Opinion | Our Elections Are Broken

I think that the thing we should all be considering aren’t modest reforms, but a wholesale transformation of our electoral system. It’s not working. For most of American history, when states redistrict for the House of Representatives, they did so every decade with a census. It was a somewhat slow moving process, and it had the advantage of opening up space for dramatic political change, because the political demographics of a state can change quite a bit over the course of a decade. The advent of mid-decade redistricting has completely changed that, and the Supreme Court’s decision —— “Limiting the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act” —— has supercharged the new dynamic. Now in that decision, the court —— “Found that Louisiana’s Sixth District, which links Black communities across the state, relied too heavily on race in its design.” The main and immediate effect of that decision is going to be to eliminate most of the majority-minority districts in the South under the pretext of partisan gerrymandering. Black Americans in the South are likely to lose most of their federal representation. But there’s going to be ripples and after-effects to this decision, to the fact that states are now free to partisan gerrymander however they like. And so what we’re likely to see as well is Democratic-led states also engage in this hyper-partisan gerrymandering in an effort to eliminate as many Republican seats as possible. We’re headed toward a world where if a party controls the governorship and even just a modest majority in the state legislature, they will have the tools necessary to make their “red state” or their “blue state” entirely red or entirely blue in its congressional representation. Democracy is premised on the ability of a party to lose, a party to relinquish power. And if we have engineered a situation where a political party simply cannot lose power in their states, then that’s not democracy. I think that the thing we should all be considering aren’t modest reforms, but a wholesale transformation of our electoral system. It’s not working. Our electoral system doesn’t represent the basic fact that there is almost no place in this country that is politically homogeneous, that even the bluest areas have plenty of Republicans, and even the reddest ones have plenty of Democrats, and that many Americans have political positions and views that don’t actually neatly track each of the parties. The country needs some other way to do elections, both for reasons of basic democratic fairness, but also for reasons of representation. The thing we should be thinking about now, given where we’re headed, is how we can move the United States away from its current system toward something that could give us fair political representation. There are many ways to get to this outcome. We could adopt the party list systems used in some other countries. We could bring back fusion voting. We could expand ranked choice voting. The alternative is a world where partisan polarization is so much greater and so much higher than it is now. So we have to start thinking about how we avoid that now.