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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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The point of representatives is that they each represent a small portion of the population. If you remove districts, then who are house members representing?
Indeed that's the intention, but in practice gerrymandering often leads to the opposite outcome where urban cores are divided up with large rural areas to suppress one side's votes.
See Utah's districts for the most obvious example of this. It would be logical to group Salt Lake City in one district, Provo + some suburbs in another, then the rural areas in the remaining districts. But instead the city is divided evenly such that each part of the city is in a different district, with every district dominated by large rural areas.
You can have an electoral division of your country without gerrymandering. Cf most european countries.
Most European countries do not use first past the post, but proportional representation with multiple elected representatives per voting district. There is far less incentive for politicians to gerrymander with proportional representation.
Multi-representative per-voting district isn't the same as proportional representation - you still get a percentage of votes that gets thrown out, normally smaller parties which can't get enough votes in any one district to add up to a representative but if you added up their votes nationally it would be enough to have several representatives.
You still get things like parties getting 10% of the vote but only 5% of parliamentarians, whilst the big parties can get 50% of parliamentarians on about 40% of the vote.
In Proportional Representation there are no districts and the votes of the whole country are added up and then used to allocate parliamentarians, which minimizes the votes lost because they didn't add up to a parliamentarian.
Multi-representative per-voting districts are still better than First Past The Post (as a singled representative per district mathematically maximizes the number of votes thrown out), but it's still designed to reduced the representation of smaller parties and boost that of larger ones.
As far as I know the only true Proportional Vote System in Europe is in the Netherlands, though Germany have a mixed system with a 5% threshold to get into the Bundestag.
One of the main complications in the US is the racial mix. Looking at party lines and geographic boundaries is an over simplification
Say 20% of the population is black, and the state has five reps. Two neighboring cities each have 30% black population, and enough population to have two of the five reps. The rest are dispersed in rural areas. Do you draw that each city gets one rep? Or do you draw such that a district has a majority of black residents, with funny boundaries to accommodate the geography?
The former means that you will more likely end up with a white representative for both cities and the voice of the black community are not heard in the legislative body. The latter means that you have now gerrymandered to ensure a group gets a voice they deserve.
This is the real pain in the ass about the whole thing. Some level of drawing stupid districts is needed to create good. Pure geographically created boundaries will only cause segregation if we want minority groups to have an equal voice in the legislature.
But, people in power tend to fuck everything up.
When everyone votes along party lines, why does it matter if you have local representation ? Barely any of them actually vote how they think their constituents would want them to vote, they vote however the party tells them to vote.
This is a very cynical point of view that would make it even less possible for independants to be represented in the House, remove town halls from the system, and therefore make the entire system even less democratic and remove the entire point of a representative democracy.
There is zero benefit to this.
I'm not saying getting rid of local representation is the solution, necessarily. In fact, I personally think the opposite is true and we need more local representation.
It's just with the current system, local representation is kind of useless and supports gerrymandering and corruption.
If I were in charge I would demand political parties to disperse completely and local representatives be the only people on the ballot to go ahead and make decisions for the people who voted for them. Vote for the person not the party.
Proportional voting would actually make smaller parties be able to have representatives, breaking up the 2 party system and promoting more diverse point of views. You can also have mixed systems, with locally elected reps for a part of the house, and the rest of the house being filled in a manner that the end result is proportional to the global voting share
Also it's possible to have a "national circle" which when votes allocate parliamentary representatives, is used for, after all regional representatives have be allocated, pick up all votes that didn't yielded any representatives in the regional circles and use them to allocate representatives nationally.
Smaller parties which are not regionally concentrated loose regional representation but they don't lose representation in overall as those votes end up electing national representatives, whilst very regional parties get regional representatives and the bigger national parties get mainly regional representative and maybe a handful of national ones.
Proportional representatives. Of a party gets a 30%of the votes, it gets a 30%ish of the seats.
The arguably huge downside of this, is that it cuts the direct line from you to a representative. That undermines democracy, because it undermines your capacity to be heard.
Does your representative ever done something you asked for?
I'm not anerican so I'm unsure how pertinent my experience is.
But yes, my representatives often hold public neetings in which anyone is invited, although I don't go there myself.
If the "direct line" is theoretical anyway it just doesn't matter anyway.
I don't have any citations sorry, but I did look into this about 15 years ago for reasons I no longer remember, and what I learned is that in most places with large overall populations that uses a system like this, and where leadership is not voted for independently of local representation, the representatives overwhelmingly vote along party leadership not on the community they represent.
Not sure I'm explaining it well sorry