Fair Representation Voting

By Krist Novoselić
May 28, 2014

I am the Chair of the election reform group FairVote. One of our policy proposals is proportional representation (PR) for the United States. Instead of PR, we call our proposals “Fair Representation Voting”. We do this because we want to distinguish between American forms of PR from the party-list, low threshold PR used in most other democracies around the world.

Fair Representation Voting is basically; the single transferable vote, cumulative voting and the non-transferable vote. (You’re online so check out the explanations yourself!) My point is that these types of voting are candidate based with higher thresholds for election. Thresholds for election are higher because we are advocating districts with a magnitude of 3 to five seats. For example, in a 3 seat district, it could take 33 or even 25 percent of the vote to get elected. This means most voters in a district could elect a candidate of choice. With this scenario, we can predict that almost every 3 seat district could elect a Republican and Democrat to office. There is also space for independents and third parties.

FairVote has released a report that draws such maps for every state. These maps combine present districts into larger super-districts. Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage featured a piece on gerrymandering that featured maps in the FairVote report. The point of the article is that a compact looking district, meaning it’s not some odd shaped monster that your imagination turns into a serpent, isn’t necessarily a “good” district. There are other criteria like competition, communities of interest and things like city and county lines. The report contains the four maps in the Post piece. The example state is Louisiana; one map shows the current districts, one if the GOP did a gerrymander disregarding the VRA, one with an independent commission drawing without partisan considerations and the last one an independent commission drawing with partisan considerations. The Post wants readers to pick the actual Gerrymander.

What you don’t see in the great Post piece is FairVote’s Fair Representation Voting map. (Attached) It combines three districts into one. Louisiana’s six seat delegation to the US House would come out of two three seat districts. Louisiana would decide which one of the Fair Representation Voting systems it would use.

With this map every Democrat and Republican voter in Louisiana could elect a candidate of choice. So would every white or black voter. The partisan split in the state’s US House delegation would be 4 GOP / 2 Democrat instead of 5 GOP / 1 Democrat.

Before you think this only helps Democrats; if a state like Massachusetts used Fair Representation Voting with three seat districts, their US House delegation would be 3 GOP / 6 Democrat instead of 0 GOP / 9 Democrat.

In other words — there would be more southern Democrats and Northern Republicans. More urban Republicans and Rural Democrats. FairVote offers that this arrangement can bring more moderation to congress. If anything, voters, who pay taxes and are subject to the laws of the land, choose who represent them! Instead today, in most states it is the other way around!!! That is why we call it Fair Representation Voting.