Redistricting

We attended a meeting last night on redistricting in North Carolina. This is required after every decennial US census, to insure that each legislative district (and some other districts) represent the same number of citizens.

The process is highly political (meaning partisan). It is also subject to complex legal constraints. The Research Division of the N.C. General Assembly has prepared a very helpful pamphlet: "Legislator's Guide to North Carolina Legislative and Congressional Redistricting." The pamphlet makes it very clear how difficult it is just to comply with the legal requirements. Once you overlay the legal requirements with the natural desire of each political party to maximize its vote and minimize that of the other parties, the challenge becomes mind-boggling.

The reasons we have so much difficulty with redistricting are:
1. Representation is by geography rather than by social, cultural or economic affinities;
2. We have single-member districts with representation decided on a winner-take-all vote;
3. By comparison with other countries, we have few legislators;
4. We have only two viable political parties.

The truth is, the reason we have only two parties is because of the first three characteristics of our system.

Is there a better way?

I think there is. For legislative elections, I favor multi-member districts and proportional representation. It is not as complicated as it sounds. Such an approach would almost certainly introduce new political parties into the system and require parties to cooperate. It would be less likely that a single party would control any house of a legislature, thus leading to coalition building. And redistricting would become much less complex.

Based on the past couple of decades of polling by Times Mirror and the Pew Trust, it seems that our population would shake out into perhaps nine or ten opinion groupings and perhaps that many parties.

Would such a change lead to better outcomes? Who knows? But such a system works pretty well elsewhere.

I predict we will adopt such a system as soon as we can persuade pigs to fly.