantage of districts

Each voter has one rep, and that rep is responsible for helping that voter. They can't just say "meh, someone else in the state delegation can look into this".

(I'm in the UK, so I don't have the gerrymandering problem - independent commissions (and they really have seemed to be independent, in my experience) set the boundaries, using existing city, town and local ward boundaries wherever possible, and you don't get the ridiculous shapes that US districts get. We still talk about switching to methods of proportional representation, because it's still possible, without gerrymandering, for a party to get a significantly higher proportion of seats than votes, thanks to natural concentration of party supporters, and 3 (or more)-way contests. But the one thing the first-past-the-post advocates have is "people want 'their MP', to whom they can go for help".

A partial way past this is the system used for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, which have a district with one MP, and then collate several of those together in a region, with a second contest to even out the allocation of seats by party. It achieves that well, but then creates 2 classes of representative - those for a smaller district, and those for a larger region.)

[Voltaire2]

2. The UK also has the first past the post problem of plurality winners.

But yes, at large representatives allotted on a proportional basis, expanding the house to get back to a 50,000:1 ratio, and instant run-offs to eliminate plurality winners are all good reforms that would increase representation and accountability. Of course none of that is happening, and before any reform, the flood of money and corruption unleashed by citizens united has to be undone.