There’s two huge problems with American democracy, and there’s one idea that would fix both of them.

(Part 1 of this 3-part series, on the Senate, is here. Part 3 will cover the presidency and other executive elections.)

Problem #1: Unrepresented voters.

The United States constitution is based on the republican ideal of representative democracy. That is, ideally, you help choose a representative, and then that representative helps make laws. In order to work well, this system should represent essentially all American voters equally.

But in practice, over 40% of American voters don’t have a meaningful representative in the House of Representatives. Either they voted for a losing candidate, or they didn’t even have a choice of candidates because the congressperson for their district was running unopposed.

We’ve been taught to ignore that basic problem, as if it were inevitable. After all, we’re told, politics will always have winners and losers (true), so it’s impossible to represent more than about half of the people (false). This argument draws its seductive power from blurring the distinction between everyone getting the laws they want (impossible), and everyone getting some representation when choosing the laws they want (totally possible).

Problem #2: Gerrymandering.

I’m writing this a few days before the 2018 midterm elections, and here’s FiveThirtyEight’s current projection for the House of Representatives:

A cloud of possibilities for party seat margin as a function of party vote margin

As you can see, according to this state-of-the-art model, Democrats could win the popular vote by up to 5.7%, and Republicans would still be favored to win more seats! For Democrats, 52.8% of the two-way vote is a losing total!

In a balanced system, this graph would have just as much shading in the upper right quadrant (Democrats lose the popular vote but win the House) as in the lower left one (Republicans lose the popular vote but win the House). In a truly fair system, there would be zero shading in either of those quadrants, just a line passing through the origin from upper left to lower right.

The reason this graph can be so unbalanced in today’s America is gerrymandering:¹

An illustration of how a state with 56% blue voters (dots) can be gerrymandered into 4 districts in ways that elect anything from 1 to 4 blue representatives.

Gerrymandering doesn’t have to mean funny-shaped districts; as you can see above, the cleanest lines can actually lead to unfair results. But when taken to extremes, it does tend to create crazy shapes, and we’ve certainly reached that extreme in much of America:

An ad for gerrymandering jewelry, featuring the crazy shapes of districts NC-6, LA-6, TX-35, MI-14, OH-1, & FL-4

Solution: proportional representation

The key to solving both of these problems at once is one simple fact:

If all (or almost all) voters are represented equally, then gerrymandering is impossible.

That is to say: wasted votes are the raw material, and gerrymandering is the finished product, where those wasted votes are crafted into a partisan weapon. But without the raw material, it’s impossible to build that weapon.

The term for voting methods that are designed to represent all voters equally is “proportional representation”. That’s a mouthful, and the acronym “PR” is already taken up by public relations and Puerto Rico, so I’ll call it pro-rep for short.

Catherine Helen Spence, an Australian voting reform pioneer, called it “Effective Voting”. Unfortunately, “proportional representation” is the term that stuck.

Pro-rep methods are quite practical: according to the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network, some form of pro-rep is used for national lower house elections in 94 countries. The key to getting a proportional result is that your vote isn’t restricted to counting for just one candidate; if your favorite candidate can’t win, your vote somehow transfers to count for other similar candidates.

There are a number of pro-rep methods. For instance, the Canadian province of British Columbia is currently in the middle of a month-long vote-by-mail referendum on switching to pro-rep, in which they can opt for either the current choose-one voting system (as in the US) or any of three different pro-rep methods designed to balance partisan and regional representation.

And pro-rep is feasible in the US. For one thing, it’s legal; Congress has the authority to regulate federal elections, and states have authority over anything Congress leaves open, so a pro-rep method could pass at either federal or state level, with no need for a constitutional amendment.²

Furthermore, pro-rep becoming more and more popular as an idea. I’ve already mentioned the current referendum in British Columbia. There’s currently a bill in Congress called the Fair Representation Act, sponsored by Rep. Don Beyer. And the idea is starting to get real support from the media, with recent articles from The American Prospect, Vox.com, The Atlantic, and others.

And pro-rep could help solve more problems than just wasted votes and gerrymandering. By making elections into more than a zero-sum race between only two viable candidates at a time, it would remove much of the incentive to run mudslinging attack ads. By making every vote more likely to matter, it would encourage increased turnout. By removing safe seats, it would help make politicians more accountable. And on and on.

But frankly, there are a lot of good ideas out there on many other subjects, and most of them never get passed into federal law. Why should pro-rep be different? Unrepresented voters is a problem for voters, but not per se for politicians; by definition, they don’t matter in politics. Because gerrymandering is a problem for politicians — specifically, mostly, for Democratic ones. So in order to pass, we need a pro-rep proposal that appeals to incumbents. It should serve voters’ interests in the long run (as essentially any pro-rep does), but not be too disruptive in the short run. Here’s what that might look like:

PLACE: a perfect pro-rep proposal for America

So, we’re looking for a voting method that ensures “effective voting”, not wasted votes; that gives voters real choices so they can hold politicians accountable; but that otherwise doesn’t make any unnecessary, disruptive changes to existing arrangements such as districts or voting machines. That system is PLACE voting.

I’ll explain the basics quickly, but if you’re more of a visual learner, you can skip to the flow diagram below. As a voter, you simply pick your favorite candidate, just as you do now. The difference is that if you don’t like any of the candidates in your local district, you can write in one from another district who you like better.

The method then eliminates any candidates who got less than 25% of the vote in their local district, and transfers those votes to the strongest candidate (most direct votes) who is “similar” to the voter’s original pick. Initially, “similar” means those within the original candidate’s party who were predeclared by the original candidate as factional allies; the list of each candidate’s predeclared factional allies is available, and for local-district candidates, is printed on the ballot itself. If there are no faction allies left who have not already either won or been eliminated, then “similar” means any candidate from the same party. And if there are no same-party candidates left, then “similar” means predeclared coalition allies in other parties, also listed in a booklet at all polling locations.

Eliminations continue, moving votes from weaker to stronger candidates. Any candidate in the same district with someone who has already won a seat by accumulating a full average district worth of votes (a “quota”) is eliminated immediately. If there are no such winners, then the candidate who is farthest behind the leader of their district is eliminated. Any votes beyond a quota are also transferred. This proceeds until there’s exactly one candidate left in each district.

Here’s how PLACE might work in the upcoming election in North Carolina:

A vote flow diagram of a hypothetical 2018 election in North Carolina. Each of 13 districts starts on the left with a mix of Democratic and Republican votes. Votes transfer from weaker to stronger candidates as you read the diagram from left to right, until on the right there is just 1 candidate left in each district. 12 of those 13 winners have the same number of votes, 100% of an average district; the 13th has a majority of the remainder; so that over 98% of the voters are effectively represented.

In the election above, the Democrats have 51.7% of the popular vote; this is the number in NC that would correspond to 217 seats nationally (just under 50%). The gerrymandered outcome would be 4 Democrats and 9 Republicans winning — over twice as many Republicans, even though they have fewer votes. But with PLACE, however the votes transfer, Democrats are guaranteed to get 7 seats to Republicans’ 6; the most proportional result possible. More importantly, 98% of the voters will have their own representative. (You can read more about this example PLACE election here.)

Note how easy it is for me to say specifically who would win in this scenario. I’ve had to make certain assumptions,³ but even if I varied these, not much would change. In particular, all four of the Democrats who would win under the current system would also win under PLACE. Needless to say, it’s much easier to convince a politician to support a voting reform if you can show them that they would still have won their seat under the new system.

So aside from fixing gerrymandering, PLACE is non-disruptive in the short term. But make no mistake; that doesn’t mean it’s not a hugely important reform in the long term. Since all votes would matter, both parties would have an incentive to try to boost turnout. It would reduce negative advertising, since tearing down your opponent would likely only convince their supporters to vote cross-district, and could actually sour undecided voters on the candidate throwing the mud.

An important long-term effect would be to break the monopoly of the two-party system. Of course, there would still be some two parties that were biggest, and to start out, that would almost certainly still be the Democrats and Republicans. Even in the long term, the two biggest parties would probably have over 70% of the seats between them; because of the 25% threshold for each candidate, this would not lead to a highly divided party system like Israel’s. But it would allow third parties to grow and, if enough voters supported them, to possibly eventually supplant the major parties. Even before their party won any seats, small-party candidates could play a useful role in democracy by choosing what larger-party candidates to declare as coalition allies who would get their votes.

Just for kicks, let’s compare that to the same vote totals under the current voting method:

A vote flow diagram for the same votes in the current voting method. 39% of the votes are for losing candidates and so go directly in the trash. Another 11% of votes are superfluous, beyond the 50% it would take to win. So only half of the votes truly matter, and only 61% of the voters are represented (albeit somewhat unequally).

But wait… what about Ranked Choice Voting?

Unless you’ve read my writing before, you probably haven’t heard of PLACE voting. But in the US, you may have heard of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), another reform proposal. This is actually a recently-invented umbrella term for two related voting methods: Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) for single-winner elections, and Single Transferable Vote (STV), a pro-rep method for multi-winner elections. Supported by the large voting reform nonprofit FairVote, single-winner RCV has been adopted in a number of US cities and the state of Maine, while multi-winner RCV is used in Cambridge and Amherst in Massachusetts and for the Minneapolis parks board. It was also used, and then overturned, in several US cities at some point from the 20s through the 60s.

For comparing with PLACE, multi-winner RCV (STV) is the relevant version. It shares all the advantages of pro-rep methods in general—fixing gerrymandering, fuller representation, probable increased turnout, etc. But unlike PLACE, it’s difficult to project specifically who would win and lose under STV, so I believe it would be much harder to sell it to incumbent representatives, even if they supported pro-rep in the abstract. There are a few other advantages I see in PLACE over STV (wider voter choice, simpler ballots, and I think a healthier relationship between parties and candidates), but its non-disruptive nature for incumbents is the most important one.

Of course, somebody from Fairvote would disagree with me. They’d say that PLACE is just my invention, has never actually been tried, and has no chance of passing. So to help you evaluate whom to believe, it’s probably useful if I give a few of my own credentials.

I’ve been involved in voting reform for over 20 years, and initially I was a supporter and member of FairVote. But over 10 years ago, I grew disenchanted with their singleminded focus on IRV, which I see as a step up from the current system, but still a clearly second-rate reform compared to other single-winner methods. Since then, I’ve helped the Hugo awards design a new voting system to prevent a minority (the “sad/rabid puppies”) from taking over their nominations process; written a paper with Bruce Schneier about the aforementioned; organized a 3-day symposium of a dozen experts in British Columbia that was influential in designing the current referendum; become a board member of the Center for Election Science, a voting reform organization that focuses on single-winner reform (note, I don’t speak for them here); pursued a PhD in statistics at Harvard in order to help bridge the gap between the amateur and academic voting theory communities (I’m currently ABD); and performed both empirical experiments and extensive monte-carlo simulations to investigate voting behavior and compare voting methods. In other words, while you shouldn’t necessarily trust a voting method invented yesterday by any random schmoe, PLACE is something I’ve put a lot of thought and work into, and I’m confident it has no serious unexplored defects.

If you’d like to learn more about PLACE voting, there’s an FAQ here. But even if you don’t care about the details, here’s the broad strokes again: