
Let’s change how we elect the House of Representatives - acjohnson55
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-change-how-we-elect-the-house-of-representatives/2017/06/27/92f28570-5ab9-11e7-a9f6-7c3296387341_story.html?utm_term=.4962fda02cce
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elmerfud
The article opens with saying less than 20% approve of the job in congress,
but then presents an argument on changing how representatives are elected that
totally ignores that statistic.

The entire house of representative and 1/3 of the senate is elected every 2
years. So, the 20% approval statistic shows more that people are happy with
their representative but not happy with all the others. This is a
dysfunctional electorate problem, not a problem with how elections are run.

At the core this proposal is more about allowing for a more stable bully
majority, and very little to do with fair representation in the electorate. If
you wanted to start transitioning back to a more fair representation how about
we allow states to decide how senators are chosen so both the people and the
states of the people can be represented.

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acjohnson55
Fair point on the distinction between satisfaction with Congress as a whole
versus a person's own representative. However, one would expect satisfaction
with Congress to have some kind of correlation with the popular vote. Why
aren't Republican voters satisfied with Congress? After all, more than half of
Americans voted for a Republican [1].

I agree with you that our electorate is dysfunctional. At the same time, we
either believe everyone should have roughly equal say in our government, or we
don't. I'm not saying that we should have an actual democracy, but that the
mechanisms of our system should be fundamentally democratic. But if the
problem is the electorate itself, that begs the question: what's the better
answer? I'm earnestly all ears.

Why do we want the states to be represented as a first-class entity? The
concept of "one person, one vote" makes plenty of sense for people, but why
should states have equal representation when they have different numbers of
people? To me, _people_, not states, are paramount.

I'm also unclear what you mean by a stable bully majority. Because I think
that's what we have today. If you live in an uncompetitive district and you're
in the political minority, you're essentially permanently disenfranchised. The
best you can hope for is to be pandered to in a primary by some candidate
trying to build a coalition.

[1]
[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/10/democrats-
won-popular-vote-senate-too/93598998/)

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acjohnson55
I hope this gets some traction here. This is an apolitical piece, potentially
applicable to democratic governance worldwide.

