Thanks for a powerfully engaging description of the possibilities of renewal! I have thought for years that the changes you propose are required to keep the USA experiment alive!
This is exactly the kind of specific structural reform conversation we need more of.
You write: “two-party systems are a choice… an arrangement we can change — with a simple act of Congress (no constitutional amendment required).” That’s the critical insight: our current dysfunction isn’t inevitable. It’s the predictable output of specific design choices made in the 18th century.
Proportional representation addresses a real architectural problem: winner-take-all single-member districts create a system where governing becomes impossible. Half the country always feels unrepresented. Policy whiplash every 4-8 years. Perpetual maximum-stakes conflict.
But here’s what makes this moment even more significant: proportional representation isn’t just a better voting method. It’s an example of thinking about governance as architecture rather than just personnel or policy. The question shifts from “how do we win?” to “how do we build systems that can actually govern effectively?”
You’re right that we’re seeing convergence: gerrymandering wars escalating to absurdity, voters desperate for alternatives, institutional support building, Trump’s gravitational pull potentially weakening. These create conditions where fundamental reform becomes possible.
The deeper opportunity is using proportional representation as a gateway to asking larger questions: What other 18th-century design choices are failing under 21st-century loads? How do we build systems that can process complexity rather than collapse under it? What would governance architecture fit for modern challenges actually look like?
Proportional representation could be the crack in the dam. Once people see that the system itself can be redesigned—that we’re not stuck with defaults from 1789—other structural reforms become thinkable too.
Anything that prevents gerrymandering is attractive to me but I worry about the cost of running statewide. Wouldn’t it be better to pass a law banning partisan gerrymandering? Aftyn Behn has made a Trump +20 something congressional district competitive in Tennessee. Would that be possible statewide?
The challenge with “pass a law banning it” is that we’ve tried. The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 (Rucho v. Common Cause) that partisan gerrymandering is a “political question” federal courts won’t police. And any ban requires enforcement — by the same politicians who benefit from drawing favorable lines.
That’s the structural trap: you’re asking people to voluntarily give up an advantage. PR doesn’t rely on politicians being virtuous. It eliminates the mechanism that makes gerrymandering valuable in the first place.
It’s the difference between “please don’t speed” and building roads where speeding doesn’t help you.
The courts will enforce the law if it passes, they just wouldn’t rule that partisan gerrymandering was unconstitutional. The ban was included in the John Lewis voting rights act and it almost passed. If work conditions in Congress are so bad now Representatives may be ready for a change. Lots of maybes and wishful thinking, but who wants to have their district change every two years?
You're right — I conflated two things. Rucho said the Constitution doesn't ban partisan gerrymandering, but Congress absolutely could pass a law. The John Lewis Act is a good example.
The question is: why didn't it pass? Because you're asking the people who benefit from gerrymandering to vote against their own advantage. Sometimes that works. But it's fragile — one election later, the new majority can repeal it.
PR sidesteps that problem. Instead of asking politicians to be virtuous, it just removes what makes gerrymandering valuable in the first place.
The other problem with "pass a law banning partisan gerrymandering" is that it's not clear what states should do instead. Draw district lines in a completely party-blind, race-blind way? That would be a disaster for minorities (racial or political): in a 55%-Democratic, 45%-Republican state, _every district_ would be roughly 55%-Democratic, 45%-Republican, and _almost every district_ would be won by a Democrat, producing a nearly-100%-Democratic legislature or House delegation. (If that sounds good to you, flip the parties around.)
The unavoidable problem is that single-seat, winner-take-all districts inherently amplify majorities. We can fix this by gerrymandering to approximate proportional representation, as we've done for decades under the Voting Rights Act, but that means most seats are either "safely blue" or "safely red", general elections are a foregone conclusion, and all the action happens in primaries, which tend to drag legislators to the extremes of their own parties, with more interest in performing for their base than in reaching compromise on actual legislation. The alternative is to achieve proportional representation through multi-seat districts, as favored by the authors.
An advantage of the latter approach is that it doesn't depend on knowing in advance what issues divide voters. If you assume voters vote based on party registration, or based on race, you can try to gerrymander for proportional party (respectively racial) representation, but what if they turn out to be more motivated by some other issue? A voting system like STV achieves proportional representation by _whatever actually matters to voters_; you don't need to guess at it in advance, and even the voters don't need to consciously know what it is.
FWIW I don't think proportional representation by itself would weaken the two-party system. The biggest state, California, might have one Green and one Libertarian. So there might be a dozen or so third party Representatives, caucusing with the major parties.
But it would deal a death blow to state Congressional gerrymandering and put an end to rural overrepresentation in the House.
You're probably right that proportional representation alone wouldn't transform everything overnight. California might get one Green, one Libertarian - incremental change rather than revolution.
But here's why I think that still matters: it demonstrates that the system itself can be changed. That's the breakthrough.
Right now, most Americans think government dysfunction is inevitable - just how things are. Or they think it's about bad people, wrong policies, the other party blocking progress. They don't see that we're running 21st-century loads on 18th-century infrastructure that was never designed for this scale and complexity.
Proportional representation - even if it only produces incremental improvements - proves something critical: the architecture is changeable. It's not handed down from heaven. It's not in the Constitution. We can redesign it.
Once people see that, other questions become possible:
Why does our budget process guarantee government shutdowns?
Why do we have policy whiplash every 4-8 years instead of continuity mechanisms?
Why can't we address long-term challenges that span multiple administrations?
What would governance systems designed for 340 million people across six time zones actually look like?
These are engineering questions, not partisan ones. Proportional representation is a gateway reform precisely because it demonstrates that we CAN redesign how governance works. Once that becomes thinkable, other structural changes become possible too.
That's the gateway I'm interested in: making visible that governance is a design problem with design solutions.
Hi Lee and Grant, your article sounds interesting, but do you guys have a plan or strategy for HOW to move PR forward? Because your article doesn't sound like much of a blueprint. Since PR is such an untried method in the US, getting an Open List system in place in a major city would seem like a good place to start, trying out PR and showing that it works. For example, eight of the 30 most populous cities in the US have partisan elections (all the rest have nonpartisan), including New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Houston, Indianapolis, Charlotte and Louisville. Cities that already have party-based elections could greatly democratize their local governments by switching to party-based PR. So why not try Open List in a major city with party-based elections? That's a small enough jurisdiction that a campaign could be organized, sufficient money raised and popular support mobilized to put it before the voters and win. See https://democracysos.substack.com/p/how-to-democratize-new-york-city
Or how about following the successful New Zealand model of electoral system change, by organizing a campaign to establish a high-level Blue Ribbon commission that studies the issue and issues a recommendation to the legislative authority? In New Zealand, the Royal Commission recommendation led to PR being put on the ballot by the Parliament. The UK also did this with their Lord Jenkins commission that came very close to putting electoral system reform for the House of Commons on the ballot.
Do your organizations have any strategy or plan? Without that, your article sounds more like a plaintive plea, almost magical thinking, waiting for the "right conditions" and the "right forces" to appear that will carry the PR movement to victory. Waiting on a hope and a prayer is not a strategy. Surely after more than two years of promoting and educating about PR, and studying the political landscape, at this point you have an idea of what strategy might be successful, or is worth attempting? If so, that would make for a very interesting article indeed. I hope to read your thoughts on that some day.
I was thinking the same. "We just need Congress to pass this" - the problem is that we have a gridlocked non-functional Congress. Ask much as I would love PR, it doesn't seem feasible as things currently stand.
I think Danielle Allen's strategy to renovate at the state level first via ballot measures to allow for open primaries and RCV is much more realistic.
I clicked on this article because I wanted to hear why PR is politically possible in the next few years, and I didn't hear it. Sure, people are dissatisfied, but you haven't said anything about how to get to PR other than "a simple Act of Congress, no Constitutional amendment required".
I assume the "simple Act of Congress" would repeal the 1960's prohibition on multi-seat districts, but that prohibition was put in place for good reasons: Southern states with slight white majorities were using statewide districts to guarantee that seats would go disproportionately to white people. If you drop the prohibition, you need to simultaneously replace it with some kind of PR mandate.
Furthermore, any state legislature that's significantly red-leaning or blue-leaning will think of PR as "unilateral disarmament", giving an advantage to the other major party, and won’t do it voluntarily until everybody else does. I think if PR is going to happen, it needs to be mandated nationwide all at once, and that's a tough sell without some good demonstration projects first.
In short, I’m not at all convinced that a “simple” act of Congress will do it; there are a lot of moving parts to be managed at the same time.
AMERICA, PLEASE BE WARNED: PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION WILL NOT FIX YOUR BROKEN DEMOCRACY!
New Zealand (where I am writing from) has had Mixed Member Proportional Representation since 1996 and our multi-party parliament is now a squabbling shambles. This has occurred because minor parties negotiate “deals” with the major party after an election to enable the major party to govern. Unpopular minor party policies are supported the major party in return for the minor parties agreeing to support the major party’s policies. This results in deeply unpopular decisions being rammed through our parliament. Proportional representation may have worked in less polarized times, but it’s not suited to current times.
After thinking about our problems here for some time, I have concluded that most democracies around the world may be boiled down to:
Competing political parties + Cyclic elections =
Economic waste + Social turmoil + Inability to implement long-term plans
To avoid the problems on the right hand side of the relationship, democratic governments have to become cooperative forums that seek out and develop society’s best ideas using a team of individuals who are subject to ongoing refreshment. These twin goals might be achieved by:
A) Making the selection of Member of Congress (MOC) the task of Community Advisory Groups (CAGs) who are randomly selected volunteers for each electorate. Every electorate’s CAG is then tasked with identifying and encouraging competent individuals to stand for election as the Member of Congress (MOC) for their electorate. Following the electorate as a whole voting to choose their MOC, the CAG would:
1. Continuously support and advise their MOC regarding the policies the CAG wishes to see pursued in Congress on behalf of their electorate.
2. Reprimanding and/or firing the MOC if their behavior is contrary to the wishes of the electorate.
B) Making Congress subject to monthly refreshment by “rolling” electorate specific elections through the country on a monthly basis. For the sake of having nice round numbers, let’s divide the USA into 480 electorates (of about equal population) who are required to elect their MOC on a 4 yearly cycle. In the first month of monthly rolling elections (MRE), 10 geographically disparate electorates vote for their MOC. In the second month, another 10 geographically disparate electorates vote for their MOC. This process repeats through all 480 electorates over the course of 48 months. After 48 months, or 4 years, the first 10 electorates hold their next election. Potentially, 10 out of 480 (2%) MOCs could be refreshed monthly. Also bear in mind that individual electorate CAGS would be granted the power to fire hopeless MOC’s, so the potential refreshment rate could be somewhat higher. Although affecting just a small percentage of MOCs, the monthly election outcomes should provide Congress with a clear indication of the public’s rating of its recent performance. In effect, monthly rolling elections would be public opinion polls “with teeth”.
Another potential benefit of monthly rolling elections (MRE) is that a small government department could be permanently employed managing on-going small elections, rather than having to dramatically expand periodically to cover nationwide elections. This could well be less costly than periodic elections. On-going elections would allow continuous refinement of the election process to ensure that the system was free of manipulation and fraud.
As public engagement in the process of government currently appears to be low, the ongoing MRE process might also help keep democracy “front of mind” for more voters.
Finally, while you are redesigning your democracy, might I suggest that you chuck out the egocentric role of President. Also your Senate – which should not be needed if you had a truly democratic Congress…
Isn’t this approach similar to the Forward Party? Unfortunately change is quick but we are at similar stage as the Whigs in the 1840-50s. Divisions have been reasonably reason a lot of the older original political parties were eliminated. I have been reading about the Forward party for time they do present a path for change. But again we may be too far gone to replace either party. But we must start somewhere I guess.
Thanks for a powerfully engaging description of the possibilities of renewal! I have thought for years that the changes you propose are required to keep the USA experiment alive!
This is exactly the kind of specific structural reform conversation we need more of.
You write: “two-party systems are a choice… an arrangement we can change — with a simple act of Congress (no constitutional amendment required).” That’s the critical insight: our current dysfunction isn’t inevitable. It’s the predictable output of specific design choices made in the 18th century.
Proportional representation addresses a real architectural problem: winner-take-all single-member districts create a system where governing becomes impossible. Half the country always feels unrepresented. Policy whiplash every 4-8 years. Perpetual maximum-stakes conflict.
But here’s what makes this moment even more significant: proportional representation isn’t just a better voting method. It’s an example of thinking about governance as architecture rather than just personnel or policy. The question shifts from “how do we win?” to “how do we build systems that can actually govern effectively?”
You’re right that we’re seeing convergence: gerrymandering wars escalating to absurdity, voters desperate for alternatives, institutional support building, Trump’s gravitational pull potentially weakening. These create conditions where fundamental reform becomes possible.
The deeper opportunity is using proportional representation as a gateway to asking larger questions: What other 18th-century design choices are failing under 21st-century loads? How do we build systems that can process complexity rather than collapse under it? What would governance architecture fit for modern challenges actually look like?
Proportional representation could be the crack in the dam. Once people see that the system itself can be redesigned—that we’re not stuck with defaults from 1789—other structural reforms become thinkable too.
Anything that prevents gerrymandering is attractive to me but I worry about the cost of running statewide. Wouldn’t it be better to pass a law banning partisan gerrymandering? Aftyn Behn has made a Trump +20 something congressional district competitive in Tennessee. Would that be possible statewide?
The challenge with “pass a law banning it” is that we’ve tried. The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 (Rucho v. Common Cause) that partisan gerrymandering is a “political question” federal courts won’t police. And any ban requires enforcement — by the same politicians who benefit from drawing favorable lines.
That’s the structural trap: you’re asking people to voluntarily give up an advantage. PR doesn’t rely on politicians being virtuous. It eliminates the mechanism that makes gerrymandering valuable in the first place.
It’s the difference between “please don’t speed” and building roads where speeding doesn’t help you.
The courts will enforce the law if it passes, they just wouldn’t rule that partisan gerrymandering was unconstitutional. The ban was included in the John Lewis voting rights act and it almost passed. If work conditions in Congress are so bad now Representatives may be ready for a change. Lots of maybes and wishful thinking, but who wants to have their district change every two years?
You're right — I conflated two things. Rucho said the Constitution doesn't ban partisan gerrymandering, but Congress absolutely could pass a law. The John Lewis Act is a good example.
The question is: why didn't it pass? Because you're asking the people who benefit from gerrymandering to vote against their own advantage. Sometimes that works. But it's fragile — one election later, the new majority can repeal it.
PR sidesteps that problem. Instead of asking politicians to be virtuous, it just removes what makes gerrymandering valuable in the first place.
But then you are still asking people who benefit from gerrymandering to vote for it..
The other problem with "pass a law banning partisan gerrymandering" is that it's not clear what states should do instead. Draw district lines in a completely party-blind, race-blind way? That would be a disaster for minorities (racial or political): in a 55%-Democratic, 45%-Republican state, _every district_ would be roughly 55%-Democratic, 45%-Republican, and _almost every district_ would be won by a Democrat, producing a nearly-100%-Democratic legislature or House delegation. (If that sounds good to you, flip the parties around.)
The unavoidable problem is that single-seat, winner-take-all districts inherently amplify majorities. We can fix this by gerrymandering to approximate proportional representation, as we've done for decades under the Voting Rights Act, but that means most seats are either "safely blue" or "safely red", general elections are a foregone conclusion, and all the action happens in primaries, which tend to drag legislators to the extremes of their own parties, with more interest in performing for their base than in reaching compromise on actual legislation. The alternative is to achieve proportional representation through multi-seat districts, as favored by the authors.
An advantage of the latter approach is that it doesn't depend on knowing in advance what issues divide voters. If you assume voters vote based on party registration, or based on race, you can try to gerrymander for proportional party (respectively racial) representation, but what if they turn out to be more motivated by some other issue? A voting system like STV achieves proportional representation by _whatever actually matters to voters_; you don't need to guess at it in advance, and even the voters don't need to consciously know what it is.
FWIW I don't think proportional representation by itself would weaken the two-party system. The biggest state, California, might have one Green and one Libertarian. So there might be a dozen or so third party Representatives, caucusing with the major parties.
But it would deal a death blow to state Congressional gerrymandering and put an end to rural overrepresentation in the House.
You're probably right that proportional representation alone wouldn't transform everything overnight. California might get one Green, one Libertarian - incremental change rather than revolution.
But here's why I think that still matters: it demonstrates that the system itself can be changed. That's the breakthrough.
Right now, most Americans think government dysfunction is inevitable - just how things are. Or they think it's about bad people, wrong policies, the other party blocking progress. They don't see that we're running 21st-century loads on 18th-century infrastructure that was never designed for this scale and complexity.
Proportional representation - even if it only produces incremental improvements - proves something critical: the architecture is changeable. It's not handed down from heaven. It's not in the Constitution. We can redesign it.
Once people see that, other questions become possible:
Why does our budget process guarantee government shutdowns?
Why do we have policy whiplash every 4-8 years instead of continuity mechanisms?
Why can't we address long-term challenges that span multiple administrations?
What would governance systems designed for 340 million people across six time zones actually look like?
These are engineering questions, not partisan ones. Proportional representation is a gateway reform precisely because it demonstrates that we CAN redesign how governance works. Once that becomes thinkable, other structural changes become possible too.
That's the gateway I'm interested in: making visible that governance is a design problem with design solutions.
Hi Lee and Grant, your article sounds interesting, but do you guys have a plan or strategy for HOW to move PR forward? Because your article doesn't sound like much of a blueprint. Since PR is such an untried method in the US, getting an Open List system in place in a major city would seem like a good place to start, trying out PR and showing that it works. For example, eight of the 30 most populous cities in the US have partisan elections (all the rest have nonpartisan), including New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Houston, Indianapolis, Charlotte and Louisville. Cities that already have party-based elections could greatly democratize their local governments by switching to party-based PR. So why not try Open List in a major city with party-based elections? That's a small enough jurisdiction that a campaign could be organized, sufficient money raised and popular support mobilized to put it before the voters and win. See https://democracysos.substack.com/p/how-to-democratize-new-york-city
Or how about following the successful New Zealand model of electoral system change, by organizing a campaign to establish a high-level Blue Ribbon commission that studies the issue and issues a recommendation to the legislative authority? In New Zealand, the Royal Commission recommendation led to PR being put on the ballot by the Parliament. The UK also did this with their Lord Jenkins commission that came very close to putting electoral system reform for the House of Commons on the ballot.
Do your organizations have any strategy or plan? Without that, your article sounds more like a plaintive plea, almost magical thinking, waiting for the "right conditions" and the "right forces" to appear that will carry the PR movement to victory. Waiting on a hope and a prayer is not a strategy. Surely after more than two years of promoting and educating about PR, and studying the political landscape, at this point you have an idea of what strategy might be successful, or is worth attempting? If so, that would make for a very interesting article indeed. I hope to read your thoughts on that some day.
Steven Hill
DemocracySOS
https://democracysos.substack.com/
I was thinking the same. "We just need Congress to pass this" - the problem is that we have a gridlocked non-functional Congress. Ask much as I would love PR, it doesn't seem feasible as things currently stand.
I think Danielle Allen's strategy to renovate at the state level first via ballot measures to allow for open primaries and RCV is much more realistic.
I clicked on this article because I wanted to hear why PR is politically possible in the next few years, and I didn't hear it. Sure, people are dissatisfied, but you haven't said anything about how to get to PR other than "a simple Act of Congress, no Constitutional amendment required".
I assume the "simple Act of Congress" would repeal the 1960's prohibition on multi-seat districts, but that prohibition was put in place for good reasons: Southern states with slight white majorities were using statewide districts to guarantee that seats would go disproportionately to white people. If you drop the prohibition, you need to simultaneously replace it with some kind of PR mandate.
Furthermore, any state legislature that's significantly red-leaning or blue-leaning will think of PR as "unilateral disarmament", giving an advantage to the other major party, and won’t do it voluntarily until everybody else does. I think if PR is going to happen, it needs to be mandated nationwide all at once, and that's a tough sell without some good demonstration projects first.
In short, I’m not at all convinced that a “simple” act of Congress will do it; there are a lot of moving parts to be managed at the same time.
What’s the plan?
AMERICA, PLEASE BE WARNED: PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION WILL NOT FIX YOUR BROKEN DEMOCRACY!
New Zealand (where I am writing from) has had Mixed Member Proportional Representation since 1996 and our multi-party parliament is now a squabbling shambles. This has occurred because minor parties negotiate “deals” with the major party after an election to enable the major party to govern. Unpopular minor party policies are supported the major party in return for the minor parties agreeing to support the major party’s policies. This results in deeply unpopular decisions being rammed through our parliament. Proportional representation may have worked in less polarized times, but it’s not suited to current times.
After thinking about our problems here for some time, I have concluded that most democracies around the world may be boiled down to:
Competing political parties + Cyclic elections =
Economic waste + Social turmoil + Inability to implement long-term plans
To avoid the problems on the right hand side of the relationship, democratic governments have to become cooperative forums that seek out and develop society’s best ideas using a team of individuals who are subject to ongoing refreshment. These twin goals might be achieved by:
A) Making the selection of Member of Congress (MOC) the task of Community Advisory Groups (CAGs) who are randomly selected volunteers for each electorate. Every electorate’s CAG is then tasked with identifying and encouraging competent individuals to stand for election as the Member of Congress (MOC) for their electorate. Following the electorate as a whole voting to choose their MOC, the CAG would:
1. Continuously support and advise their MOC regarding the policies the CAG wishes to see pursued in Congress on behalf of their electorate.
2. Reprimanding and/or firing the MOC if their behavior is contrary to the wishes of the electorate.
B) Making Congress subject to monthly refreshment by “rolling” electorate specific elections through the country on a monthly basis. For the sake of having nice round numbers, let’s divide the USA into 480 electorates (of about equal population) who are required to elect their MOC on a 4 yearly cycle. In the first month of monthly rolling elections (MRE), 10 geographically disparate electorates vote for their MOC. In the second month, another 10 geographically disparate electorates vote for their MOC. This process repeats through all 480 electorates over the course of 48 months. After 48 months, or 4 years, the first 10 electorates hold their next election. Potentially, 10 out of 480 (2%) MOCs could be refreshed monthly. Also bear in mind that individual electorate CAGS would be granted the power to fire hopeless MOC’s, so the potential refreshment rate could be somewhat higher. Although affecting just a small percentage of MOCs, the monthly election outcomes should provide Congress with a clear indication of the public’s rating of its recent performance. In effect, monthly rolling elections would be public opinion polls “with teeth”.
Another potential benefit of monthly rolling elections (MRE) is that a small government department could be permanently employed managing on-going small elections, rather than having to dramatically expand periodically to cover nationwide elections. This could well be less costly than periodic elections. On-going elections would allow continuous refinement of the election process to ensure that the system was free of manipulation and fraud.
As public engagement in the process of government currently appears to be low, the ongoing MRE process might also help keep democracy “front of mind” for more voters.
Finally, while you are redesigning your democracy, might I suggest that you chuck out the egocentric role of President. Also your Senate – which should not be needed if you had a truly democratic Congress…
Wow. I support this. But I need to empower and give agency to the younger people. I’m tired. Feisty…but tired.
Isn’t this approach similar to the Forward Party? Unfortunately change is quick but we are at similar stage as the Whigs in the 1840-50s. Divisions have been reasonably reason a lot of the older original political parties were eliminated. I have been reading about the Forward party for time they do present a path for change. But again we may be too far gone to replace either party. But we must start somewhere I guess.
Please excuse my rant.
I’m all for proportional thanksgiving dinner.