"Grim" has some thoughts on the dismal state of the federal government. I agree with most of them, including repealing the Seventeenth Amendment, except for this suggestion:

I suggest the elimination of Congressional districts, so that all representatives are elected in a single statewide election. If a state were to have ten representatives, then, a hundred people could run -- the top ten vote-getters would take office. That would restore the force of electoral pressure to the House, where it is designed to be. It would increase turnover of Representatives, and cut down on the corruption in the government.

It would do those things, and those are good things, but it would have undesirable consequences as well. Like eliminating the electoral college, it would effectively disenfranchise rural voters, leaving them at the untender mercy of the voters in the big cities who would elect all representatives, and not just their own.

That's a canard. Rural voters could form a block and get just as much representation as they have now. Unless states were no longer entitled to at least one, that is. If House Districts crossed state lines, then big population states would get a handful more votes in the house.

What it would do is allow third parties to be viable. If you only need 10% of the vote to win, there might be a couple more parties viable like in a parliamentary system. There was a big scandal about this when Lani Guinier was nominated for AG for civil rights in 1993.

party list voting is the standard in Israel,
I think most people would rather not have to
deal with that experience.

Turnover of representatives would occur at the bottom
level, so junior people in the party would get kicked out,
and the old party war horses would stay in forever,
concentrating their power and seniority.

Also you would see the rise of fringe parties, like
the African National party, the White Rights Party,
La nuestra Mexicali, and a growth of idelogical
parties and religious parties. Anyone for the
jesus party, or the true liberals party?

What's worse, is the top guys become captive to their
interest blocks and utterly unresponsive to the
small constituents.

I've lived in counties that had district reps, and they would
show up at all the church fairs, fire department open houses,
parades, fireworks, etc, trying to be accessible.

I've lived in regions with At-Large run off voting, and the
at large reps, would lamprey onto the largest interest group
and totally ignore everyone else. One rep was at every
meeting of a mega-church, he spent 2 hours a day there,
because the pastor would endorse him. Another rep
was under the ownership of the public employees union
and the teachers union. He wouldn't even answer phone calls
if you weren't calling from one of those organizations.

Israel has all these strange parties, about 27 in all.
Labor and Likud don't have neough votes to win a clear
majority so they form crazy coalitions that last a few months.
At least 200 years of American Experience is the 2 party
system is stable.

The dems need to reorganize, so does the GOP.

Explain to me, Sam, how California farmers voting as a "bloc" would prevent LA and San Francisco from electing all of California's representatives?

This would give more variability and more parties than just two. In my country, districts are the size of about seven representatives.

It works so that the number of votes parties get determines which party gets how many places, and if a party gets x places, the order of the x people getting in is determined by the number of the votes the people got. (In Sweden the party list or "pecking order" is rigid, but here it's determined by votes.) It is a tradeoff of course, sometimes some parties have "superstars" who get a huge amount of votes and thus inflate the party's numbers and drag on some relatively unvoted people of their party to the parliament, but it's still better than having to play "tactical" - if you don't have party lists, your votes are all in vain if your candidate just misses the treshold by one vote, so people are afraid to vote choices that they think "ah, that one can't make it anyway, my vote will be just wasted". In a list vote, your vote is still useful even if your candidate can't make it.

In presidential elections of course we have (nowadays) direct voting and two rounds so that people whose candidate didn't get through on the first round can have a say on the second. Interesting television discussions by the way with eight presidential candidates, there are many viewpoints presented I would not have thought of.

Of course I can guess the existing american fifty-fifty parties oppose any change to the current system.

A much simpler reform, which would do much to reduce gerrymandering, would be to simply double or triple the size of the House. The population of the country has more than doubled since the size of the House was fixed at 435 in 1941. Throw in Maine-Nebraska style electoral college rules nationally (state winner gets two electoral votes, others decided by congressional district winner) for another nice decentralizing effect.

Rand: to the extent there are agricultural districts in California now, they have 1/435 roughly of the US population. If California went to a system where the top 53 candidate vote getters got a seat then the people elected would look a little different than today. I assume that each person would be able to vote for a party like in a parliamentary democracy and they would each have a slate of candidates. Perhaps the order of the candidates within the party could be decided in an open primary. The seats would then shake out according to the party votes. Suppose there are 2% of the voters who favor the Rural Party. Suppose they all turn out and vote for the Rural Party. At most, the other 98% of voters would elect 48 other candidates for other parties with more votes so this block would get one representative. If the city folk turn out 30%, then the Rural Party can expect somewhere between 2 and 4 seats depending on the rounding.

How do you figure we would have tyranny of the city folks?

OT, but this is the top post as I write this...

DL is claiming that he just popped a nuke, USGS initially claimed no activity detected, but the needles are starting to wiggle. Confirmation one way or the other to come soon.

Enlarging the House of Representatives is a superb idea.

Each member of England's House of Commons represents about 1/10th as many people as a US Congress-critter as I recall after doing the math a few years ago. It is astonishing how many people are represented by a single Representative.

Triple the size of the House and each member will answer to far fewer people, and will therefore be more responsive, by definition. Also the power of each House seat will be diluted.

Ack. The 17th keeps my state rep candidates from totally avoiding all the local issues. They avoid them anyway, but at least they don't have that excuse to talk Federal issues.

As for the "ten highest vote getters"--you're setting up for a situation where the top 3 get 80% of the votes and are outvoted in legislature by the 7 clowns who got the next 12%, with 8% going to also-rans. There's something which makes proportional representation gridlock look good.

Order of candidates in a party, why have a separate open primary when you can order them by the amounts of votes they got in the actual voting.

The simplest way to solve ALL this is term limits. 12 years and your out, with a stand down of at LEAST half that time. Or even better would be 12 years for the Senate and 8 for the House. Stand down of half that for both sides of congress.

I'll not hold my breath until these Civil Serpents gut themselves for the country's good. It ain't in 'em, to do it.

Steve: Why? If the people of a district want to keep electing someone, why shouldn't they be able to?

On the main post, I like districts, for the same reason I like states, rather than one uniform blob of representation for the nation itself. The only significant issue with district representation is gerrymandering, and if the polity as a whole really cared, that could be eliminated.

(I don't know the legal standing well enough to know if the Federal government could mandate it; I suspect not, so we'd need 50 state laws, but as the Kelo backlash and marriage amendments of the past few years show, things can get done when enough people care. And while politicians have an interest in keeping their districts gerrymandered, a very good public counter argument is along the lines of - "if you need a rigged district to win, why should you be elected at all?".

And enforcing fairness would be complex, but not necessarily hard. (Any programmers or engineers reading this probably know the distinction I'm making.)

Computers can do the calculation work (and do it in a way that can be proven to be "fair", once we agree on the rules) - the difficulty is determining a districting algorithm that people would agree on.

But it shouldn't be -in principle - too hard to come up with some combination of urban/rural grouping (for the same reason states have 2 senators and N representatives - to keep from disenfranchising the vast, underpopulated rural areas to the profit of the urban), geographic cohesion and use of natural or political borders (rivers, county lines), and population.)

Aside from the other reasons that would be as stupid an idea as direct popular election of Senators and direct popular election of Presidents, I have one word that sums up the problem with it:

Representatives

The representative from my district is MY representative in Congress; is effectively ME, as a surrogate for direct one-to-one democracy that is unwieldy with substantial size.

If a mob of them represents the entire state, each one represents everybody and nobody.

We already have Senators to represent the state, however badly direct election has skewed that and made them, well, a mob of two, representing everybody and, effectively, nobody, and not even really understanding their own role in representing the interests of the state per se.

If we go at-large with reps, we might as well go unicameral with Congress.

At large districts have an unfortunate history of being used in the South (states like Georgia and South Carolina) to keep certain people from getting elected. It'll be another century before the stench they left behind on the policy (as with poll taxes) has dissipated enough to try it again.

You'd think people offering these utopian solutions to non-problems would at least do a little research into the history of their great and wonderful ideas so as to at least cull out the one that have no chance at all.

Sigivald,
here's why. Ted Kennedy has been in D.C. so long he lost his "Bahstahn" accent. He no longer "pahks the cah in hahvahd yahd". Mind you I feel the same way about that proverbial thorn in the lefts side Jesse Helms, same system, loss of different a accent. To clarify my stance let me say that I live in North Carolina, Helms home state, where saying we need term limits to get people like Kennedy out is a good thing, but saying it about Jesse is a hangin' offense. I vote conservative, so I voted for Helms, because he was the only choice I had.

Term limits would accomplish several things. They would eliminate "Career Politicians". We are supposed to have a representative government. Who the he11 does a guy represent if he's never had a job outside of the government? How in touch with the commoners is he with his guaranteed salary, good benefits and NO chance of his job disappearing? They need to be reminded that someday that job will end and they'll need to reconnect to the real world of making a living. That might help them seek better deals for us, back here at home, if they know they've got to come home eventually. They can't all become lobbyists.

How can a Senator or Congressman keep tabs with his constituents, when he OWNS a house in D.C. that he lives in 10 1/2 months out of the year and NEVER sets foot back in his state? A guy might buy a house in D.C., but he would never think of that as home, if he knew he wasn't going to be there for 24 or 30 years. Change that "inside the Beltway" attitude.

Many people agree with my stance, many do not, obviously you're probably on the nay side as you asked what term limits would accomplish.

This whole thing may be solved by our country being ruled by foreigners, from either Pyonyang or a cave in Tora Bora. Or we may have Martial Law, from the new capitol in St Louis, that being a reasonable distance from the nuclear hole in the ground on the Potomac, and too far from either coast for easy launches from N. Korean submarines. Because BOTH parties in our illustrious have taken their eyes off the ball.

Our leaders in Washington have forgotten, that the first thing they were supposed to do was protect us, not there jobs. I think I guy with a less secure future would work harder, not be so jaded and would remember that HIS job is about US.

Everyone hated that suggestion. I'm happy to abandon it.

The idea of eliminating districts was a means to an end -- the end, the important thing, being eliminating gerrymandering. It's very hard to draw Congressional districts in such a way as to eliminate partisan steering. Yet it's that steering that has created the serious problems in the House, and indeed in the legislature as a whole.

In defense of the idea, I had envisioned a process that would work this way: everyone who wanted to be a Representative would run in one election, and every citizen got one vote. If you had ten slots, and a thousand people ran, the top ten vote-getters would be elected.

It seems to me that urban voters would pool behind a few candidates, who would get a massive number of votes each, which would prevent those votes going to other pro-urban candidates.

Several other ideas have been proposed, and I'm happy to go with any of them that will work. All that is really important is to put an end to gerrymandering.

Steve: But if the people of Massachussetts don't care that Kennedy no longer has his accent, why should they be prohibited from re-electing him?

With modern technology, like telephones and the internet, and a staff, I submit that a representative can keep a very decent line of communication open with his consitutents even if he's in DC most of the year.

(And, again, if the constituents start feeling un-represented or ignored, they can vote for someone else, can't they?)

And regarding job security, well... I'd think that having to worry about re-election every 2 or 6 years (depending on what sort of representative he is) would keep him a lot more engaged with his constituent's desires than knowing he's out of a job no matter how well or poorly he performs, no?

It's possible, though I tend to doubt it, that term limits might produce greater concern in representatives with "doing the right thing" in terms of foreign policy (though I suspect they might just try to get their Legacy and goodies faster ... and that Legacy is just as likely to be of meaningless diplomacy as the effective variety, or effective non-diplomatic action. More the former, I'd guess, given the political costs of attempting risky, effectual action rather than the safe course of more talk).

But that seems like a small potential benefit in exchange for removing the ability of The People to elect whoever they wish (apart from the minor limits of age, citizenship, etc.) as a representative, so long as they feel it's in their interest.

So, yeah, we just disagree on the right course here, I suppose. Part of it is that I hate tinkering with the shape of the State as defined in the Constitution without a very compelling argument.

The problem isn't the politicians, it's US. We're the ones that keep sending these idiots back to represent us. We've made it easy for them to change the rules so it is easier for them to get re-elected because too many of us don't give a sh!t about the elections.

if you want to eliminate gerry-mandering
which is a cause i believe in, try 2 approaches.

1) Iowa commission: Retired judges, eminent citizens
produce a map.

2) minimum area : Maps must create districts with the
minimum perimeter length compared to another map.