No. of Recommendations: 3
If you want to better represent the voting population, you're on the right track with more representatives. 10 per district is probably unworkable, but 3 or 4 might work well. Let people vote for one representative on the slate, but the top 3 or 4 (or whatever number you pick) are elected. Of course, that would take a constitutional amendment, so don't look for it any time soon. If ever.I don't think you need a constitutional amendment, but you would need to repeal the federal statute that requires single-member districts for the Federal house.
As for multi-member districts, I suppose it really depends on what you're trying to solve for. It's nice to imagine that if you have a district that's 75% voters of the A party, and 25% voters of the B party, that if you have a multi-member district (MMD) election that picks four members you'd end up with 3 A members and 1 B member. But that really is a function of how many people compete for those seats. If you have 4 A-party candidates running, and 4 B-party candidates running, you'll likely end up with all A-party representatives. Then when you apply that over different types of majority/minority splits (75% white and 25% black, 75% urban and 25% rural, etc.) you can end up with a system where the representatives that get elected tend to come from the most majority of groups anyway.
As for algorithmically drawing districts, I find some of the arguments in this old commoncause discussion to be compelling:
“Doesn’t using computers to draw districts completely eliminate human bias?”
No computer program to draw districts will ever be free of human judgment and bias because human beings must input instructions for a computer program to follow. One or more human beings must make value judgments about whether to tell the program to prioritize competition between the major parties, keeping counties and or cities together, nesting state house districts into state senate districts, or one of the many measures of compactness, partisan symmetry, or responsiveness. Choosing which to consider or one over the other is a political and value judgment whether a person does it directly when drawing districts or programs a computer to do so.
“OK, but once humans have made all those decisions, can’t a computer automatically generate the best map?”
Ordering a computer to generate a map based on specific criteria does not result in one map. It results in an infinite number of maps. https://www.commoncause.org/articles/not-a-job-for...
