That’s where PR could come in. In PR, each party wins seats in proportion to its support. Israel elects all 120 members of its national legislature from a single multi-member district that encompasses the entire country, and the Netherlands does the same with its lower house. But districts that large can lead to over-representation of fringe parties who receive just a small percentage of the vote, as well as giving numerous tiny parties the ability to make outsized demands from big parties if they lack a majority. So larger countries often break themselves down into smaller districts to ensure legislators have some connection to a particular geographic area.

In the United States, those geographical areas could be the states. Imagine Oregon sent five members of the House. Under PR, if Democrats got 60 percent of the statewide vote and Republicans got 40 percent, three Democrats and two Republicans would be elected to the House. Or if the two big parties got 40 percent each, and the Green Party won 20 percent of the vote, the Greens would send a representative to Congress. The largest states could use several smaller electoral districts, so that, for example, someone from San Diego isn’t represented only by northern Californians.

There are different ways of determining which candidates from the parties make it in. Most European democracies use what's called an open-list PR system, where each party nominates (at most) as many candidates as that district sends to its legislature. Voters get a single vote for a candidate that also counts for that candidate’s party.

Think again of five-member Oregon. One popular local Republican wins 40 percent of the vote, and two other Republicans win 10 percent each. All three go to Congress because the party won three-fifths of the state’s votes. The top Libertarian candidate receives 20 percent. He or she, too, goes to Congress. No Democratic candidate gets more than 8 percent of the vote, but because the total number of votes cast for Democrats adds up to 20 percent, the last congressional seat goes to the first-place winner among them. (Results that don’t break down so cleanly are decided by seat-allocation formulas like the “largest remainder method.”)

The voting reform group FairVote advocates a PR method called “instant-runoff” voting, where citizens rank the candidates on a ballot into first place, second place, and so on. Once a candidate reaches a threshold, votes are reapportioned to second- and third-place finishers until all seats are filled. Here’s an explainer video from Minnesota Public Radio:

In another variation, Germany mixes PR and winner-take-all single district elections by allowing citizens to vote twice, once for a party and once for a local representative.

To be sure, these various PR systems are more complicated than the winner-take-all method. Simplicity for voters is not to be disregarded. Plus, there are some advantages to the current system. When voters must make a clear choice between two big parties, those parties must present themselves as big tents open to different groups. (The Senate, which allocates only two seats to each state, isn’t as well-suited to PR and would continue to privilege the big parties if the House reformed its rules.)