11-28-2020, 07:27 PM
Doing away with political parties would violate the first amendment’s guarantee of freedom of association. It is a non-starter. Some things that could help:
Ranked choice voting, which would allow third parties to not be penalized as “throw-away votes”. It would still be an uphill climb, but a strong third party challenge could gain traction, and as long as they survived to the top two, they have a decent chance of winning by attracting folks who will vote for anyone but the other major party opposition. Also it would generally discourage pushing the extremes, as a winner would have to be broadly acceptable to 50% + 1 voters, rather than a plurality. This is especially useful in primaries.
Expand the House. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the House has to have 438 members, and it used to be de rigeur to increase the size of the House as the population increased. If the average house district were much smaller, district representatives would represent more local and idiosyncratic interests that may not be captured by larger district. Bonus, it is harder to gerrymander smaller districts.
More controversially, allow multi-member districts (say three to five representatives per district). I know full well that in some ways this goes against the other two, but it would require more of a change to require. The big advantages are that it would provide better representation for minorities in a district and would make gerrymandering nearly impossible, since a district designed to give a narrow majority to one party (say but constructing it to give that party ~60% of the vote), would likely result in a 3-2 apportionment of their congress members, and even “safe” districts would probably go 4-1 except in the most extreme cases. And because every district will likely feature at least one or two that were competitive, that would require parties to be responsive to their districts.
Here’s an editorial from a NY conservative on multi member districts.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014...tions.html
BC
Ranked choice voting, which would allow third parties to not be penalized as “throw-away votes”. It would still be an uphill climb, but a strong third party challenge could gain traction, and as long as they survived to the top two, they have a decent chance of winning by attracting folks who will vote for anyone but the other major party opposition. Also it would generally discourage pushing the extremes, as a winner would have to be broadly acceptable to 50% + 1 voters, rather than a plurality. This is especially useful in primaries.
Expand the House. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the House has to have 438 members, and it used to be de rigeur to increase the size of the House as the population increased. If the average house district were much smaller, district representatives would represent more local and idiosyncratic interests that may not be captured by larger district. Bonus, it is harder to gerrymander smaller districts.
More controversially, allow multi-member districts (say three to five representatives per district). I know full well that in some ways this goes against the other two, but it would require more of a change to require. The big advantages are that it would provide better representation for minorities in a district and would make gerrymandering nearly impossible, since a district designed to give a narrow majority to one party (say but constructing it to give that party ~60% of the vote), would likely result in a 3-2 apportionment of their congress members, and even “safe” districts would probably go 4-1 except in the most extreme cases. And because every district will likely feature at least one or two that were competitive, that would require parties to be responsive to their districts.
Here’s an editorial from a NY conservative on multi member districts.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014...tions.html
BC