Why district lines matter more than our votes

Drew Penrose on how to bring choice, competition & representation to our democracy

Every 10 years, it’s the same old song and dance with the House of Representatives. We tally the number of people living in each state, the House’s 435 seats are apportioned accordingly, and then we draw up the congressional districts. Next comes many millions of dollars — and an incalculable human cost — battling over district lines, gerrymandering lawsuits, and debates over the fairness of a district map; all of this for a system where only about 20% of congressional races are actually competitive. 

And the worst part of this is Americans can’t vote our way out of this reality. In our current system, our representatives are essentially chosen for us based on where we happen to live. But our current system is not inevitable, it’s the result of a choice — one that was made not too long ago, and one that can be unmade. This is the central focus of Our Shared Republic, a new series of essays that advocates for “unchoosing” our winner-take-all electoral system and replacing it with proportional representation. 

Drew Penrose, Policy Strategist at Protect Democracy and lead author of Our Shared Republic, joins us for a conversation on the series.

Drew, welcome to If you can keep it! First things first: What choice led us to this point, where district lines have become destiny? 

A law passed in 1967 requiring single-member districts for the House of Representatives, which means that there can only be one winner in each congressional district. It was a well-intentioned decision to stop states from electing all of their representatives statewide by a general ticket method — basically a situation where if most of the state voted for one party, that party would control the entire state. Even less representative than our current system. 

But the law also gave us a system where the choice of district lines matters more than our votes do, giving us an endless cycle of gerrymandering and a Congress that is disproportionately old, white, and male at a pivotal time when we need new voices.

Our Shared Republic proposes proportional representation as an alternative to our current system. How would that work?

At its most basic, proportional representation means a share of votes elects an equal share of seats. Instead of electing a single representative, voters would elect multiple with representation allocated in proportion to votes. Say you have a six-seat district. If a party’s candidates win 51 percent of the vote, they would win three of the six seats. A party whose candidates won a third of the vote might win two of the six seats. 

Another way to think of it is as full and fair representation: Full because everyone gets represented, not just the biggest group of voters in each district; and fair because representation isn’t distorted by where the district lines get drawn. It’s a simple idea, but there are lots of ways of implementing it. No matter which form of proportional representation you go with, you get basically universally competitive elections, fairer representation, and a long list of downstream benefits.

How does proportional representation compare to representation-focused winner-take-all options, like drawing majority-minority districts? 

With single-member districts, the fight for fair representation gets pushed into a fight over fair districts. Thinking of majority-minority districts, the obvious problem is that there are not enough of them; it’s just hard to get fair representation for communities of color when you are limited by geography. But another problem is that anywhere you have majority-minority districts, it will still be the case that most voters of color will not live in them. Like, in Louisiana, about two-thirds of the state’s Black voters live among its majority white, safe Republican districts. 

With proportional representation, voters of color would have a lot more power to elect candidates of choice all over the country, and that representation would be nearly universal — voters of all races and ideologies would be much more likely to have a vote that matters and a representative that serves their community.

Reformers often point to the fact that most other democracies use some form of proportional representation. Have you found that to be persuasive to an American audience?

It helps, but emphasizing other countries can also backfire by making proportional representation seem strange, like some European thing that wouldn’t work here. But if you look at the Federalist Papers or other statements by leaders in the Founding Era, it becomes obvious that they would have chosen proportional representation had it been available to them. 

It’s clear that a big concern of James Madison as he pushed for the new Constitution was the need for a new government that would fairly represent the many different factions across the country. That was central to how he designed the House of Representatives, but at the time neither he nor anyone else understood that electoral systems are probably the most important piece of technology for doing that. Proportional voting methods were invented about a hundred years later, and some in Congress did push to adopt them. It even got pretty close to passing a couple times. Meanwhile proportional representation gradually became the dominant way of electing legislatures across the rest of the democratic world. It’s unfortunate, but it also means that we now get the benefit of looking across all those examples and seeing the positive impacts.

You’ve been working in the electoral reform space for over 10 years now. How have your thoughts on proportional representation evolved with time?

When I started, the conventional wisdom was that proportional representation was a sort of pie-in-the-sky idea for which no one seriously advocated. I always found that sort of amazing considering that a share of votes electing an equal share of seats is intuitively much more fair, and the more I learned about it, the better it seemed. As politics has gone more and more haywire, people have become increasingly open to ideas that previously seemed hopelessly abstract, and really since January 6, 2021, it’s like a switch has flipped. Now I would say that proportional representation is not just a more fair way to do elections — it’s an imperative if we want to save our democracy. Others get it too, and the idea is no longer something only policy wonks talk about. When you look at things like the new city charter in Portland, it’s clear that this is something ordinary people are starting to demand.

Our Shared Republic singles out proportional ranked choice voting (PRCV) as the best form of proportional representation for the United States (background on varieties of PR here). Is it PRCV or nothing?

Oh, absolutely not! All the benefits listed in Our Shared Republic would accrue if the U.S. adopted any kind of proportional representation. I do list some reasons why PRCV might be the most appropriate system for Congress in Our Shared Republic, but I also note that other proportional systems have their own benefits and deserve greater attention in the United States. I think if I were writing Our Shared Republic today, I would write it in a way that was more system agnostic, because the goal is really proportional representation, not a specific system. 

The series ends on the idea of creating a republic that “will not be mine or yours, but ours, and not be ruled, but shared.” Could you say more about this vision, and how proportional representation could lead us there? 

Winner-take-all has gotten really ingrained in our public consciousness, and it’s created a sense that politics is really top down and all about who wins and who loses. Proportional representation fits more naturally in a politics about all of us having a share of power and reaching solutions that work for as many people as possible. In countries with proportional representation, people have a greater sense of the power of their own votes and a less negative view of opposing political parties, and that means a more stable and empowering country overall. I want that for the United States, and I hope with Our Shared Republic I’ve contributed to that future in some small way.

You can read the full series of Our Shared Republic essays here.