Nullify Gerrymandering By Counting Votes In A Different Way
A way to make elections fairer for everyone, including third parties, without having to redraw gerrymandered election maps
This is a shortened, heavily revised version of my column “Another Way To Neutralize Gerrymandering. Don’t Change The Map. Change How The Votes Are Counted” originally published on November 6, 2018
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing the boundaries of election districts in a way that dumps as many of the other party’s voters as possible into as small a number of oddly shaped districts as possible so that your party will be able to get more seats than its number of supporters actually entitles it to.
The Standard Fix For Gerrymandering Is To Push For Neutral Election-District Maps
Most the of the plans to fight gerrymandering focus on trying to force the legislature use neutrally-drawn election-district maps, but most politicians are not willing to do that because they want those extra, undeserved seats, so that solution is usually a non-starter in the real world.
Fix Gerrymandering With A Different Voting System
Another fix for gerrymandering that doesn’t require any changes to current election practices, any redrawn district maps or any new forms of ballots is what I call it Party Voting.
How Party Voting Works
Party voting ignores the gerrymandered district boundaries and, instead, looks at the total number of votes cast for each party in all the district elections across the entire state.
Suppose a certain state has five Congressional districts and suppose that the total number of votes cast in this year’s election for all of the candidates in all five districts was 924,000.
We divide the total number of votes cast for all candidates, 924,900, by the number of candidates being elected, 5, and we get 924,900/5 = 184,980 votes per seat.
Now, suppose that 897,300 total votes were cast for both Republican and Democratic candidates across all five Congressional districts and 27,600 votes were cast for write-ins and third party candidates.
Of those 897,300 votes cast for both Democrats and Republicans, the Democrats got 474,000 and the Republicans got 423,300.
To implement Party Voting we divide the total number of votes for every party by that 184,980 votes/seat number.
Calculating How Many Seats Were Won By Each Party
423,400 total Republican votes divided by 184,980 votes/seat = 2 GOP candidates declared elected with 53,040 votes left over.
474,000 total Democrat votes divided by 184,980 votes/seat = 2 Democrat candidates declared elected with 104,040 votes left over.
The party with the highest number of remainder votes gets the fifth seat.
If the Tea Party or Libertarian Party had received more than the Democrats 104,040 leftover votes but less than the 184,980 votes/seat, that party would have been declared the winner of the last seat, but since neither did, the Democrats with 104,040 votes left over get the fifth seat.
Which Democrats & Which Republicans Were Elected?
The three Democrats who got elected were the three Democrat candidates with the highest vote totals in their races and the two Republicans who were elected were the GOP’s two highest vote getters in their races.
The three top vote-getting Democrats were Carlos Sanchez, running in the 4th District, Wanda Gleason (5th District) and Sally Jones (1st District), so they’re declared winners in those districts.
The two top vote-getting Republicans were Sam Black (3rd District) and Mary Webster (2nd District) who are also declared winners for those districts.
Two Winners In One District?
One possible concern is getting two winning candidates from one district and no winning candidate from another district.
In our example election, the third-highest vote-getting Democrat was Sally Jones from the First District, but suppose that we swapped Sally Jones’ First District vote total with Janice Wilson’s in the Third District so that Janice Wilson got more votes in the Third District than Sally Jones got in the First District?
That would make the top three Democratic vote-getters Carlos Sanchez (5th District), Wanda Gleason (4th District) and Janice Wilson from the Third District.
Here’s the problem. The top two GOP vote-getters were Mary Webster (2nd District) and Sam Black ALSO from the 3rd District.
Unless we do something, Sam Black (R) and Janice Wilson (D) will BOTH be elected to represent the Third District and no one will be elected from the 1st District.
If two people would otherwise be elected from the same district, the candidate from that district with the most votes will represent that district.
Since Sam Black got 108,700 3rd District votes and in this example Janice Wilson got 77,700 3rd District votes, Sam Black would represent the 3rd District
Since no one has been elected from the First District, the third highest Democrat vote-getter, Janice Wilson, will become the representative for the First District.
Seven Benefits From This System
(1) It Nullifies Gerrymandering
The first advantage to this system is that it makes gerrymandering irrelevant.
Gerrymandering no longer gives a party any advantage because seats are won based on total votes received by each party across the entire state, not the number of votes received by a candidate in only one district.
With the incentive to gerrymander gone, the parties might actually use a computer program to draw the districts around party-neutral social/neighborhood lines or geographical features (rivers, mountains).
(2) No Changes For Voters
The next most important advantage of this system is that nothing would change for the voters. The voters wouldn’t have to do anything or make any additional decisions. They would vote the same way they’ve always voted.
(3) No Changes In Ballots
The ballots would be unchanged.
(4) No Changes In Candidates
Candidates would run on a district-by-district basis the same way they did before Party Voting.
(5) No Changes For The Registrar Of Voters
The Registrar of Voters wouldn’t have to mechanically change anything. He/she would print, distribute and count the ballots the same way they’ve always been printed, distributed and counted.
(6) It Gives Smaller Parties A Chance To Elect A Candidate
Party Voting gives third parties a real chance to elect a candidate.
Right now it’s very difficult for a new party to elect a candidate even if that party has widespread support. In our example, if the Libertarian, Tea Party, Green Party or whatever had managed to get a total of at least 105,000 votes across the entire state (which is greater than the Democrats 104,000 left-over votes) it would have gotten the fifth seat.
(7) It Gives The GOP & Dems Some Real Competition
Because Party Voting gives third parties a real chance of winning a seat, it introduces real competition for existing parties, and competition is usually a good way to motivate an institution to adopt productive change.
The only thing Party Voting changes is the arithmetic that would be applied to the vote totals after all the voting and all the counting is completed.
Party Voting Won’t Fix The Toxic Party-Primary System
A system like this is not a magic bullet that will fix all of the problems with our election system. Specifically, it won’t fix the very real drawbacks that are endemic to the
- Toxic party-primary nomination system,
- The structural problems that restrict and sometimes suppress voter participation and
- The minority rule power given to rural voters by legislative seats allocated by county or state rather than by population.
But Party Voting would go a long way to making a successful end-run around politicians gaming the system with gerrymandered election-district maps.
–By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
