Gerrymandering is once again a thing. These battles between unaccountable gatekeepers — the elected legislators who pass the bills are almost never those who actually draw maps; instead, it's a combination of outside hired guns who lie about their actual purposes and "senior party leadership" seldom in elective office — demonstrate utter ignorance about, invidious stereotyping of, and contempt for voters.
Voters and districts do not belong to elected officials. Elected officials belong to the voters.
A distressingly-large, even dominant, aspect of gerrymandering is a result of continuing to apply eighteenth-century social concepts to even the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. During the eighteenth century, "born, lived, and died within 25 miles of point X" was the default; by the time the Voting Rights Act was passed more than half a century ago, it described only a minority, and today that minority is even smaller. During the eighteenth century, for those who "worked," the "workplace" was within two miles of the "residence" for well over 99% of the population; by the time of the VRA it was somewhere between 40 and 60% (depending upon the definition of "worked" and of the "workplace"), and today — even with the COVID remote-work-from-home disruption — it's probably less than 25%. Education, court appearances, government offices, libraries, shopping for both necessities and discretionary/luxury goods, internet access itself… the list goes on. And it's going to continue to change.
I therefore suggest, in an effort to prevent the legislators of America from being a burden on their voters or country, and for making them beneficial and responsive to the Public, that we minimize use of maps at all.1 This modest proposal is to eliminate "first past the post" elections in all federally-established multimember electoral allocations and in as many others as possible, and instead use a combination of proportional representation and ranked-choice voting. Regardless of the exact mechanisms chosen, this would ultimately show far greater respect for the voter who, say, lives on the north side of Austin, Texas, but commutes to school/a job on the south side of San Antonio, or vice versa; or Baltimore and DC. Even more relevantly, consider other pairings like Naperville and Chicago, Redmond and Seattle, San Mateo and San Francisco — all of which represent a far-more-common circumstance than two major nationally-known cities whose centers are only an hour's drive apart (traffic permitting!).2 The map is not the territory, and it's long past time that we actually acted like it — especially regarding elections, when many of the relevant boundaries have drawn themselves through behavior decades or more after being put in place by all-too-often marginally-literate sailors.
Of course, this is merely a "modest proposal": The probability of it even being taken seriously by people who have obtained power based upon electoral maps asymptotically approaches that of the current Administration nominating any current law professor at Columbia to any Supreme Court vacancy opening before the end of this year.3
- "Eliminate" would be even better, but there are multiple Constitutional problems with that, beginning with the fiction of "states." Rigid federalism is all well and good until somewhat gets hurt by the fights on the playground, like a little over a century and a half back… This particular modest proposal requires only statutory change, because the power of internal allocation is in fact committed to the states. See U.S. Const. Art. I § 4; cf. also Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962) (declaring a federal right to voting equality within a state, but ultimately after remand deferring to state determination of methodology and division except when the methodology or division implicates another established federal right).
- I'm afraid that the voter who lives in Kansas City, Kansas and commutes to Kansas City, Missouri; or lives in New Jersey and commutes to New York City or Philadelphia; or lives in Vancouver and commutes to Oregon — that is, has substantial personal and community connections to multiple states simultaneously — is SOL under the Constitution as it stands. Of course, voters who live in New Jersey are SOL for a lot of other reasons, albeit not nearly so compellingly as those who live in Illinois (let alone Cook County)…
- With all due respect — no, with virtually no respect whatsoever: Bite me, Senator McConnell. Better yet, read both your oath of office and U.S. Const. Art. II § 2 cl. 2, and consider that they refer to the body as a whole and not any subpart thereof.