Unfortunately, the problem is far worse than gerrymandering by itself. Even if district lines were drawn perfectly (whatever that means), 51 percent of the vote would win 100 percent of the representation. Those 49 percent wasted votes do not amount to “consent of the governed.” Today’s harmful winner-take-all dynamic comes rather from the fact of single-member districts — i.e., one representative per geographic district. A better solution is to combine together single-member districts into larger multi-winner districts as would be enacted by the newly introduced bill H.R. 3057. Gerrymandering would simply go away, as would most of the problematic district lines. A timely read is nonpartisan FairVote.org’s amicus brief for the Supreme Court regarding the current case on gerrymandering: http://bit.ly/fairvotebrief.
Unfortunately, the problem is far worse than gerrymandering by itself. Even if district lines were drawn perfectly (whatever that means), 51 percent of the vote would win 100 percent of the representation. Those 49 percent wasted votes do not amount to “consent of the governed.” Today’s harmful winner-take-all dynamic comes rather from the fact of single-member districts — i.e., one representative per geographic district. A better solution is to combine together single-member districts into larger multi-winner districts as would be enacted by the newly introduced bill H.R. 3057. Gerrymandering would simply go away, as would most of the problematic district lines. A timely read is nonpartisan FairVote.org’s amicus brief for the Supreme Court regarding the current case on gerrymandering: http://bit.ly/fairvotebrief.
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