A seemingly ingenious, simple solution to nonrepresentative government and gerrymandering

Forbes's Steven Salzberg rejects the claims of those who say that the House of Representatives will be made more responsive by increasing the number of reps to 593 (or so), this being the cube-root of the number of Americans, and this ratio being considered desirable by some political scientists.

The cube-root guideline may or may not work in less populous countries, but in the US, it yields a ratio of one rep per 550,000 represented people (the framers envisioned a 1 rep:30,000 people ratio, which would produce a gigantic Congress.

Instead, Salzberg proposes that each Congressional district should send two members to Congress, each casting a fractional vote proportional to the fraction of the electorate whose votes they won: if Rep Dingleberry (R) gets 20% of the votes, and Rep Cheetham (D) gets 80%, then Dingleberry casts 20% of an Aye vote, and Cheetham casts 80% of a Nay (or vice-versa).

This has a certain attractiveness to it: if you're one of the voters who casts a ballot for a loser who garners 30% of the vote, you still get represented in Congress.

But there are some obvious problems with this. Salzberg handwaves the idea of third-party candidates ("We could divide the single House vote proportionally among the top two vote-getters, ignoring the third parties" and possibly "States could also use ranked-choice voting to re-apportion the votes of the losing candidates"). The idea that there are only two possible political "sides" is viewed by many (including me) as a problem as great as the number of seats in Congress. Read the rest