If you live in the USA, and think the Republicans are taking the country in the wrong direction,¹ this graph should terrify you:

That shows an almost 1 in 3 chance that Democrats will win more votes but fewer seats than Republicans in the congressional elections. That’s possible for two reasons:

Our voting method, known as First Past The Post (FPTP), routinely wastes a large fraction of votes — sometimes more than half of them.

Gerrymandering (the scheme of drawing district lines to weaponize those wasted votes) was exploited more effectively in 2010 than ever before, and Republicans have been the overwhelming beneficiaries.

Both of these problems are fixable. But the solution isn’t what you think.

Redistricting?

The most obvious solution to badly-drawn lines would be to draw better lines. And certainly, that would help. But it wouldn’t solve the whole problem.

Consider Ohio. Voters there just passed Issue 1, which was billed as rules to prevent gerrymandering. But here’s how that might turn out:

Republicans could comply with the rules of Issue 1, with much more-compact districts that respect county lines, and still give Democrats only 5 of 16 seats. That’s fairer than the 4 of 16 they have today, but it’s still over 2 seats short of the 7.3 seats they’d deserve based on their share of the 2-way popular vote for president (I’m not using the House popular vote, because many races were foregone conclusions, with significantly lower turnout than the presidential race).

Partly, that’s because Issue 1 was deliberately written to be a weak law that left most power in the hands of incumbents. But there’s a deeper problem. FPTP elections always result in large numbers wasted votes for the losers in each district; if they end up proportional, it’s basically by luck. And that luck systematically tends to run against Democrats, who are naturally “packed” and “cracked”; often well over 80% of the population in urban areas, but rarely less than 30% in rural areas.

So in Ohio, a weak redistricting law solves about 1/3 of the gerrymandering problem, and even a strong one would probably solve only 2/3 of the problem. Arbitrary lines can’t possibly do all the things we’d like them to do: unify communities of interest, maintain partisan fairness, ensure competitive elections, look compact on a map. These are all valid goals, but they’re fundamentally at odds with each other.

Does that mean the problem is insoluble? Isn’t the root problem here, that of wasted votes, fundamental to democracy? No! As Ernest Naville, an early campaigner for proportional representation, said: “In a democratic government the right of decision belongs to the majority, but the right of representation belongs to all.” Proportional representation voting methods can ensure that almost all voters get to help pick a representative, keeping wasted votes to only a tiny fraction.

And that brings us to the next possible fix:

Ranked Choice Voting?

If you live in the US and have heard of proportional representation, chances are that this is the method you know about. Also known as Single Transferable Vote (STV),² it’s been used in Ireland and Australia for decades.³ It’s based on voters submitting ranked ballots—“I like Carol best, Bob second, and Alice third”. To find winners, any votes that would otherwise be wasted are transferred to voters’ later preferences, until most voters are represented. Typically, the number of unrepresented voters is less than the number who helped elect each representative, so in a 9-winner election, under 10% of the votes would be wasted.

This would be a great solution to gerrymandering! But there are two fundamental problems with it in practice.

First, the places where reform is most needed are, almost by definition, the places where reformers have the least power. For instance, I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which happens to be the one town in the US which has been using STV since before it was called RCV. There’s a strong and growing movement in this state in support of RCV (though in practice that mostly means IRV, which wouldn’t help with gerrymandering.) But if that movement were to succeed in reforming Congressional elections here, the immediate result would be that Republicans would get 3 more US House seats—fairer to Massachusetts Republicans, to be sure, but actually exacerbating the partisan skew on a national level. Meanwhile, the chances of STV passing in a state that needs it more, such as North Carolina, are basically nil; the Republicans control the legislature, and citizen initiatives are not possible there.

Second, STV is too much of a threat to existing power. It would dump all incumbents into newly-drawn multimember districts, disrupting existing political dynamics; even hard-working, well-liked incumbents could end up losing their seats due to freak happenstance. And it would subtly tilt the playing field away from parties with a coherent platform across multiple salient issues, and towards single-issue candidates running on charisma, platitudes, and promises. For both of these reasons, the chances that STV will pass on a national level are basically zero, at least for the foreseeable future: one party’s incumbents will be unanimously against it, while the other party’s incumbents will at best be contentiously divided.

Now, this argument is distasteful to some. Many voting reform activists were drawn to this issue precisely because they want to break the two-party stranglehold on power, so to them STV’s disruptiveness is an advantage, not a disadvantage. Though I hate the US’s zero-sum politics as much as anyone, I’d argue that’s the wrong attitude. Far better a viable reform plan that breaks the perverse polarized stasis of the two-party system, allowing it to evolve naturally in whatever direction the electorate wants, than an overambitious burn-it-down goal that probably won’t succeed and would lead to unnecessary chaos if it did.

The two problems above—unfavorable terrain on the state level and excessive disruption at the federal level—are, to me, the bottom line of why, despite 110 years of activist support in the US, STV will never work to fix gerrymandering here. And that’s really a pity, because the organizations that are all-in on STV/RCV/IRV—such as FairVote nationally or Voter Choice Massachusetts at the state level—have exactly the kind of grass-roots organizing energy that it would take to fix this problem. Newer, smaller organizations like the Center for Election Science are more open to better voting methods, but so far we don’t have the scale we’d need to solve the problem (full disclosure: I’m a board member, and we can put your donations to good use!)

If STV were a viable solution to the problem, I’d focus on its advantages (it’s pretty good!) and not it’s flaws. But since it’s not, here are some other, smaller, problems it has:

Complex ballots. For the last city elections here in Cambridge, my ballot had a 26x26 array of bubbles to fill in, meaning that to cast an effective vote I had to compare 26 candidate’s platforms. It was easy enough to choose the one I liked the best, but when it got to deciding if a given candidate belonged in 5th or 6th place, I was basically flipping a coin. But if I had been too lazy to make that decision, my ballot wouldn’t have ended up mattering at all.

Centralized counting. STV ballots can’t be counted at the precinct level alone; either the ballots themselves, or all the data they contain, must be transmitted to a central location. This reduces transparency and security.

Reduced choice. Because of the above two problems, STV doesn’t scale well to districts of more than about 5 representatives at a time. If your favorite candidate isn’t in that district, you’re out of luck.

Opaque results and unclear chain of accountability. I’m a huge voting geek, so I know that my Cambridge vote ended up helping my 5th-choice candidate. But if looking at complicated tables of numbers weren’t my idea of a good time, I’d probably think that my representative was the person I ranked 2nd, who won before my vote could transfer to them.

Luckily, all the above problems are fixable:

PLACE voting?

PLACE voting⁴ is a proportional representation voting method that’s based on STV, but designed to fix all of the flaws above. Under PLACE, as a voter, you’d pick one candidate—either by putting a check besides one of the candidates in your single-member district, or by writing in a candidate from some other district:

As the ballot above says, if your chosen candidate does not have enough votes to win, your ballot will transfer to another—whichever of your chosen candidate’s predeclared list of allies has the most direct votes. This transfer process will continue until there is one winner per district, and each winner has almost a full district worth of votes — so almost no votes are wasted.

If you follow me on Medium, you’ve probably heard of this idea. But if you don’t, I’d guess you haven’t. That’s because I designed this system in 2016, using my knowledge of voting theory to combine well-known mechanisms and solve all the problems with STV listed above.

And yes, I understand that for now, the fact that this method is so new is a problem. Although I have experience with voting theory—I designed a voting system for thousands of voters on the oldest science fiction awards, am on the board of the Center for Election Science, and helped organize the British Columbia Symposium on Proportional Representation—it’s probably hard for you, reading this, to be sure that PLACE is ready for real-world use. Myself, I’ve seen dozens of sloppily-designed voting methods come and go; how do you know that PLACE isn’t one of them?

Well, for now, that’s hard. I’m currently studying for a PhD in statistics at Harvard, and though PLACE is more poli-sci than statistics, I’m working to get it published in the peer-reviewed literature; but until that happens, it’s just my word, and that of the other people I’ve managed to convince. If, after this article, you’re one of them, please contact me; my email is firstname dot lastname at gmail.

But on a deeper level, for now it doesn’t matter if you believe in PLACE specifically or not. The important things for you to understand are:

Gerrymandering and FPTP are a huge part of why US politics is so unhealthy.

This is a solvable problem.

Better redistricting can solve part of the problem, but not all of it.

Proportional representation (#PropRep) would solve the whole problem.

RCV / STV is a nice idea, but not politically viable at scale in the US.

Better #PropRep methods already exist or can be designed.

¹This “hook” is pitched to anti-Republican voters. But actually, none of the reforms I discuss are fundamentally partisan. They’d increase voter power, and so they’d actually be win-win for all voters; the only real losers would be the most corrupt incumbents and lobbyists.

²Actually, the “RCV” term is, confusingly, used to refer to two related voting methods: IRV for single-winner elections and STV for multi-winner ones.

³IRV (known there as Preferential Voting) has been used in Australia for over 100 years but, except for Tasmania, STV has only been used since 1948.

⁴PLACE stands for “Proportional Locally-Accountable Candidate Endorsement”, but just call it PLACE.