The Gerrymandering Crisis Has a Fix. Here's What It Looks Like.

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]Regular viewers know that I'm not just a guy that you see on your phone or your computer screen doing videos and stuff, whether it's on YouTube or Tik Tok or wherever. You also know that I have a day job and that day job is a columnist for the New York Times. And I do videos for them as well. Not as frequently, but about once a week I'll do a video for the Times. And my most recent video was not just talking about what I've been talking about for the past week or so, which is the Supreme Court's decision in Klay, Louisiana, and all of its implications, but I was talking about how you move forward from a world where partisan gerrymandering, where hyperartisan gerrymandering seems to be the rule. Right? We're entering a situation where we're beginning to treat the House of Representatives and beginning to treat federal representation overall like the electoral college in which if you manage to win 50 plus 1% of the representation within the state and the state legislature and the governorship, then you can gerrymander your political opponents basically out of existence. I think this is a bad state of affairs. As I've said before, my position on partisan gerrymandering is is that it's bad. It is a corrosion of democracy. It does not allow for fuller forms of representation. If I had it my way, if you gave me a magic wand to wave, there wouldn't be any of this whatsoever. Now, in that video, I suggested three possible alternatives to the way that we do elections. Now, in that video, I mentioned three possible alternatives to the way that we do congressional elections. And this would apply to state legislative elections as well. And I'm going to talk about those three alternatives as well as others you could bring in. It was funny. I was reading the comments to the video in the various places it was posted. And I guess a lot of people took from it that the video was about the electoral college and there was a lot of argument about the electoral college. And I've noticed as well when I talk about the electoral system, what people hear is electoral college. And I'm not sure they can make the distinction. So before I get talking about these other options, I just want to make a quick point of clarification.

[00:02:06]The electoral college is how we decide presidential elections in the United States. Rather than there being a system where it's a straight popular vote, which by the way, the idea that a strict popular vote would result in California, New York, and Illinois deciding the presidential election is just false.

[00:02:20]There are mathematically not enough voters in those states for that to happen. And beyond that, it's a funny way of just repeating the error of the electoral college. You look at the fact that they're big and you see that they're blue and you're like, "Oh, well, that means they must be able to dominate the election." But there are way more people in this country than you think and that's just not how things work out.

[00:02:38]Anyway, the electoral college has to do with the presidential election. It has to do with how the states distribute their presidential electorates which are determined by your representation in the house and your representation in the Senate. And for all of the many flaws of the electoral college, mainly that it advantages people who live in closely competitive states. Not big states or small states, but states where there's just a small margin between the two parties. And thus, if you live outside of those states where there isn't a small margin, your vote kind of doesn't count. The electoral college has nothing really to do with federal representation in the House and the Senate. These are two separate issues. And so, we're going to be talking about federal representation and state legislative representation, not the electoral college. I think the electoral college should be gotten rid of, but that's a separate discussion. Let's not get things mixed up. I'm trying to make this as explicitly as possible. This is not a video about the electoral college.

[00:03:33]Please do not comment about the electoral college. Or if you do, make it tongue and cheek so I know that you're joking, you know. All right. So, in this video for the New York Times, I list three potential options for how you could rethink house elections in this country, legislative elections. The thing we should be thinking about now, given where we're headed, is how we can move the United States away from its current system towards something that could give us fair political representation. There are many ways to get to this outcome. We could adopt the party list systems used in some other countries. We could bring back fusion voting. We could expand rank choice voting. You already know what rank choice voting is. I hope it's where you're given multiple options and you rank the options and then if no one wins an outright majority in the first round of voting, second place options, third place options begin to factor in and the winner in the end is whoever's been ranked the most by voters. Now before we move any further, it's important to say or think about what our larger objectives are for changing the way we do elections in this country. And I think the larger objective should be more political representation, right?

[00:04:41]People's views don't fit neatly between the two parties as they exist, the two party coalitions. So more parties, more opportunities for people to express their political views in different ways, and then more competition. And the last thing is an element of randomness. I think one of the problems with the two-party system as it has developed is that it's created the impression because of our narrow margins, because of close competition really that it is maybe possible to win a final victory that you can just win outright and thus that dissuades you from engaging in the kind of compromise and coalition building that I think actually makes democracies work. Now, why does it even require a change to our political system to get to say multiple parties? The two-party system, I think, contrary to what a lot of people believe, isn't in the constitution, isn't something mandated by law necessarily. It is a function primarily of two things, three things.

[00:05:43]It's a function of the fact that we have single member districts. So, a single district elects a single member. It's a product of first pass the post elections. Whoever wins the most votes in a contest wins the seat in the district. And it's you could say 100%.

[00:06:00]You win all of the representation if you win most of the votes. Even if most of the votes isn't a majority of the votes and the electoral college or just the presidency because you need to assemble a majority of electoral votes. It's a strong bit of pressure towards creating coalitions that are able to do that. And there's going to be basically one or two coalitions that can manage to accomplish that successfully. Precisely because in a system where the pressure is towards trying to assemble the largest possible coalition to win that one seat to win that one office, the system is going to discourage a situation where you have say four, five, six parties vying for that because in that situation, say party A and party C are only are only a little bit far away from each other ideologically in terms of their issues.

[00:06:50]And if they came together, they might be able to win outright. But if they're not together, they'll both lose. And so that that creates the pressure to want to build some kind of coalition out of that. And that's basically what happened. You can see it happening immediately after the ratification of the constitution.

[00:07:05]Constitutions ratified in 1788. And basically by 1800, we have something like coherent political parties. And within 20 years of that, 25 years of that, we have something like modern mass political parties. It happens very quickly. So to get to multi-parties or some other kind of system you basically have to deal with the single member district and first pass the post and this gets you to our options. So party list or kind of party list proportional representation is a system of electing officials of organizing a legislature in where first you have multi-member districts just it is what it says a district elects multiple members.

[00:07:43]Imagine a district that has 20 members in it. formerly was 20 districts each electing one member now it's a single district electing 20 members and it's distributed by proportional representation. So whichever party wins a percentage of the vote that's how many seats they get. In a party list system the parties don't run individual candidates per se. They can but they don't have to. Instead they put out a list and that list has everyone who would fill the office if they won seats, if they won representation. And so you go out to vote and there's 20 seats and one party wins 50% of the vote, one party wins 25% of the vote, another party wins the other 25% of the vote.

[00:08:25]But you as the voter, you're not really voting for the individual people. You're just voting for the party. Then the party decides who is going to fill the seats based off of the list that they offered you. And maybe on the list they have told you this is the likely order which will fill the seat. So if we win 50% here are the 10 people who is going to sit. So, to be clear, I like this.

[00:08:44]People vote for parties anyway. The idea that we're all voting for individuals is sort of a fiction, a nice story that we tell ourselves, but not really. I like this. It's easy. It's straightforward.

[00:08:54]It makes sense. To make that happen in the United States, you would again have to get rid of single member districts, which is a thing you can do by statute.

[00:09:01]It's not in the Constitution. It's just a law you'd have to pass. you'd probably want to expand the size of the House of Representatives considerably from the current 435 maybe to some something like 635 maybe to just outright doubling it to 870 and you'd want proportional representation.

[00:09:19]The combination of those things would make winning would make additional parties viable. They could win without acting as spoilers for their closest competitors, for their closest ideological allies.

[00:09:33]And the same mix of reforms would work at the state level as well. All right, that's the party list. Then we have fusion. What is fusion? Now, we used to have fusion in this country up until basically the early 20th century and the two parties got rid of it because it was competition. But what fusion is is you can have single member districts and you can have first pass the post voting. But instead of a rule where candidates can only run on a single ballot line, you can have a situation where candidates can run on multiple ballot lines. So imagine an election in say Montana and you have three parties on the ballot.

[00:10:13]Three parties have ballot lines. The Democratic Party, the Republican party, and let's call our third party the anti-MAGA Republicans.

[00:10:21]The Democrats know that they'll never be able to elect anyone. They're just too unpopular.

[00:10:26]The anti-MAG of Republicans know that they probably won't be able to win if they cannot get some support from Democrats. And so what they do in a fusion system is they nominate the same candidate. They find some kind of compromised candidate and that person runs on both ballot lines against the Republican.

[00:10:46]If you vote for that candidate on the Democratic ballot line, they get the votes. If you vote for that candidate on the anti-Maga Republican ballot line, they get the votes. it doesn't matter.

[00:10:57]And if they get the most votes, they win, right?

[00:11:01]The virtue of this, beyond the fact that it's a pretty easy reform to introduce, it doesn't change a whole lot of things, is that it does two things. First, it does encourage the creation of additional political parties because those parties will not act as spoilers.

[00:11:16]Fusion allows you to have multiple parties in a single member district in a first pass the post system without any of those parties acting as spoilers.

[00:11:24]Americans don't like political parties.

[00:11:27]They don't like the idea of political parties. But it is a simple empirical fact that democracy has never existed in the modern world without parties.

[00:11:36]Parties are a critical aspect of making democracy work. They provide information. They organize electoral contest. They do all this work that make it possible to be a a relatively informed and effective voter. Think about how difficult it is to choose candidates in a municipal election when there is no party identification. You have no idea what you're doing. You have to engage a whole lot more research to figure out. And although people like to think of themselves as independent, it's actually cognitively much easier to be able to look at a party identifier and say, "Oh, that person probably agrees with me or I probably agree with them and I vote for them." So, you got to have parties. And I'd say the problem with our system is that we don't have enough of them. we have these two and that introduces all these perverse dynamics. This winner take all zero sum dynamic as well as as I said before this sense that you might be able to win the whole ball game that can spiral and escalate into a real disaster as we're experiencing now. So fusion gets you more parties. Fusion helps you avoid your spoiler problem. You can almost think of fusion as a way to open the door gently to multipartism in the American system. We've again, we've already had fusion before. In the 1880s and 1890s, populist candidates ran fusion campaigns with Republicans or Democrats depending on the state. And it works. We know that it works. And as far as short-term reforms go, ones that could get you to some other place, I'm actually also a big fan of fusion voting. And then there's rank choice voting. You know the deal with rank choice voting.

[00:13:12]I'm not the biggest fan. I think it's a little complicated and so far rank choice hasn't encouraged the development of new parties. Potentially rank choice plus fusion might do it, but rank choice alone doesn't quite do it. It's perfectly compatible with the two-party system as it exists. Now, I'm already going pretty long here, so I'm going to wrap this up. I'll say that there are other things to think about when trying to figure out how to move the US to I think a better electoral system. There is the electoral college in the presidency and the way that that office does create this pressure for a two-party system.

[00:13:51]Even if you abolish the electoral college and just have a straight popular vote, you also are not going to want to have a a situation where the winner is a plurality winner. you want them to be a majority winner. You can you can play around with it, but you have to do something about the presidency if you want multi-partyism to be viable.

[00:14:09]And the Senate in a similar way because every state gets two Senate seats. You can't really do proportional representation as the Senate currently exists. Here I will note that the constitution says that no state shall be deprived of its equal representation in the senate without its consent which means you can't turn the senate into a proportional body right it remains the case that every single state has gets the same number of senators but there's nothing about just increasing the number of senators so it is possible that you could have a situation where every state gets six senators you'd have a 300 person senate and then you could do some form of proportional representation from there. That becomes a little easier.

[00:14:51]But again, you got to think about what you're going to do at the Senate. All of this, I think, is much easier at the state legislative level, although you do have to deal with the governors. All right, like I said, this went long. So, here is my explanation of those ideas.

[00:15:04]Hope you found this informative, and I'll see you next time. As always,