Consider the following system for electing the members of Congress:
- Each voter gets 3 votes, so they can vote for three people to represent them (i.e. can’t vote three times for the same person).
- Any person getting more than 1 million votes becomes a member of congress.
- Of the resulting pool of congressional representatives, the top 20% by vote count constitute the Senate, and the rest constitute the House of Representatives.
Currently, congressional representation is geographic: Senators represent the state, and Representatives represent a specific geographical area within a state. Geographic representation made more sense at the time of the founding, when states thought of themselves as truly sovereign nations, and people’s lives and social networks were hyper-local. A geographically defined group had a meaningful commonality of interest, and states-as-sovereigns effectively sent diplomats to ensure their interests were protected. But now, the system feels odd. The 17th Amendment made Senators less tied to the state-qua-state, and more to the state as a geographic constituency. State sovereignty has been significantly curtailed by centuries of expanding federal power. People think of themselves as being citizens of the US first and of a state second (if at all). Moreover, House districts are gerrymandered to hell, they do not plausibly represent any community and have become another avenue of vote suppression and party power consolidation.
The system I propose above seeks to address the mismatch by replacing it with at-large voting for all members of Congress; each member represents a self-identified constituency, defining itself on whatever dimension it finds important. A geographic community could still elect a representative if its membership were coherent enough to rally around a representative. But so could a religion, a race, an internet subculture, or a group affected by a specific niche issue. Each person gets more than one vote in part because they are part of more than one such community. They could endorse a candidate who will reflect their religious values, one who will represent their industry, and one who will champion a particularly meaningful cause. It encourages a certain type of diversity of constituency, since it rewards candidates that stake out a particular niche to represent. Simultaneously, it diffuses some of the tyranny of the majority concerns, since majorities will be less unified on their second and third candidates than on their first, and so make coalition building more fluid and less sclerotic.
The separation of the resulting pool into a Senate and a House achieves a few additional goals. First, it keeps the rest of US government as it is, minimizing changes that e.g. going to a unicameral legislature would require. It encourages people to vote for a candidate they know will clear the threshold either way, and weights power by vote count while still preserving the equality of votes within each house. Senate will still be smaller and senators will represent more people, and in some sense will represent the larger identities in our society, while the larger House gets input from the rabble of smaller identities and issues. And, if I may be permitted, there is an aesthetic benefit to having a House that represents many diverse constituencies, and a Senate that represents fewer large constituencies that transcend them; a House of the pluribus, and a Senate of the unum.
For similarly aesthetic reasons, I count as a benefit the fact that this system would produce a Congress of varying size: when the people are more of the same mind, Congress is smaller, and hones in the issues that remain; as unity of purpose falls, Congress increases to capture that diversity of opinion.
The numbers I picked are not necessary to the idea, but neither are they totally without reason. They were targeted towards achieving the benefits described above, while keeping the size of Congress similar to what it is today (535, 435 in the House and 100 in the Senate). In the last presidential election, there were about 160 million votes, which under this system would produce 480 million votes, for a maximum of 480 members of congress, with 96 in the Senate and 384 in the House. That’s an unlikely result, however, as many will get much more than 1 million votes, and we might need to run simulations to see what results in the best balance of average size and representativeness.
One issue of note with this system is that it assumes all members of Congress are elected simultaneously, which isn’t the case. There are a number of ways to address this, but some may undermine the benefits of the system. For example, if a third of seats were elected in each cycle, each large constituency could expect 3 members of congress representing it, since they would presumably be able to get a representative of their choosing into congress in each cycle; we could adjust the numbers to account for this, but could not achieve as representative a Congress at the same size. But it could also introduce an interesting dynamic of moving members between houses mid-term, as the size of Congress and the vote-threshold for being in Senate changes.
I am sure I am missing other issues as well, but I assert that this would do a better job representing the interest of US Citizens in our legislature than the current system does, and would solve many problems with our democracy.
